GOVERNMENT plans to automatically fine drivers whose car tax has expired have been branded "daft" by a Bolton councillor.

Tory Cllr Stuart Lever said the scheme, which would see motorists being hit with automatic £80 fines, has been ill thought-out and could prove unworkable.

Drivers will get two weeks to renew their tax discs after they expire -- otherwise the fine will appear automatically in the post.

Persistent non-payers will be prosecuted and fined a minimum of £1,000 under the plans set out by Transport Minister David Jamieson yesterday.

Under the new system, fines will be issued on the basis of computerised tax records. There will be no need for police or cameras to spot an unlicensed vehicle.

The automatic fine comes into force in January and Mr Jamieson also unveiled a hotline for motorists and pedestrians to report vehicles seen on the road without a valid tax disc.

Cllr Lever believes the system could lead to confusion and has not been thought through properly.

He said: "There's no doubt that car tax dodgers need to be dealt with but I think this particular policy is flawed.

"People could well report an untaxed car only for the police to arrive and find it parked perfectly legally off the road on someone's driveway.

"On the top of that it's proved extremely hard to get people to report social security fraud, so how do they expect them to start reporting drivers evading car tax, too? It's a daft policy that needs a rethink."

There are currently estimated to be around one million unlicensed vehicles on the road.

The Government says these are frequently abandoned, involved in criminal activity and often uninsured.

The overall cost of uninsured driving is said to be around £500 million -- adding up to £30 on the annual insurance premium of the average motorist.

APCOA, which runs Bolton's parking wardens, does take details from tax discs for identification purposes but does not currently report if the disc is out of date.

But spokesman Christopher Wigdor said: "It's quite likely that we will begin to do so in the future.

"The whole idea of illegal parking being decriminalised with private companies now able to issue tickets on behalf of local authorities, is to enable situations such as overdue tax discs to be reported by non-police.

"It wouldn't be a decision taken by us, though -- it would have to come from the council. Watch this space."