PAC: Lost jobs and income among serious repercussions after major DVLA delays

- 3 million licences subject to delays since April 2020 

- Drivers with medical conditions especially badly hit 

- Customers’ mental health and difficulties with daily living worsened 

Since April 2020 around three million customers who applied for a driving licence experienced delays, and complaints about the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) have greatly increased.  

In this inquiry the Public Accounts Committee received submissions from people who described losing their jobs or income and being unable to start or return to work because of the delays. Others had difficulty arranging motor insurance or were unable to hire a vehicle or drive abroad. Of the nearly 40 submissions received three quarters were from customers with medical conditions requiring the DVLA to decide on their fitness to drive. Some DVLA customers experienced isolation and worsening mental health when unable to go about their usual daily lives without a valid driving licence.   

This state of affairs persisted for around two years despite the DVLA changing the law to postpone driving licence renewals, investing in new buildings and additional staff, and making more services available online. Customers’ poor experiences were exacerbated by huge difficulty contacting the DVLA during the pandemic.  

The DVLA’s system to process applications from customers with medical conditions is slow, inefficient and in need of major improvement. These customers and those applying by post have been badly affected by the delays, but almost all of the 17 million customers without notifiable medical conditions had their applications processed within three working days. 

The PAC says the Department for Transport (DfT) has taken a hands-off approach and failed to ensure DVLA is using modern working practices and up-to-date technology. 

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “The pandemic inevitably made operations more difficult, but the DVLA and DfT were not prepared for the challenge of keeping essential driving licence services running and especially not for those who needed it most.  

“Some of the DVLA’s operations are antiquated, it lacks a comprehensive strategy for modernisation and on PAC we're unconvinced they’re more ready for the next crisis. When that does arise it will again be the most vulnerable customers - people for whom driving is a lifeline - who are worst hit. That’s just not acceptable. The DVLA has to get its act together.”  

PAC report conclusions and recommendations 

6.      Due to the DVLA’s delays processing applications, there were serious repercussions for some people from not having an up-to-date driving licence. Since April 2020, around three million customers who had applied to the DVLA for a driving licence have experienced delays and complaints about the DVLA have increased markedly. We received around 40 submissions to our inquiry from people who recently had a poor experience with DVLA’s driving licence services. Three quarters were from customers with medical conditions requiring the DVLA to decide on their fitness to drive. People described losing jobs and income and being unable to start or return to work. Others had difficulty arranging motor insurance or were unable to hire a vehicle or drive abroad. Some DVLA customers experienced isolation and worsening mental health when unable to go about their usual daily lives without a valid driving licence. The DVLA tells us that it prioritised help to customers that it identified had been badly affected by delays. However, over the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to the DVLA from customers enquiring about their applications increased hugely, showing that the DVLA’s efforts did not resolve many customers’ concerns and issues promptly. 

Recommendation: The DVLA should set up better systems to identify and fast-track driving licence applications where the customer is badly affected by a delay. It should set out its plans to achieve this in the Treasury Minute. 

7.      The DVLA’s communication during the pandemic was ineffective, leaving many customers feeling as if their applications were making no progress. Customers had huge difficulty contacting the DVLA’s call centre during the pandemic to enquire about the progress of applications. Between April 2020 and March 2022, due to a surge in calls, around 60 million calls to the DVLA about driving licences went unanswered, 94% of the total it received. The number of calls it did answer 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. Some of our constituents told us that when they did speak to the DVLA they found its response unhelpful, causing frustration and additional stress. Many DVLA customers went to their MPs for help: the number of complaints about the DVLA received via MPs increased tenfold between 2019-20 and 2021-22. Although most people affected by the backlogs were able to continue driving under an exemption in the Road Traffic Act 1988, this was not clear to many people. The DVLA says that it has recently modernised its telephony systems, so it should be able to cope better with future surges in demand. 

Recommendations: 

a.       The DVLA should improve its communication to ensure customers understand the status of their applications and are updated regularly. This should include the information that they may be able to continue to drive while they wait for their application to be processed.  

b.     The DVLA should also improve how it communicates this and other important information to stakeholders such as MPs. It should set out what it is doing to improve its communication in its Treasury Minute response to this report. 

8.      The DVLA’s efforts to encourage customers who can use online services to do so are not sufficient. Some customers need the option of applying for a driving licence using a paper form, but the DVLA assesses that around 60% of customers who apply on paper could have applied online. In the periods during the pandemic when customers who applied on paper experienced substantial delays, almost all customers without notifiable medical conditions who applied online had their applications processed within three working days. The DVLA rightly wants to avoid disenfranchising people unable to use online services, and its aim is to “create digital services so good people choose to use them” while keeping a paper option available. However, we believe there is considerable scope for improving take-up of DVLA’s online services and we do not agree with the Department’s approach of not setting the DVLA any targets for digitisation and digital take-up of driving licence services. 

Recommendations:  

a.      The Department and the DVLA should consider what more they can do to increase take-up of the DVLA’s online services:  

·       They should understand better why some customers have chosen not to engage with online services.  

·       They should incentivise customers to use digital services and discourage people who can apply online from sending paper applications. 

b.     The Department should, in its Treasury Minute response to this report, set out its plans to hold the DVLA to account for increased take-up of online services. 

9.      The DVLA gave insufficient attention to those driving licence service areas, such as medical notifications and its call centre, where staffing challenges led to the most detrimental consequences for customers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the DVLA prioritised services with the highest volumes of applications or where it believed processing delays would cause greater problems, such as its services related to vehicles, knowing that this would take resources away from its driving licence services. Both the DVLA and the Department knew the system for managing paper-based driving licence applications was susceptible to disruption because it relied on people being on site. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the DVLA sought to make paper driving licence services more resilient. It invested in new buildings and additional staff, made changes to the law to postpone driving licence renewals, and made more services available online, but these actions failed to prevent backlogs from building up and persisting for around two years. The DVLA also undertook work for other parts of government during the pandemic, such as printing vaccination invitation letters, which were of course very important tasks, but also diverted resources from DVLA’s core services. It told us this work used spare capacity in its printing and mailing facilities. 

Recommendations:  

a.      The DVLA should write to us within six months to share an improved contingency plan.  

b.     The DVLA and the Department should also jointly write to us, at the same time or earlier, to set out lessons learned from the driving licence backlogs saga and how they are responding to the lessons.  

c.      The Department should ensure it understands the impact of the DVLA taking on work for other government departments and ensure there are mitigations in place to address any negative consequences for the DVLA’s core purpose. 

10.  The DVLA’s system to process applications from customers who have notified it of relevant medical conditions is slow, inefficient and in need of major improvement. Processing times for applications that involve the DVLA making a medical decision are far longer than for other applications, with many decisions taking a year or more. At the time we took evidence in November, the DVLA expected to clear its remaining backlog of such applications by January 2023, returning to meeting its target of processing at least 90% of these applications within 90 working days. But in our view even 90 working days is too long for customers to wait. Customers experiencing problems after notifying the DVLA of medical conditions have been the main source of complaints to the DVLA since 2018-19, and we are concerned that the DVLA’s poor service discriminates against its more vulnerable customers. The Department acknowledges that the legislative framework for medical licensing has not been reviewed for decades. The DVLA’s decisions often require information from GPs and other medical professionals, which is requested and returned using paper documentation. The DVLA intends to introduce modern, digital communications to speed up information exchange with the health sector but given the technical challenges involved, it is not yet clear to us when and how it will do this. 

Recommendations: 

a.      The DVLA should in its Treasury Minute confirm that it has resolved the backlog in applications from drivers with notifiable medical conditions as expected, and if not, why it has not and when it will do so.  

b.      By the end of 2024 at the latest, the Department should complete a strategic review of the system to process applications from driving licence customers who have notified it of relevant medical conditions, encompassing both the legislative framework and process management. It should set out its timetable for the review in the Treasury Minute. It should work with the Department of Health and Social Care, the NHS and medical professional bodies to radically improve how the DVLA and medical professionals exchange information. 

11.  The Department and the DVLA have not taken a strategic approach to maintaining and improving the infrastructure, estate and processes that the DVLA’s performance depends on. The Department has taken a hands-off approach to the DVLA, failing to ensure that its services are periodically reviewed and improved through timely adoption of modern working practices and up-to-date technology. Consequently, the driving licence application process has become inefficient through outmoded working practices, and it is not resilient to external shocks. We recognise that the DVLA has improved and modernised some of its services, for example paying road tax is now an easy and efficient process for vehicle owners. However, the pandemic exposed weaknesses in some of the DVLA’s other operations. Currently, most staff working on driving licences cannot work remotely because of data security risks and underlying technological challenges, which the DVLA said cannot be easily remedied. The DVLA acknowledges that while almost all its services are digitised, applications for vocational licences and applications involving complex medical decisions are not, and its plans for digitisation will take 10 years. The DVLA argues that it is now a much nimbler organisation after changes introduced during the pandemic, but we are unconvinced that it is ready for any future crises. 

Recommendation: The Department and the DVLA should work together to set out, by the end of 2023, a strategy for how the DVLA will re-engineer and modernise the driving licence process, over the next 3 to 5 years. Its strategy should address the extent to which its long-term digital transformation plan will make its IT infrastructure adequately resilient and if there is more it could do to enable secure remote working should another crisis occur. /ENDS 

Full details of this inquiry including evidence received Driving licence backlogs at the DVLA