Recommendation 9

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, rising from an average of less than 0.5 million calls per month in 2019–20 to an average of 3.5 million calls per month in 2021–22. The DVLA did not increase its capacity to answer calls in response to the surge in demand – the NAO found the number of calls the DVLA answered fell by more than half, from over four million in 2019–20 alone, to 3.4 million over the two years from April 2020 to March 2022.19