Richard Burden
Main Page: Richard Burden (Labour - Birmingham, Northfield)Department Debates - View all Richard Burden's debates with the Department for Transport
(9 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
This was the week in which Ministers boasted that they were going to cut red tape by replacing the counterpart driving licence with an online system. That is a good objective. The trouble is that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency’s computer system has already crashed under the strain. Motorists who want to hire a car abroad now have to contact the DVLA online and obtain a code in order to access the same information that they would previously have had in their pocket, and if they do not hire the car within three days, they will have to go back to square one because the code will have expired. Mr Speaker, you could not make it up! Cutting red tape? It’s a mess, isn’t it?
Mr McLoughlin
The simple fact is that people do not have to do that online; they can phone. There was a problem on the first morning of the new system, but since then it has been operating successfully.