Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

Claire Young Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this debate.

Dozens of my constituents have come to me with stories of DVLA failure, each carrying a variation of the same theme: a system that has let them down, often involving delays in licence renewals or restorations related to medical conditions. Let me take the case of one self-employed constituent who, due to delays with restoring their licence, has lost more than £60,000-worth of work. For months, their livelihood, security and mental health were left hanging by a thread. Only after pressure from my office was the matter resolved. It was a medical case and the DVLA failed to justify the delay. Another constituent, who must renew every three years owing to a medical condition, had their licence rejected because the DVLA incorrectly claimed that they had changed their name. That single administrative error cost them six months of their licence.

A third constituent appealed against the decision on their medical fitness. In response, the DVLA sent them the full medical records of another person, then spent three months arguing with the GP practice over the medical fee. The DVLA was prepared to pay only a fraction of what the GP wanted. My constituent offered to pay the difference to end the argument, but that was refused, and they had to make an inconvenient journey to a distant, DVLA-approved GP. When the licence eventually came, it was granted for one year only. The case has been ongoing for over three years—it was originally with my predecessor. Those are just some of the cases affecting my constituents. The common denominator is not the medical condition itself; it is the fact that every one of them involves a medical issue, and every one of them has been delayed for reasons that the DVLA has never made clear.

The DVLA does not operate in isolation. It depends on GPs, consultants and the wider NHS to provide the evidence it needs to make decisions. When those channels fail, the DVLA fails with them, and my constituents are the ones who pay the price. Through a freedom of information request, a constituent discovered that the backlog for medical renewals alone stands in excess of 260,000 cases. As has been mentioned, the 2023 Public Accounts Committee report found that nearly 3 million people who had notified the DVLA of medical conditions had experienced long delays, with some losing employment and income as a direct consequence.

Of the Committee’s 11 recommendations, the then Government accepted 10. The one they declined was a strategic review of how cases involving medical conditions were handled, bringing together the DVLA, the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS. My casework suggests that the rejection of that recommendation was short-sighted. One of my constituents waited five months simply for a consultant to be asked to review their records, never mind all the steps that had to happen after that. The DVLA knows the problem. The Department of Health knows the problem. My constituents certainly know the problem. The only question left is whether this Government do.