The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is an executive agency of the Department for Transport that works to maintain the records of 50 million drivers in Great Britain and 40 million vehicles throughout the United Kingdom. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, some people experienced delays applying for or renewing their driving licence and a backlog …
| Title | HC No. | Published | Items | Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forty-first Report - Driving licence backlogs at the DVLA | HC 735 | 17 Mar 2023 | 26 | Responded |
From April 2020 to March 2022, the DVLA did not answer 60 million calls to its drivers’ licence customer service number, 94% of the total it received. The number of calls to the DVLA about driving licences surged in Summer 2020 and stayed above pre- pandemic levels for two years, …
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the DVLA prioritised those services with the highest volumes of applications or where it believed processing delays would cause greater problems. The DVLA told us that in 2020, it prioritised reducing the backlog in paper applications for vehicle-related transactions, because at the time, these backlogs were …
The DVLA’s system for managing paper-based driving licence applications relies on people being on site to manually process applications. The DVLA and the Department told us that when they determined priorities in 2020, they knew this system was susceptible to disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the solution was …
| Date | Witnesses | |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Nov 2022 | Dame Bernadette Kelly DCB · Department for Transport, Emma Ward · Department for Transport, Julie Lennard · Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency | View ↗ |