Never thought I would say this, but the DVLA have finally got thier act together.
Had to swap two number plates and sell a car and the procedure is now effortless and incredibly slick, I even put the other blokes number on my old ff and it was seemles. Your new V5's are back within two days now.
Well done DVLA, sorry about the loss of jobs at our local office but the queue was a pain in the arse everybtime you changed a reg......

Glad it went Ok for you my experience was completely the opposite (although it was over a year ago) and resulted in a £40 fine for having an untaxed vehicle, I rang to explain but they told me to pay up. My experience with HMRC however has always been good even when I was issued a notice for non payment of some tax in 2013 - I fessed up (I had made a mistake) they didn't fine me just asked me to pay the tax which I did yesterday.

Swings and Roundabouts  Geoff

Received a letter from them last week, so sorry, due to technical error, you have had no road tax since the end of March , please reapply!