Old cars with no MOT? Count me out

CHRISTMAS, as everyone with an old car knows, isn't just a time for giving. It's a chance to get the spanners out and get a bit of automotive nip ‘n' tuck underway.

As you'll read this my old MG will be hidden away in a garage with its wheels in the air as part of a two-pronged effort to keep it out of the winter weather and to get it through the MOT in the spring, although I'll freely admit I know absolutely nothing about mechanics and have to rely on a team of friends and family to help keep the old girl going. I envy people who have even the slightest bit of mechanical nouse, because they can work miracles with carburettors.

But if you own a car older than 50 years old, new Government proposals will mean you won't have to bother any more. In what's possibly the loopiest bit of legislation ever to come out of Westminster, cars made before 1960 will no longer be required to go through the MOT. Ever.

The Government's argument is that all classic car owners are like my dad; timeless tinkerers, who spend entire weekends in their boiler suits, endlessly mending things that BMC, Rootes and all those other long-gone car companies didn't get right in the Forties and Fifties. For them, happiness is a Triumph TR3 that comes out twice a year on the back of a trailer, on its way to a car show.

But what about the likes of me, to whom mechanics might as well be voodoo? I like to keep my own motors mechanically prim and proper but I bet there's plenty of people out there who simply won't bother if there's no legal requirement for it to pass an MOT. I know it's a simplistic argument, but surely there's something reassuring in knowing that ALL cars - and especially ones with the stopping abilities of an ocean tanker - have been into a garage at least once in the past 12 months? Even a Jaguar XK150, which I reckon is about the fastest, most advanced car to fall into this bracket of golden oldies, will be comprehensively outdragged, outbraked and out-Euro-NCAPped by a three-year-old Focus or Astra, so surely it needs an MOT just as much.

I know the chances of coming across a rusty Morris Minor with no MOT on it whatsoever are slim to nonexistent, but it's still a chance I wouldn't want to take.