Original Summary

Watch: What is a ghost plate? Thousands of illegal registration plates on cars and other vehicles have been detected by a new camera system currently being tested on motorways in south-east England, BBC Panorama can reveal. These plates have been adapted to avoid their details being identified by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems, which are used to enforce speed limits and low emission zones, as well as track criminals. Illegal plates are putting the public at risk and are far too easy to get hold of, according to one former government advisor. We have spoken to families who say their lives have been devastated by road deaths where illegal plates were involved. Filming undercover, we also discovered how easy and cheap it is to buy plates without any background checks. The minister responsible for vehicle registration across the UK has told us a national plan has now been instigated to understand how widespread the problem of illegal number plates is, and what can be done about it. The UK has one of the largest networks of ANPR cameras in the world, with 14,000 sites capturing 100 million number plates each day. Many experts believe this system is failing to keep up with tactics used by some drivers determined to avoid recognition. These tactics include deliberately using false plates that clone the number of another vehicle - and so-called "ghost plates", where special plastic is used to make all or part of the registration number unreadable by most motorway cameras. One of the main providers of ANPR technology, MAV Systems, has been testing a new camera capable of identifying and reading ghost plates. At one test site, just outside London near the Dartford Crossing, it has recorded an average of more than 1,000 of the ghost plates a day over several months. Two other sites have been running for almost two years. At one, near the M25, detections have risen from 1,000 a day to nearly 2,000 a day - while at the other, near the Eurotunnel at Folkestone, the system is flagging more than 400 a day. 'It has broken us all' Sharon Gannon's son, Jason Wallis, died in a crash where hidden registration plates were involved. She believes being invisible to ANPR cameras emboldens drivers to take deadly risks. Wallis was killed in Buckinghamshire in 2023. He and his brother-in-law, Lewis Baker, had been riding their motorbikes at high speed when they both crashed into a car. The car driver was not hurt. Baker survived and was later jailed for 15 months for dangerous driving. In court, he admitted using a device to hide his number plate from public view. He also said he and Wallis had ridden at high speed more than 100 times. "It has broken us all," Sharon Gannon says of the effect the crash has had on her family. In another case, from 2025, 81-year-old Graham Slinn was killed on a pedestrian crossing when a car with cloned plates hit him at high speed. Graham Slinn was killed in a crash involving a driver using illegal plates The 20-year-old driver, Cain Byrne, who was driving without a licence or insurance, had also inhaled nitrous oxide minutes before the collision. He was identified after police trawled through hours of CCTV footage. One camera even caught the moment he had put the illegal plates on his car. Byrne was jailed for 11 years and six months for causing death by dangerous driving, driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The victim's daughter, Nicola Timmis, says cloned plates are like a "gateway drug" which allow drivers to take more dangerous risks. "It seems like it's harmless, but then one thing leads to another, leads to another, and before you know it, it's somebody dead," she tells Panorama. "It is not a victimless crime." Ghost plates Both cloned and ghost plates look like normal vehicle registration plates when viewed by the naked eye. In the case of cloned ones, at least two vehicles are on the road with the same letters and numbers - with only one of them being legal. Ghost plates, on the other hand, show correct details for the vehicle - but they are made up of reflective materials which are difficult or impossible for most ANPR cameras to read. Cloned and ghost plates undermine the police's ability to track organised criminals, says Tony Porter, a former senior counter-terrorism officer who has advised the government on surveillance cameras. "The police need an effective ANPR system that doesn't have weaknesses [and] doesn't put the public at risk," he says. While passports have security features such as watermarks and electronic ID chips, Porter says, "we tolerate a £10 number plate with no security mechanism on it". In the UK, there are more than 34,000 businesses registered with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to supply number plates. Anyone can currently become a registered number-plate supplier by filling in a quick form and paying a one-off fee. Panorama secretly filmed at a market in Essex to find out how easy it is to buy a plate in breach of the rules. Two out of three businesses we approached there offered ghost plates which they said could help avoid cameras policing London's Ultra-Low Emission Zone (Ulez) cameras. One of them allowed us to buy a plate without asking for either ID or proof that we were allowed to use the registration - both of which are required by law. In the UK it is easy to set up as a supplier of registered number plates Instead, we handed over £40 in cash and, eight minutes later, we had a brand new number plate. Buying a ghost plate is not illegal in itself, but it would be against the law to put it on a vehicle and drive with it. Just two number plate suppliers have been prosecuted and forcibly removed from the DVLA register since 2020, a Freedom of Information request by Panorama has discovered. Only six DVLA officers are tasked with inspecting and auditing the thousands of registered suppliers in the UK. The DVLA said in a statement that it was "cleaning up the register, strengthening compli

中文概览

中文标题： 新型摄像头揭露数千辆汽车非法幽灵车牌

BBC Panorama披露，英格兰东南部高速公路测试的新摄像头系统检测到数千个非法车牌。非法车牌经改装可避开自动车牌识别系统，影响限速、低排放区执法和追踪罪犯；前政府顾问称其危及公众且易获取。英国负责车辆登记的部长表示已启动全国计划，以了解非法车牌问题范围及应对办法。

  • 情报分类：综合情报
  • 分类依据：涉及车牌识别摄像头与社会治理，非技术学习或硬件产品，归综合
  • 信息来源：英语新闻 / BBC News Top Stories
  • 发布时间：2026/9/28 13:02:30