The changes to vehicle licence plates – which allow many more licence plate combinations than previously – came into effect on 1st September.  As In Brief noted this time last year, the new combination of numbers and letters allows the vehicle to be identified by region as well as year.  The first two letters, the local memory tag, show where the car was registered (region and DVLA office); the following two numbers, the age identifier, indicate when it was registered, for example, the number ‘51’ will represent the period from September 2001 to February 2002; the final three numbers are allocated at random to make each registration mark unique.  This new system should provide enough combinations for at least the next 50 years.