DVLA: Staffing Levels

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

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.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

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?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

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.