won a plate on ebay seller says it only costs 80 pounds to swap over its still on his car i thought he had to put it on retension before selling thoughts because i dont want to get ripped off

 

He can sell it but it is no use to you until he puts it on to a retention certificate. The DVLA are very helpful if you phone a VRO vehicle registration office. There is a chance they will want to inspect his car but unlikely. I would ask them to get it on a certificate and then you reimburse the fee after. Once on the cert they can sign it over to you.

Seems lazy not to have got it ready to go before advertising it though.

Be careful and make sure it is all done right.

 

ive asked the question have you put it on retension all i get it costs 80 quid to transfer think ill leave it sounds dodgy to me

 

Well only he can do it, if not you could see any plate on any car and pay 80 and nick it on to your car.

 

Link to ad??

 

The £80 is to transfer the plate directly to another vehicle, whether it's owned by him or you. It's all done in one transaction.
If it's put on retention, (I think it's £100) the plate is removed from the donor car which gets its old plate back usually. When the seller gets the certificate back from DVLA, it's then passed to you to send away to DVLA in order to assign it to your own vehicle.
In my experience, each stage takes a couple of weeks.

 

If it helps, I've just transferred the plate from my old car onto my new one and it took about 5 days. Quite quick, really. I haven't had my new V5 through, yet, but on the vehicle check page on the DVLA website the plate is now assigned to the Golf, so I've put the number on and had no problems.

you need to fill in this form;

https://www.gov.uk/government/upload...317_150814.pdf

and send it to them.

 

£105 for a years retention now Del, just put ours on. The quote of £80 is correct for swapping from one car to another but we didn't have the logbook back in our name so retention it was