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Hi, I have just spent the last two weeks looking for a 5 berth caravan to replace my much loved 9 man tent for our annual 2 weeks in Newquay and numerous summer weekends after getting swamped out most of last year in the tent.

Eventually hit gold - Got a Abbey Piper 14.5 in nearly mint for just over £2000.

But have an issue with CRIS as this costs ~£15 each time to carry out an HPI check.

So I looked at over 7 vans all around 1990 - 1994 due to the age of the vans none of current owners had bothered to carry on the CRIS registration but as they were fully marked I felt obliged to check them out.

So why do CRIS penalise buyers and not sellers? Why can't they just publish a free searchable database of stolen numbers? I am sure they would locate more vans this way than charging us £15 a hit to check out a potential purchase as I am sure that for older vans people do not bother.

Seems to me to be a money generating business rather than a genuine attempt to minimise caravan theft.

Love to hear your thoughts and as a newbie to caravanning I am probably going to get shot down as an idiot but Hey Ho!

I know what you mean but the reason I suspect that some owners probably don't keep the cris up to date is because new owners also have to pay £10 to change it over.  So I reckon cris must be making a bit of money which I would assume pays for the running costs of the company who do the checks.  Why don't you just do a check on the van that you definately want cause surely then the only reason you might not buy the van then was if it was stolen.  Best to only lose £15 and not £2000 

Quote: Originally posted by Warwick Gates on 17/5/2008

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Seems to me to be a money generating business rather than a genuine attempt to minimise caravan theft.

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correct you answered your own question right there

they are a buisness out to make money

 

just tha same reason that caravan manufacturers dont fit the best door locks on the market or all have their own version of chris marks or fit cheap trackers just 3 things manufacturers could do and only add about 1 to 2 hundred pounds to their costs for all 3

 

chris are a buisness thats what they do make money so i dont realy understand why your upset about it?? is it because you carried out so many checks instead of just one on the one van you decided to buy??

i mean i look at many cars when i want a new one but i only pay for 1 hpi check thats on the car i decide to buy, so why did you pay for so many checks?

 

One reason that this registration is not kept up is that there must be others like me, that knew nothing about this scheme. I had owned my van for over 3 years before I joined any of the popular caravaning forums and first heard of this system, by which time it was to late as I could not remember the name of the previous owner. They emigrated, that why I got the van cheap in the first place.

Steve W