Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

Adam Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this important Backbench Business debate. I am grateful to her and her fellow Liberal Democrat Members, the hon. Members for Guildford (Zöe Franklin) and for Melksham and Devizes (Brian Mathew), for raising issues that I will shortly touch on.

Time and again, my office has to deal with people who are having all manner of problems with the DVLA. Like colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, I want to highlight the issue of people—often elderly people—who have had to surrender their licence due to medical concerns and have experienced trouble as a result. Even once they are medically cleared to drive again, it can often take many months for the DVLA to return their licence.

I will give three examples of real people living in my Erewash constituency who have had their lives unnecessarily disrupted because of administrative delay and failure, pure and simple. There was a couple in Breaston, one of whom had their licence taken away after a routine medical check-up. They were medically cleared pretty quickly, but it still took the DVLA two months to restore their licence. They had been in the process of selling their car at the time, and the sale was completely disrupted. Similarly, my team recently helped a man in Ilkeston who waited four months after being cleared to drive to have his licence returned. At the most extreme end of the scale, my team recently helped a woman who had had her licence taken away due to moderate sleep apnoea. She, too, was quickly okayed to drive again after further medical assessment, only for the DVLA to take seven months to finally return her licence.

These are not old cases, and I only picked the three worst from the 18 months that I have been a Member of Parliament. All these cases have been handled by my team in recent months, and they were resolved only because of a Member of Parliament’s intervention. We have heard from colleagues across the House how it is deeply inappropriate that Members of Parliament should have to step in to resolve these cases. It is simply not good enough.

In Erewash, four in every five households depend on a car to get around. I am always advocating for more and better public transport, on which I regularly engage with the Minister. We have some good services and connections, but going without a car for months on end is not just an inconvenience for my constituents; it is an enormously disruptive problem that prevents people from getting around every day.

Especially in anticipation of new rules to make our roads safer, someone really needs to look at how the DVLA handles health-related cases and interacts with elderly drivers. Clearer timelines would be beneficial, as would improved communication between the DVLA and the people who are forced to rely on its services. I would greatly appreciate it if the Minister could comment on his and the Department’s work on that front. What most needs to be recognised is that, for people who have lost their licence and not had it back for months, through no fault of their own, not being able to drive means that their life is put on hold. That is not right, and I seriously hope that the DVLA can get it sorted.