[MGR South Devon]

Having 'spoken' with Matt (Cable Tie) SW Region, on his advice I am making the PM I sent him open to all the Club.
Just a heads up on some new rules being brought in on ebay regarding Environmental Permitting Rules.
If you are selling used parts on any platform, it appears you now have to have a environmental disposal licence, ie a breakers licence.
Basically if you are not a licenced breaker, you are not not allowed to strip cars and sell the parts. To enforce this, the environment dept has found a back door way to enforce, by getting ebay to take down any used parts listings that do not disclose that the cars are stripped on a licenced premise.
This will affect a lot of sellers of used car parts, and could also mean that it will be harder to get hold of used parts apart from buying from a breaker. I am not sure how this will effect some of us here on the Forum, but any of the traders who are selling used parts without a licence may fall foul of the law.
Upshot is, MG Rover parts will be become even harder to get, as most breakers do not strip them but put them straight into the bailer.
As an Ebay parts seller with a business shop we had a direct message from ebay regarding this. Fortunately, having read all the rules on ebay and also the government website, we have found a legal way around this as 80% of our parts are obtained from two licenced car breakers. If you sell on ebay you can check this out yourself on the section about this on ebays rules.
I would add that as a bona fide garage, we have a duty of care when it comes to waste management etc, so we did not consider we were 'breaking any rules' but it appears the environment dept now think differently, so we are having to rethink how we obtain used parts in the future.
In our opinion, we think this is an underhand way of getting the older cars off the road and forcing drivers into electric cars. If there are no used parts to keep these older cars going, then they will all have to be scrapped.
It will be interesting to see how Ebay do actually respond to this and if they will target private individuals as well as business sellers. They will lose a lot of revenue if they remove the non compliant used parts sellers, as the used parts platform is massive on their site.
Watch this space.