I can but repeat what I said above - its what they made me do, because it was more than 10 years expired.
When I renewed my licence it was in October 2001. Maybe things have changed since then.
I can't say that I had any help from them. Whenever I rang, I got the usual "our lines are busy, but your call is important to us" cr@p. Writing to them just resulted in a copy of a GID which I had already downloaded from on their web site.
I hope you get better results - good luck
