The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mr Simon Burns)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) on securing the debate. I know that this issue is important to him, because this is the second debate that he has secured on this topic in the past 10 months. In the previous debate, the then Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) promised to meet my hon. Friend and a delegation from the photographic industry. That meeting took place in March and further meetings have since taken place with officials from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. I think we now have a very good understanding of the situation and I would like to set out some of the key issues concerning the driving licence and the driver’s photo.
The DVLA plays an important role both in law enforcement and road safety. The photographs that have been incorporated in driving licences since 1998 provide critical support for the police and other enforcement agencies by linking the person behind the wheel with the entitlements to drive that they hold—or perhaps do not hold. The photographs held on the DVLA database are just as important as those on the licence itself, because the police have direct digital access to them for motoring enforcement. The quality of the images is therefore paramount. That helps the police recognise repeat offenders, and just as importantly it makes it easier for ordinary motorists who—in the past, and sometimes still today—have been asked to take their documents to police stations. The Driving Standards Agency also has digital access to photographs on the DVLA database. A high-quality image is important for all of them, as I am sure my hon. Friend fully appreciates, given his comments.
DSA driving test examiners have in recent years seen an increase in impersonations or substitutions at driving tests. High-resolution images that can be made larger on screen provide greater confidence when checking the identity of an individual and counter the direct challenge to road safety. The quality of images has increased greatly over recent years. Almost all photographs are now taken, stored and transmitted digitally. The industry itself has been transformed. That change has been driven not by Government intervention, but by customers and the way that they choose to use the products on offer. At the same time, these new technologies have hugely reduced the cost of taking photographs. However, there is a downside for organisations such as the DVLA and the police, in that such photographs are open to manipulation, especially if taken by the individual using their own equipment.
The DVLA continually seeks cost-effective ways of improving the quality of images that it receives and of increasing convenience for customers while meeting the Government’s drive for “digital by default”. An example is the face-to-face service available at post offices which, since 2010, has included taking photographs at the counter. That service is now available at 752 outlets, as my hon. Friend mentioned, and has proved to be a simple and cost-effective solution for customers. The quality of the photographs taken is controlled by software in the equipment and face-to-face supervision by the counter staff. The process adopted for renewing driving licences with photographs that are 10 years old, for example, takes just over three minutes. That includes taking the photograph, capturing any data changes, collecting payment and transmitting all the information securely and electronically to the DVLA. The driving licence lands on the customer’s doormat typically within two or three days of their arriving at the post office counter.
There are also major efficiency benefits for the DVLA. The transactions can be fully automated and, because of the personal supervision at the counter, there are virtually no rejections of data owing to the quality of the image. The service is a major improvement. Feedback from customers has been hugely positive: over 80% state that they would recommend the service to family and friends.
Alongside that new customer channel, the DVLA introduced in 2011 a web channel for direct customer use. In those transactions, on agreement with the applicant, photographs already submitted to and verified by the Identity and Passport Service are reused by the DVLA. There are constraints on the age of such photographs, but it allows the public to make the transaction from home in an entirely convenient and effective way.
Those two channels are very much in line with the Government’s digital strategy, which was published at the start of November by my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Digital transactions are securely and conveniently undertaken and are making significant savings across Government. Web channels have been in place since 2005 for first applications for driving licences and replacement driving licences, and for new driving licences for the over-70s and for those wishing to notify a change of address, but in the choice of the three available channels we have seen a migration from paper to the web over the past two years. Some 18% of customers now choose the web, 28% use counter services and the remaining 54% of transactions are dealt with on paper.
The web channels and the counter service currently sit alongside the older paper channels, but those channels are inconvenient for customers. The forms are less easy to navigate than their electronic equivalents, which have in-built checking systems, and customers must obtain photographs separately and post them along with their forms. Processing paper copies is vastly more time consuming and costly for the DVLA than electronic requests, especially for rejected transactions, which are inconvenient and expensive for all concerned.
Introducing the new web and counter services for 10-year driving licence renewals has saved the DVLA at least 200 staff and brought a financial saving of around £5 million each year for the Government. At the same time, the quality of photographs, the accuracy of data and customer satisfaction have increased and the number of rejections has fallen. Continuing and expanding the digital and automated channels forms an important part of achieving the DVLA’s target of reducing its annual running costs by £100 million, against its 2010 baseline, by the end of this Parliament.
My hon. Friend will have seen this morning’s announcement of the Post Office as the successful bidder for the DVLA front-office counter service contract. I know that the vast majority of right hon. and hon. Members will welcome that award, because it is an important part of ensuring that post offices and sub-post offices, both urban and rural, have an opportunity to provide a valuable service within our local communities. However, the contract has been let as non-exclusive specifically to avoid the creation of a monopoly supplier of a range of services to Government, including photographs, and to allow collaboration with the photographic industry to continue. I believe that my hon. Friend has already received an assurance on this aspect in response to his recent parliamentary question. I assure him that we do not want a monopoly supplier, because that is not in the best interests of customers, the Post Office, or the photographic industry in general.
The DVLA and I do not wish to create monopolies, but we do want to provide choices for customers and to allow the market to determine the solutions for the future to support industry in moving in the right direction. We want to take all the opportunities we can through advances in technology to improve customer services in quality and cost; to use digital technology to reduce manual administrative tasks while improving security and seeking automation of processes from one end to the other to improve accuracy and quality of data; and to actively pursue the wider Government agenda to move to “digital by default” wherever possible.
Where there are new opportunities, there are always challenges of change, and changes that are enabled by new technologies can be disruptive for existing industries. That is why the DVLA needs to work with the photographic industry to enable this transition from the old to the new in order to develop a solution that works for the DVLA and other Government agencies but, equally importantly, that provides the best solution and retains choice of provider for the public.
The meetings and workshops between the DVLA and the photographic industry have identified two possible solutions for exploration. The contract award to the Post Office and the solution that it has in place now needs to be considered as part of the next workshop to assess how these solutions interact with or complement the counter services contract. There are two major providers to be considered: first, the professional photography sector, which already takes digital photographs and in many cases will need to make only relatively simple adjustments to its processes to transmit the photographs in order to interface with DVLA systems; and secondly, self-service photo booths, which may need the phasing in of additional technology to meet the full digital approach to benefit both customers and the DVLA best. As my hon. Friend said, the next workshop to take that collaboration forward is scheduled for a fortnight’s time. It will be attended by representatives from the self-service booth sector as well as those from the professional photography sector—specialist high street chains and independents.
My hon. Friend the then Under-Secretary formally initiated that collaborative effort, and it would be extremely helpful to continue the work with a further meeting between my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley and Department for Transport Ministers. That would be an important opportunity for us to review progress following the meeting with industry representatives towards the end of this month. It will be important for Government to work with the industry to develop solutions that are less expensive, more convenient and, equally importantly, maintain choice of provision for customers, which is the nub of my hon. Friend’s argument. I hope that he will accept the invitation to that meeting; I suspect that he will, because he requested one in the closing moments of his speech.
The crucial thing is to get the interested parties and my hon. Friend around the table so that we can begin fully to thrash out the alternatives, the opportunities and the different proposals; see what can be done to take forward a system that will provide not only choice but value for money both for taxpayers and for customers; and ensure that we have a plethora of different outlets to provide a service whose technological improvements, which we cannot afford to not keep abreast of, are advancing dramatically. At the same time, we cannot be seen to be creating monopolies that will undermine the vibrant role that the private sector, which has played such an important role in the photographic sector in the past, can continue to play.
I am confident that our meeting will be productive and useful for all sides. I look forward to it so that we can address the control and security improvements required by the DVLA in order to address fully the fraud and ID security challenges that it faces. It will also provide an opportunity to discuss the variety and freedom of choice offered by the private sector’s contribution, in its different facets, to a service that is used so often by so many of our constituents up and down the country.
Question put and agreed to.