Vehicle approval, alteration and identity check data for Great Britain

About this data set

This data set comes from data held by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA).

It isn’t classed as an ‘official statistic’. This means it’s not subject to scrutiny and assessment by the UK Statistics Authority.

Individual Vehicle Approval (IVA)

You must apply for vehicle approval if you’ve built a vehicle, rebuilt a vehicle, radically altered a vehicle, reconstructed a classic vehicle or imported a vehicle.

You can use the IVA scheme if you’re making or importing a single vehicle or a very small number of vehicles in the following categories:

• passenger cars
• goods vehicles
• buses and coaches
• trailers
• special purpose vehicles, eg vehicles specially designed to hold a wheelchair

This data table is updated every 3 months.

Motorcycle Single Vehicle Approval (MSVA)

You must also use the MSVA scheme if your vehicle has been radically altered or built using a mixture of parts from previously registered vehicles. For example:

• amateur built vehicles
• rebuilt vehicles
• vehicles converted to a different wheelplan

This data table is updated every 3 months.

Notifiable alterations

You have to tell DVSA if you make changes to the specification of a heavy goods vehicle or public service vehicle.

This data table is updated every 3 months.

Vehicle Identity Check (VIC)

If a car was written off by an insurance company, a ‘VIC marker’ was placed against the DVLA record.

If you bought a car that had a VIC marker, you couldn’t get a V5C vehicle registration certificate (log book) until the car had passed a VIC.

The VIC scheme closed on 26 October 2015. This data table is no longer updated.