Even if you have purchased your car you don’t technically own it, you are just the keeper, and your car paperwork proves this.
This is not true, and misunderstands the purpose of car registration—which should be in the name of its regular user. The V5C document is not proof of ownership.
A post on Facebook incorrectly claims that car registration documents reveal car owners in the UK don’t actually own their vehicles.
The document, known as a V5C, describes the named driver as the “registered keeper” which, the post claims, means that their property (i.e. the car) has been taken away from the owner without their consent.
But a V5C document isn’t intended to prove ownership of a vehicle, and just because you are named as “keeper” of your car doesn’t mean you don’t own it.
Gaining ownership of a car works in the same way as most other transactions—for example obtaining proof of purchase such as a receipt from a dealership or buying in cash.
The term “registered keeper” means the person who actually uses the vehicle, not the person who owns it. This is relevant in cases, for example, when the person who paid for the vehicle is not the person who drives it.
The registered keeper is usually responsible for penalties such as parking tickets, so it is advised to ensure that the registration is changed if you own the vehicle but are not its user.
The post also refers to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and incorrectly claims that the group declared a goal to have people own nothing by 2020. Similar claims have been repeated in other posts online, and have been debunked by other fact checkers.
The claim appears to originate with a 2016 WEF social media post, which made eight predictions about the year 2030 written by Danish politician Ida Auken, including: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”
Ms Auken, Reuters report, has clarified that her prediction “was not a ‘utopia or dream of the future’ but ‘a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse.’”
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because registering as a keeper of a car doesn’t say anything about ownership—it simply means the named person is the regular user of the car.
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