Land Transportation Office. (INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)
MANILA, Philippines — A system has been placed to ensure that the Land Transportation Office (LTO) will be able to address its backlog in vehicle plates while accommodating additional demand from owners of new vehicles, Assistant Secretary Vigor Mendoza II, who heads the LTO, said on Monday.
Mendoza made the assurance at the hearing of the House Committee on Appropriations on the proposed 2024 budget of the Department of Transportation (DOTr)j. Agri party-list Rep. Wilbert Lee had asked Mendoza whether the LTO could address the plate backlog even if the proposed allocation for it had been cut.
In response, Mendoza said that the backlog could be addressed as the LTO only had 179,000 plates left to issue while its delivery was at around 250,000 plates per month. However, the backlog in motorcycle plates — 13 million in all — would take until 2024 to be addressed as the LTO could deliver only a million monthly.
“This year I observed that we have a lower budget for the plates. We have a lot of old vehicles which still do not have the old plates, and with the increase in crime rate now, this is an important tool for our law enforcers,” Lee said in Filipino.
“Easily we can wipe up the motor vehicle backlog. Our problem really is with the motorcycles because the backlog is at 13 million, [and] our delivery is one million a month. So we would reach over a year before we wipe that out,” Mendoza replied.
“So we’re balancing the current supply, our current demand of plates versus our backlog. So we have come up with a mechanism where we go after our current demand and also reduce our backlog.”
BH party-list Rep. Bernadette Herrera was also concerned that the current demand for vehicle plates would not help the LTO address its backlog.
“But is it true that every time, every month, we have an additional backlog because the delivery and the one printing it is not consistent or it is not being addressed jointly?” Herrera asked.
In response, Mendoza said plate production had increased to 32,000 per day — or around 700,000 per month.
“Yes, but we are catching up because the delivery of plates has increased… So this is speeding up already, Madam Congressman,” he said.
A plate backlog has been hounding the LTO since early 2012 — over 10 years or two administrations ago.
In 2022, LTO said that it would need around P6.8 billion to address the huge backlog. A year before that, LTO said it had a backlog of 2.561 million pairs of replacement plates.
The backlog has been reduced, but last July, the Commission on Audit (COA) noted that over 1.7 million license plates for automobiles — which motorists already paid for in 2015 — had not been delivered by LTO.
According to the Commission on Audit, the replacement plates are worth a total of around P808 million.
To date, the items have not been delivered to various LTO regional offices.