Garages that undertake MOTs are being encouraged to shun physical customer certificates as the service bids to go paperless by the end of the year.
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) wants to “massively reduce” the amount of paper used across the entirety of its remit, which includes plans to provide a digital-by-default option.
Key factors behind the move includes a bid to reduce fraud within the testing process as well as making it more environmentally friendly.
Vehicles that fail emissions tests will still receive a paper certificate.
“We’re confident that this change will cause little to no disruption to you and your business, and in the long run, save you money and time,” Chris Price, head of Policy at the DVSA, wrote on the Matter’s of Testing blog.
He added: “Moving to a digital MOT record will reduce the amount of paper used which is beneficial to the environment whilst also making it easier for customers to access their vehicle records and view the results, if they need to view the certificate they can.
“We are keen to devalue the certificate and encourage people to use our digital services to reduce paper and fraud.”
Surveys will now be conducted to judge just how big of an impact this could make on the testing process, both for garages and drivers – especially those who are less tech savvy.
“Before we make any changes to the current process, we need to understand exactly how people use their certificate, why they think they need it and how they use the MOT history service,” said Price.
He added: “To make moving to a digital certificate as easy as possible, we want to review our use of paper across the MOT scheme. We’re carrying out a review at the minute of all the paper we ask you to print, or store hard copies of, to see what is still needed and what can be done digitally.”
One big move could be to introduce a paperless MOT training log. Currently, they are recorded in many ways across different sites, with no standardised way to complete them and no centralised way to view them.
This “can be difficult for testers and AEs to stay on top of training logs”, Price said.
He added: “We’ve been carrying out research at several garages over the past few months to get a better understanding of how you store and use paper training logs. We’ve also been getting your thoughts on a digital version of your training log – from how it will work, to how long it takes to fill in and where it should be accessed on MTS.”
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