DVLA: Staffing Levels

My Lords, the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency regularly monitors staffing levels against demand for its services and changes staffing levels where necessary within agreed limits. For example, the DVLA has recently taken on more staff to meet increased demand for its drivers, medical and contact centre services. Improvements are already taking effect: the average decision times fell from 68 working days in February to 56 at the end of May.

The fact that it is taking 66 days to answer would explain my problem, as I met all the DVLA’s criteria when I replied in an email on 27 March. If my Question were to have come up next month, we would have been commemorating three months of me waiting to get a driving licence. Does the Minister accept that the DVLA is in a crisis? It is desperately short of manpower and it is not fit for purpose for what it is supposed to do: issuing driving licences to the public of this country, who pay its wages. Is the Minister considering technology to meet this problem, such as putting in place a computer programme to get on with issuing licences, thereby reducing the problem of DVLA not having enough manpower to meet the difficulties it has today?

I hope that the noble Lord received my letter of 12 June, in reply to his email to me on 14 May. If he took the simple action outlined in my letter, he should now have his licence and be driving again. There are 53 million driving licence holders in Great Britain. In 2024-25, the DVLA received 837,591 medical licence notifications, a figure which increased to 922,123 in 2025-26. As I said, the average decision time fell from 68 to 56 working days. It recently recruited 60 extra full-time equivalent caseworkers and 100 additional FTE contact centre staff, to cut call waiting times. The noble Lord is right that, if he were to apply now, he would be able to use the newly launched digital medical services platform, which enables far more customers with medical conditions to notify, apply for and renew their driving licences online.

My Lords, it was recently stated in the House of Commons that 34,000 suppliers of number plates are registered with the DVLA. Given the widespread problems with illegal number plates helping people dodge the law, can the Minister tell us how many DVLA staff are allocated to policing compliance by those 34,000 suppliers and whether that number is sufficient?

The noble Lord is right that this is a serious problem on a significant scale. The Government acknowledge that more needs to be done. A recent consultation closed on 11 May and the actions that we propose to take following the review of the consultation will include legislative change, if needed. I cannot tell him how many people currently do that job but I will write to him with the figure.

My Lords, I will back up what the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said and ask the Minister to consider the following. It is one thing to get a driving licence when you pass your test, because you know that you have passed your test. However, when you apply for a renewal at 70, you do not know what will happen. Therefore, you are left in limbo. My wife is a leap year baby, so I believe she is 17 and a half, but the cruel public authorities say that she is 70. Naturally, she sent in her application in January—because 29 February was the cut-off point in question—but she still has not heard a single thing. She has no idea what has happened with the process. That has knock-on effects in practical terms and is a considerable source of anxiety. I believe this to be a widespread problem.

If the noble Lord drops me a line with a few more details, I will look into that case. The rules demand more attention to medical conditions from the age of 70 onwards, and rightly so. There have been some terrible examples of older drivers who are unfit to drive but have still driven and have caused serious accidents, including death, so we are right to worry about this. The process ought to be efficient. I know better than most that I have to renew my vocational licence annually, and I start it on the first day that I can. I am pleased to say that it always comes back, but that may be because my name is on the licence.

Oh!

I just thought I should say that so that nobody thought it was in somebody else’s name. It is important that, as people get older, they consider whether they are capable to continue driving and have the right medical history to do so. I realise that it is a real issue for their mobility, particularly in rural areas. That is why the digital medical services platform, to which I referred, enables much more of this to be done online. If the noble Lord would like to give me some further details of his very young wife’s licence application, I will look into it.

My Lords, I imagine that my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom put his name on his licence application as well, though with slightly different results. The DVLA used to be, not so long ago, one of the more highly regarded agencies, rather like the Passport Office. It was pretty efficient and reliable, but it seems to have gone downhill. Taking another example, the Government committed last year to reduce the wait for driving tests to seven weeks by summer 2026. Here we are in the height of summer 2026 and the waiting time is still 23 weeks. What are the Government going to do about this? What date can they now give for saying that they will bring these waiting lists within bounds?

Some issues of government are more intractable than others. Given the statistics I quoted earlier about a 10% rise in medical licence notifications yet a reduction in the timescale dealing with them, I think that the DVLA is not an example of an organisation in crisis but one that is seeking, together with technology, to address the issues it faces on a real-time basis. However, the noble Lord is right that the Government anticipated reducing the waiting time for a driving test to seven weeks; the Secretary of State recently said that it was taking a long time to sort it out and that it will not be sorted out until autumn next year. That is not to say that nothing has been done. The number of examiners has gone up by 147. In the period between June 2025 and May 2026, the DVSA conducted 242,000 more tests than in the same period. Pass rates are going up, which is very satisfactory. The noble Lord ought to know the effects that the actions to make the booking system fairer—limiting learners to two changes to their driving tests, restricting bookings so that only learners can book and amend tests, and limiting the area a learner driver can move a test to once booked—are already producing. Those actions were taken at the end of March, in the middle of May and in early June, and they are already clearly increasing the availability of test slots. He is right that it is taking longer but we will solve it.

My Lords, I will take the Minister back to the question about cloning plates, which is increasingly facilitating a whole range of crime, including, with the increase in petrol prices, drive-off from petrol stations. From my experience of 30-odd years being a Member of Parliament in the other place, the DVLA and the police were remarkably uncurious and unwilling to look at genuine grievances from individuals whose plates had been cloned and who were regularly getting traffic violation notices and parking fines. Would it not be for the good of those individuals, and for law and order and the reputation of the authorities, if the police and the DVLA work together to crack down and start to eliminate this menace?

My noble friend is absolutely right: it is not acceptable. There are clearly more number plates that cannot be read by ANPR and more cloned number plates on the road these days than there ought to be. I believe that actions are being taken, because it is a particularly unpleasant experience to discover that you are the victim of fines and other costs generated by somebody pretending to have your index number. The Government are concerned about it. As I say, the consultation about eradicating vehicle plate cloning closed on 11 May. If legislative change is necessary then we are committed to making those changes.