Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the DVLA webchat.

In 2025-2026, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)’s contact centre answered 8,929,400 customer contacts, of which 964,576 were answered via webchat. The webchat service provides customers with an online option to support them when they are using one of the DVLA’s digital services or if they have a general enquiry.

The DVLA’s webchat also incorporates a chatbot function which automatically answered 498,780 customers in 2025-26 without any human intervention. The chatbot function is available constantly, allowing the DVLA to answer some customer enquiries outside of its standard opening hours.

In 2025-26, the average time taken to handle an enquiry via the webchat channel was around 90 seconds quicker than the telephone option.