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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.
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Watch on BBC iPlayer or on BBC One (BBC Two in Northern Ireland) at 20:00 on Monday 28 September.
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.
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.
Image caption, 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."
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.
Image caption, 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 compliance and enforcement" and that it continued to work closely with police and Trading Standards to "tackle suppliers who break the rules".
To witness the scale of the problem, Panorama joined the police and DVLA at a location on the edge of Birmingham and West Bromwich to see a roadside operation checking for illegal number plates and other issues.
Not long after we arrived, officers stopped a van. Specialist infrared goggles - which see number plates the way ANPR cameras do - revealed it was displaying a ghost plate. The driver received a £100 fine but said he was unaware the plate was illegal.
The police and DVLA then visited the plate supplier, where staff denied selling ghost plates. But, using the goggles to view the supplier's stock, Panorama identified two ghost plates displayed on a wall alongside several legal ones.
Police also discovered the supplier kept ghost letters and numbers separately on a shelf, which they said suggested "some level of intent".
Image caption, A police officer shows evidence of "ghost" numbers and letters stocked at this West Midlands garage
The supplier, which told Panorama it did not manufacture the letters it used to make plates, received a warning letter, although a prosecution is still being considered.
Police forces want to see tighter licensing and regulation around who can issue a number plate, says Chief Constable Tim Forber, the UK's policing lead on ANPR.
"Not a week goes by where we don't see an example of someone on cloned plates involved in serious and organised crime," he adds.
There is a problem that needs tackling and a more robust system may be needed, according to Justin Madders, the minister in charge of UK vehicle registration.
He says the government recognises this and is creating a national centre to crack down on illegal number plates, bringing together police forces to share intelligence and trial new technologies to improve road safety, tackle organised crime and drivers attempting to dodge fines.
"I don't think we can rule anything in or out at this stage," he adds.
Additional reporting by NJ Convery
