OT: Driving license renewal delay

There have been several reports (You and Yours Radio 4 etc) about problems at the DVLA and long, long, long waits.

It took from Dec 20th to July 25th for DVLA to clear me to drive following an illness.

Bill

I renewed my driving licence feb/march online and I received my new licence two days later.

I was going to say that.

Just renewed my passport and in spite of them promising delays up to 10 weeks it was back in a couple (with good interim feedback too).

IIRC they are printed in Poland

My daughter passed her test a couple of weeks back, and I was expecting many weeks of delay before she got her full license through the post... I was amazed when it turned up three days later!

Thanks all. That's set my mind at rest.

Another Dave

On Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:54:37 +0100, newshound <snip>

Anyone else see the irony of this ???

No, Oh just me then

Avpx

They call it around here the pingdemic. A good word for it I feel, every walk of life is affected by stupid pings from people you have never been near at all. I removed the app, as it was clearly malfunctioning and also even if it did not ping you it kept giving you instructions to do this or that as if I was some kind of moron. It was probably useful to start with but now random noise has made it worse than useless. Brian

That is the source of your problems.

My renewal went through pretty slickly and the licence came back in a few days

Its because for whatever reason they cant find your passport.

Yup. My son applied for his provisional licence at the beginning of December. He had to fill in an additional (paper) form, as he has had seizures in the past (none since being treated). He is still waiting - and we know that they received the go from his consultant, as they have confirmed receiving the letter.

The backstory to that is they don't have an online document handling system. For most companies and government departments, when they ask you to send in original documents, they go to a document handling centre which checks their authenticity, scans them onto the document handling system and posts them straight back. Then the person who deals with your 'case' (whatever the request might be) refers to the scans on the computer system at a later point.

DVLA hasn't modernised their processes in that way, so they still have big piles of paper at their offices. That means that staff need to be physically in the offices to deal with the paperwork, and they can't work from home as case handlers in other companies could. Hence a lot of people at DVLA Swansea caught COVID and there was a strike because they were putting employees at risk by having to work at close quarters. With social distancing they reduce COVID risks but can have fewer staff on site and so process less paperwork, and then there's the enormous backlog...

Result is that everyone's documents are holed up in that building in Swansea and staff are still digging their way through them.

Theo

Lucky you. I sent paperwork, photo and supporting documents off on March 17th I got my documents back 21st May and my licence 5 days after my birthday..

I think 'ordinary' renewals that don't require any (special?) human intervention are still quite quick, it's just anything that needs someone at DVLA to do something is currently taking ages.

The stats suggest that over a third of people pinged go on to report infection, so it sounds like it is doing what it is supposed to.

I can't quite understand why people are surprised that when there is a massive spike in infections, that there is also a corresponding rise in the number of contact trace "pings".

What was it asking you to do? Its not given any instructions to me so far?

I have often thought that cities and large towns should have a government office, specifically for submitting documents through. Take them in, they scan them in, you take them home again - no risk of them going astray and a verified electronic copy is available to the company/government/council department concerned.

partly due to DVLA staff having been on strike, ISTR hearing there's about 10 weeks of post backlog sitting unopened

Though I submitted two change of registered keeper forms online and got both new V5s back in under a week.

Back in the day it used to be like that. The vehicle licensing was done in areas. Myself living in the good old West Riding of Yorkshire could carry out vehicle taxation, driver licence matters, change of address etc. at Wakefield by post or in person. Imagine that!