About us
A family firm. We have been making licensing identification since 1991, and we sell it to licensing authorities and nobody else.
What we do
We make identification that an enforcement officer or a passenger can verify at a glance, and that a forger cannot reproduce. Tamper-evident plates, covert and overt security features, and mounting systems that fit any vehicle without damaging it.
We also help authorities work out what they actually need - which is sometimes less than they expected.
How we work
We come and look before we quote. We talk to the people doing the job as well as the people specifying it, and we watch a renewal run end to end.
Nothing in our range was thought up in a design meeting; every part of it exists because an authority had a problem with the version before. Sometimes what we find is not a product at all, and we will say so.
Here is what that looked like on one job →
Our history
Seventy-six years of precision manufacturing, thirty-five dedicated to licensing
1950 - the parent company
Dunhill & McGrouther Limited is registered on 24 March, and spends the next four decades in graphic arts equipment.
What a plate was then
A taxi licence plate was pressed steel carrying a number. No expiry date, no vehicle details, nothing a passenger could use. A plate from a licence surrendered a year ago looked exactly like a plate from one granted that morning, and so did a competent fake.
1991 - VIP-System Limited is founded
Incorporated on 11 July to produce variable information security products for the hire vehicle trade across the UK and Northern Ireland, within the Dunhill & McGrouther group.
The nineties - the original innovation
Two patented inventions - an official licence plate and a matching structural platform for hackney carriages - established the approach we still use. The plate carried variable information: details tied to one licence rather than to one number, and, for the first time, an expiry date that anybody could read.
That work was done in years when impersonated and unlicensed vehicles were causing serious harm, and when the question being put to authorities had changed. It was no longer whether a vehicle carried a plate. It was whether anyone could check it. A number cannot be checked. A date can - by the passenger, from the pavement, in a second.
Both patents have long since run their term and expired; the method belongs to everybody now, and the thirty-five years of doing it does not.
Today
More than 300 councils have been customers since 1991. Local government has been redrawn more than once in that time, so the figure includes authorities since merged, renamed or abolished.
Still innovating
The original patents lapsed years ago. Several current products are patent pending, among them a window sticker that destroys itself if anyone tries to lift it.
Designed, engineered and made in the UK
We develop hardware rather than assemble parts
Everything is designed, tooled and manufactured here. We cut and mould our own parts, so a new format, a policy-specific feature or a fix for something nobody anticipated can be prototyped, tested and delivered without waiting on anybody else.
VIPOL® and LPR are unique - developed here, not bought in. Several of the products built from them are patent pending.
Why we don't publish council names
Procurement should stay open, and identification security depends partly on discretion. We don't ask authorities to endorse us publicly and we don't list them. Private references are available on request.
If your current supplier can't solve it, we'd enjoy the challenge.
Thirty-five years of licensing problems, and the interesting ones still arrive by telephone from somebody standing at a counter.
Talk to our team