@itexpert7 Well that is very useful, thank you. I shall definitely go down that route for an online medical.. When you say (just print the DVLA licence proof from their website), what do you mean? Sorry if I am being a dense here!!! thanks again.
Hi, We have been officially resident in Portugal now for 3 months (both formerly UK residents all of our lives). We are both 58 yrs old. We are still in the process of exchanging our UK licences after submitting the exchange request some 2 months ago online to IMT.
I am pretty confident that you CANNOT print your UK licence off from the DVLA website as has been suggested. ( No offence to whoever posted this). You will need to contact DVLA by phone in the first instance on 0300 790 6801 and ask if you can be sent a Certificate of Confirmation of your UK licence as you have moved to Portugal and this is your new permanent address. Tell them that you need to exchange your UK licence for a Portuguese one and the authorities in Portugal have asked for confirmation that you have a licence X2. Give them your driving licence details and your full address and they will send to you (snail mail only) their Confirmation of your driving licences. It will be stamped by the DVLA as authentic and will include the categories of vehicles that you are entitled to drive. I was informed by a DVLA representative that this was quite a common practice. We had the documents back here in 2 weeks.
The next bit is a bit harder and can be done in 1 of 2 ways as I understand it. Either you attend your nearest IMT processing office with a duly filled out application, your DVLA Confirmation Cert, money, residency card etc (docs as specified on the IMT website) or you can submit your request for exchange online with copies of your docs as files. (This is what we did).
IMT have had our online request for licence exchange for the last two months and have sent us a formal receipt confirming that we are in the process of licence exchange so if you are stopped by the local Rozzers you can show them the exchange certificate that you have received from IMT, assuming that you are outside the 90 days after becoming official Residents.
We are waiting any day for IMT to ask for our UK licences to be submitted to them but as someone else has already mentioned, we will also need them to hire cars on our forthcoming trips back and forth the UK and a wedding in Italy coming up soon so this is going to become problematic and I don’t have an answer yet.
This has been our own recent experience of the licence exchange situation to date and I hope has been of some help to readers.
