Driving licence update - if you can call it that!

Tom mc this is what we have done. We have got our residencia,pardon, NIE,health insurance etc. and pay taxes. It’s just unfortunate that whatever we’ve tried my wife can’t get her license changed and this has been from well before Brexit. She is now stuck going through the Spanish driving test which as others will attest is a expensive and a nightmare.

Tom mc wrote:I have lived in Spain for 16 year got residency 12 year ago changed my driving licence 4 year ago. So no not smug. Came to live in Spain live by the law of the land.

Should you (and others) not have obtained your Spanish licence within 6 months of becoming resident? I understood that driving licences and foreign registered cars (regardless of home country) are required to be changed to Spanish licence / registration within 6 months of becoming a Spanish resident.

Maybe this didn’t apply pre Brexit?

If you can't say anything helpful or nice then say nothing.

carolandgraeme wrote:If you can't say anything helpful or nice then say nothing.

Can’t see how my post is rude or unhelpful, it’s simply a question about process. Tom Mc is stating that he has had residency in Spain for 12 years but only changed his licence 4 years ago. He’s quoted about ‘live by the law of the land’ so I’m simply asking him if being resident for 12 years while driving on a UK licence for 8 of those, complies with the legal requirements of Spanish residency?

Hang on a mo, he says he's been living in Spain for 16 but only became resident 12 years ago so what happened during those first 4 years, surely not living illegally under the radar?

Did he submit tax returns for those years, what do you think!

Let him who is without sin.......!

Yes I filed tax returns and still do.And driving with a UK license was allowed.

Tom mc wrote:Yes I filed tax returns and still do.And driving with a UK license was allowed.

Yes that actually makes sense now I think about it. Pre Brexit, UK licences would have been classed as EU licences up until a few of years ago.

Wasn’t having a go Tom, just wondered if the licence issue was wrong.

It don't think it was ever legal, but the authorities turned a blind eye as they did to so many things years ago. When we first moved over here we informed 'Newcastle' and immediately applied for residency. There was a 2 year waiting list then, but we still paid resident taxes. We received unemployment benefit for the first 3 months and we could access state health care for 2 years without contributing. There was no social media and no Talk Quesada so we weren't as well informed as we are today and mostly relied on the free English papers. Any internet was accessed via a dial-up telephone line or in an internet café. British TV was transmitted via a square mesh aerial which the police shut down at the start of the Olympics (2004 or 2008?). It was only around 10 years ago, when there were reports of local people being fined for driving on a UK licence in the local press, that we realised we needed to exchange ours. Until then we had been driving clients around in company vehicles completely unaware and our employer wasn't bothered either. We have seen the change from pesetas to euros, the EU has expanded and now Brexit has changed things again. Some people deliberately stayed under the radar for tax, drove British cars without MOTs, and have only recently been forced to go legal. Others were simply unaware or learnt as they went along. I don't think anyone has any excuses these days though as the information is readily available, including on forums like this one. I do, however, feel for people now that the freedom of movement we enjoyed back then has been taken away and there are so many more hurdles to jump.

Without going into timescales and who has done this or that, why has Spain got any issues with exchanging UK driving licenses?

You can go and live virtually anywhere in the world and host countries accept UK driving standards are sufficient to allow straight exchanges. So why has Spain got an issue when its own driving standards appear below those in many other countries, such as the US, Australia, New Zealand and even many Asian countries.

Recognising someone's basic driving ability if a long term license holder from a major country seems completely reasonable.

Or this just all just about being unnecessarily difficult because the UK left the EU?