So today was dominated by my filling in a V55/5 which is required to re-import my car to the UK, which was really fun, NOT!
Not Fun!
The v55/5 consists of over 60 boxes and three pages of instructions on how to fill them in and it's quite an officious looking form especially given the warning that 'incomplete or incorrectly filled in forms will not be processed'...
The thing is that officious statement is a bit of a lie as I'd already phoned the DVLA a couple of days ago and was advised to just fill in what I could and not worry about it too much, which put me at ease, although that may just have been the welsh accent!
Anyway, the form took me the best part of a morning to fill in, mainly copying across information such as make/ model, engine and chassis numbers and emissions info and so on.
It wasn't so much the quantity of information required it was the fact that I had to add in text boxes to the PDF document for every question and double check everything, and I needed frequent breaks given the numbing nature of the task!
Anyway, once I'd filled in the form I had to pick my car up from the MOT the day before (it passed) and then drive back to Ramsgate and have some lunch and then crack on...
Supporting Documents
Part of the instructions were to send supporting docs including...
- Proof of ID and address
- MOT certificate
- Previous importation documents.
It ended up being quite a wedge...
I then spent an hour in a queue on hold waiting to talk to someone at the DVLA to make sure I had all the correct stuff in the envelope I had ready to send off.
I had quite the check list...
It turned out I didn't need as much as I thought - insurance comes after tax for example, which it didn't say on the damn re-import form (the other way around according to that!)
Even posting was a hassle....
I had to buy envelopes and then had another queuing experience in the Post Office - but I finally got it sent of registered at 16.00 today.
However of course there's a postal strike tomo (Friday) which I fully support but it means my docs don't get sent until Monday unfortunately.
Two week turnaround...?
That's what the guy said on the phone - hopefully by mid October I'll have whatever docs I need back to get my UK plates made up and then it's just a matter of changing the insurance and I'm good to go!