What's in a number?

The Police have now gone on record as saying that they have "no confidence" in the current vehicle registration system. But hang on a minute - wasn't it the Police who were mainly instrumental in the present system being introduced some six years ago? So what's going on? The problem of course is that the incidence of number plate theft and cloning has massively increased over the last few years, and the reason for this is simple enough to understand - it's down to the equally massive increase in the extent to which our driving lives these days are dominated by camera systems which rely on number plate recognition. As most of these systems are revenue collectors - whether it be speeding fines, congestion charges or catching people who drive off without paying for their petrol - it obviously becomes worth people's while to look for ways of avoiding recognition. It's a simple matter of economics - if the financial penalties were not there, cloning and theft would virtually disappear overnight.