This morning the DVLA released a whole load of new number plates with the new 2011 format. A few years ago I realized that one of these would be quite cool for me so I have been planning to buy a personalized number plate since then. On the DVLA website the plate I wanted was £399 so at 8.30am when the plate was released I was waiting. Inevitably, at 8,30 the DVLA website was overloaded. It amazes me that people can not anticipate such a rush on their servers and do something about it. It is quite easy for an organization like that to hire extra servers by the hour to just cover the period when they know they will be busy. But maybe they let it happen deliberately.
What bothers me more is that after half an hour, when I was able to get on the plate was gone as were many others. I checked another independent number plate website and they were selling my plate for £1499. That almost 4 times the amount the DVLA were selling it for. There is no way that they would have been able to but the plate and get it on their site in that time when the DVLA servers were down without some help from inside the DVLA.
Someone is making a lot of money out of this and whether it is the DVLA corruption of someone taking backhanders or perhaps they have done a legal deal with the DVLA it is still money that is being taken unethically from the DVLA, a public body which is there to provide a service to the public. So either way it is the public who are being robbed.