That this House has considered reform of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.
I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for a debate on a topic that, as I can see from the number of Members present, regularly fills the inboxes of right hon. and hon. Members from across the House. This debate is primarily about two closely connected issues: first, whether the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is fit for purpose in how it delivers its current responsibilities, and secondly, whether it is equipped to play the role it should in improving road safety. Let me be clear from the outset that this is not about blaming the staff of the DVLA, who work under immense pressure and whom my constituents praise when they are able to get through. It is about whether the systems that the staff are required to use are modern, fair and safe, and whether they serve the public properly.
There is no doubt that the DVLA is a large and busy organisation. Last year alone, it issued 12.5 million driving licences and 17.9 million vehicle registration certificates, and handled more than 14 million contact centre inquiries. It is an agency that most people will interact with frequently throughout their lives. On the surface, the DVLA’s latest customer satisfaction survey looks positive, with reported satisfaction of 92%, but that figure masks a serious problem. Satisfaction drops by 20 percentage points when it comes to medical driving licences, and by 34 percentage points when people are asked about the time taken to reach decisions.
My hon. Friend mentions the business of medical decisions. In most cases, MPs and our caseworkers do not have the medical knowledge to be able to determine somebody’s fitness to drive. Although it is lovely for us to be able to restore people’s licences by intervening in their cases, does she agree that this really should not be our job?
I will come to some of those specific issues shortly. Our teams are incredible and work really hard, both here in Westminster and down in our constituencies, but that should not be necessary. People should not only get the help they need when their MP steps in.
A lot of my constituents say that there is effectively a two-tier system: if someone is able to use the digital system, it is extremely fast; if someone has a medical condition, they have to use the paper form, which creates all sorts of administrative problems that we end up chasing up. My caseworkers say that the DVLA is one of the worst departments at responding to MPs’ offices. Does my hon. Friend think that the system has to change?
I thank my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for his comments. I am afraid the DVLA is certainly in the top three worst departments, and I will come on to some specific cases shortly.
When constituents come to my office, they are frustrated but also really anxious. They have followed DVLA guidance by declaring their medical conditions, or they have reapplied for a licence after a temporary suspension, and then they wait, often for months, with no meaningful updates. The DVLA’s strategic priority is to drive up digital engagement, yet in practice the medical licensing system remains stubbornly analogue. The department does not routinely use email, it does not proactively chase missing documents, it does not provide status updates, and it still relies on posting medical questionnaires to GPs and consultants. Unless someone chases their MP, who then chases the DVLA and pushes the constituent to chase their clinician, cases simply stall. Applicants are left idling, with no sense of when or if the system will move them forward. This is not a functioning public service.
Let me give Members one example, which sadly is not unusual. Ellie submitted a medical questionnaire in March 2025 relating to possible epilepsy. Her symptoms stopped following B12 injections, and her consultant confirmed in writing that she was fit to drive. Six months later, she received a call from the DVLA, and she confirmed that there had been no further episodes. A month after that, her licence was revoked without her even being notified. She discovered that only in January 2026, when she happened to check her driving licence online.
When Ellie contacted the DVLA, she was told that her medical questionnaire was missing—one that had never been sent to her. After resubmitting the forms in February this year, she was informed that the original paperwork from last year could not be located. A full year after first engaging with the DVLA, her case is now classed as high priority after daily contact from her—sometimes 12 times in a day. No one should have to fight that hard to prove that they are safe to drive.
My hon. Friend is illustrating the challenges really well. I look forward to the Minister’s response, because I think, given the nods I have seen, that Government Members agree. I have a constituent—a councillor, in fact—who wants to be a driving instructor, and he has experienced the same delays. Does my hon. Friend agree that we want to hear an update from the Minister on the work to put those systems online so that they run parallel with everything else?
I have a taxi driver in my constituency who is stuck in a similar situation. This is not just about people who want to drive; it is about people who have to drive.
As our population is ageing, the scale of this challenge is growing. Last year alone, medical licence reviews increased by 16% to more than 850,000. The need to digitise this part of the system is not optional; it is urgent.
Some constituents are told not to worry, because they may be able to drive under section 88 of the Road Traffic Act 1988.
I can see that the Minister agrees. However, section 88 applies only in limited circumstances. It does not cover cases in which a licence has been revoked, and it creates real uncertainty. It forces people to navigate legal and insurance risks without a sat-nav to assist them. I have a resident who was travelling to Portugal and was not able to invoke section 88 abroad. I have another resident who was told that her no-claims discount on her insurance would be cancelled if it took much longer to get her licence back—she had worked on that no-claims bonus for 17 years.
This problem does not only affect older drivers or those renewing licences; young people are caught out too. My constituents Max and Maisie declared childhood medical conditions when applying for their provisional licences and waited for six months, with no progress beyond being told that information was required. In both cases, provisional licences were issued shortly after my office intervened, showing that the system can respond quickly when pressure is applied, but young people should not have to rely on interventions by MPs simply to take driving lessons and participate in everyday life.
These are not just anecdotes from constituency offices. The Public Accounts Committee found in 2023 that since 2020, 3 million people applying for licences by post or declaring medical conditions experienced significant delays. Over the same period, almost all of the 17 million people applying online without medical conditions had their licences processed within three working days. Great service should be available to everyone, not just the healthiest.
Various charities reinforce that picture. Epilepsy UK reports increasing calls from drivers who have complied with all the guidance and whose clinicians have returned all the information, and who yet remain unable to drive for months after being medically eligible. Diabetes UK has shared DVLA data showing that less than 5% of medically restricted licence reviews result in refusal or revocation, suggesting that the vast majority of people caught up in delays pose no greater risk to road safety.
Members might be interested to know that we will come to the Front-Bench spokespeople at half-past 4. About 10 Members are standing, so you can work out that a time limit will not be needed, unless they talk for an excessive 10 minutes each.
I thank the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this important debate. Roads are the arteries of our nation, keeping us and our economy moving, and the rules governing our roads rely on being able to identify vehicles and their drivers, which is the responsibility of the DVLA. It really matters. It matters to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for road tax to pay for upkeep; it matters to those of us who want to walk, drive and cycle safely; and it matters to the police, who can use number plates to work out who is using our roads. When the rules of the road are not enforced—when people flout them with no punishment—it degrades trust.
I will highlight two elements of the DVLA systems that are failing: first, the regulation of number plate sales, and secondly, the rise of ghost vehicle owners due to there being no registered keeper. I will start with number plates, the little piece of plastic on the front of a vehicle, which most people hopefully never have to think too much about. Number plates are the quiet bedrock of how we enforce the rules of our roads. Number plates should tell us who owns a car, and they should be readable by cameras so that the police can use automatic number plate recognition software, which is essential for their work.
In many other countries, number plates are treated as what they are—passports for our roads—and are highly regulated. In France, for example, vehicles are allocated a plate for life, with no changes permitted, and in many other countries only one or a few companies can sell plates. The UK system looks absurd in comparison. To become a number plate supplier here, someone simply pays a £40 one-off fee to the DVLA. There are no background checks and no criminal checks. This has led to a situation where the UK has more than 34,000 suppliers registered as selling number plates with the DVLA. For context, that is four times the number of petrol stations in Britain.
The hon. Member is making an excellent speech, which has reminded me of a conversation I recently had in my constituency. Drivers in the area of Hooe and Plymstock are showing really antisocial behaviour, and one of the police officers I was with mentioned this fact. We were not even talking about how cars are registered to the DVLA, but does she not find extraordinary the number that are registered to Mickey Mouse?
That is absolutely true. Vehicles are registered to Mickey Mouse, or to big organisations’ addresses. There are simply no checks whatsoever on whom people register vehicles to, which means they are doing really dangerous and really antisocial things, and getting away with it.
The Labour Party manifesto committed us to taking back our streets, and reforming the DVLA will help us tackle the racers, fraudsters, drug dealers and dodgy number plate sellers who are making our constituents’ lives a misery. This situation has gone on for too long. Now that the Government are committed to action on this, I hope we can finally catch the ghost plates and the ghost owners on our roads, and make all our roads safer for us all.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this important debate.
I want to keep my contribution brief and focus on the story of just one of my Guildford constituents—although I have had correspondence with many more—which I think really captures why the DVLA is in urgent need of reform. When someone reports a medical condition to the DVLA, they are doing it for the right reasons: they are complying with the law and putting the safety of their fellow road users ahead of their own convenience. But too often, the system does not respond in kind.
My constituent is living with stage 4 lung cancer. Despite being asymptomatic, they responsibly surrendered their licence in August 2024. They did so without hesitation, because they understood their responsibilities and wanted to be a good citizen. Their consultant has since confirmed that they are medically fit to drive. On that basis, they applied to have their licence reinstated in July last year. When I spoke to them last week, nine months later, they were still waiting for a decision—nine months! During that time, they have submitted multiple complaints: one in January; one later that month; and, finally, one in March through the DVLA’s own direct complaints system, which promises a response within 10 days. Not one of those complaints has received a reply. That is not simply a backlog; it is a system that has lost sight of the fact that its administrative processes have real human consequences. While managing a life-limiting illness, my constituent has also had to manage months of uncertainty about when or even whether a decision will be made and the daily restrictions that come from living without a driving licence.
As we have heard, that is not an isolated case. Across the country, constituents are waiting months for medical decisions, often with minimal communication. There is a clear pattern: straightforward cases move quickly, and complex cases—the ones that need the most care and judgment, which are often the most urgent because of the circumstances of the individual—wait the longest. My constituent had no symptoms that would disqualify them from driving, but they have been left in limbo for nine months without explanation.
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The underlying issue is simple: the DVLA is stuck in manual, while the rest of us are on automatic. Medical applications are processed strictly in date order, correspondence with clinicians happens by post, and returned documents then sit in another queue. This is a system designed around administrative convenience, not the human impact.
That brings me to the second part of this debate. If the DVLA is to move beyond processing delays and play a meaningful role in improving road safety, we need to talk about eyesight. The UK’s eyesight testing regime is out of step with other nations and is largely unchanged since 1937. It relies heavily on self-declaration and a basic numberplate test, with no mandatory eyesight checks after passing the driving test. The Government’s road safety strategy suggests introducing mandatory eye tests at licence renewal for drivers over 70. I want to be absolutely clear that this is not about targeting older drivers; vision loss does not follow a special birthday, and focusing solely on age risks undermining public confidence and missing the real issue. If safety is the goal, an age-based approach alone misses the mark.
I have spoken to the hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam)—he could not be in the Chamber this afternoon—who is an optometrist. He told me that he frequently sees patients whose eyesight is far below safe driving standards. He described how some of his patients could not see the board, let alone the letters on it, yet he is unable to inform the DVLA or even those patients’ GP of their inability to see properly. I also met the Association of Optometrists, which welcomed the principle of mandatory testing but warned that limiting it to over-70s is short-sighted. [Laughter.] Thank you.
Vision can deteriorate at any age, so testing should be linked to licence renewal, which currently takes place every 10 years for most drivers. There is a wider opportunity here—eye tests can detect serious conditions such as glaucoma, cataracts, cancer and lupus. Allowing optometrists to share their results digitally with ophthalmology services could reduce pressure on the NHS and allow people to be diagnosed earlier, thereby lessening the impact on their sight, while also improving road safety.
Residents in my constituency of Mid Dorset and North Poole agree. Alan told me that it is not just about reading a number plate at a distance; he raised the issue of reflex testing, and also said that
“It’s essential to read on the move—signposts, hazards and vehicle instrumentation”.
He raised particular concerns about night-time driving, which is not assessed as part of the driving test. Alison welcomed mandatory testing, because she had found that family members who were no longer fit to drive were difficult to persuade to give up their licence. She concluded that without a formal test and a medically trained person making the decision, unsafe drivers would continue to add unnecessary risk to the roads. A 2025 prevention of future deaths report described the current system for enforcing vision standards as “ineffective and unsafe”. While concerns about the impact that extending testing would have on the DVLA’s workload are real, safety has to come first.
I welcome the road safety strategy, which goes some way towards recognising the role of driver licensing in improving safety. However, it fails to address the issue of cognition, or to acknowledge that many people continue to drive because they have no alternative. Given that bus services in rural areas are patchy at best, and without joined-up working between the NHS and the DVLA, alongside full digitisation of the licensing process, serious concerns remain about whether the system is fair and whether the improvements to road safety that we all want to see will be fully realised.
As such, I have a number of questions for the Minister. First, can he update the House on when the long-promised digital medical licensing system will go live, and whether it will include automatic chasing of medical information and real-time status updates for applicants? Secondly, will the Minister confirm whether the system of medical licences and the list of notifiable conditions are under review, given how few cases result in revocation? Thirdly, on the issue of eyesight, how many of the 62 deaths linked to poor vision in the decade to 2023 were actually caused by drivers over 70? Given that 4,000 bus and lorry drivers had their licences revoked for eyesight issues in the past three years, none of whom is likely to have been over 70, why does the strategy focus almost exclusively on older drivers rather than on vision standards?
Finally, I have previously asked in this place whether we can expect a road safety Bill in the next King’s Speech, to turn strategy into reality, but I did not receive an answer. I urge my constituents to respond to the open consultation before 11 May, and I ask the Minister to set out the next steps, including how he is working with NHS colleagues and when this House can expect legislation to genuinely reduce the risks on our roads.
If the DVLA had the ability to check that all those companies were doing the right thing—that they were asking for ownership documents and ID documents when they sold the number plate to someone, and only selling plates that were fully readable and not ghost plates—the situation would be fine, but the DVLA does not do that, and it will never be able to check so large a system.
I have no doubt that most people buying a number plate are doing so for innocent reasons, but it is crystal clear that many people are buying dodgy number plates to make themselves invisible to speed cameras, to avoid paying road charges and to commit serious crimes, and unscrupulous sellers are allowing that to happen. To give an example, in 2025 a young man was murdered in cold blood in Slough, and the police eventually worked out that the killer’s car was using a cloned plate. When the police found the car, it had no plates on, but it had a stash of different registration plates in the back. They found the person who sold the cloned plates, and he was fined £5,500 and removed from the DVLA register for five years, after which time he is perfectly allowed to start selling number plates all over again. There is a live rape case, which I will not go into any detail on, where a driver used a ghost number plate on his vehicle when he committed the alleged offence.
I have heard so many cases of drug dealers using ghost plates to go undetected by ANPR and fraudsters copying other people’s number plates. These dodgy companies sell cloned number plates without a second thought, and law-abiding drivers are left to pick up the pieces as they fight to prove that they are innocent of a crime or appeal against huge financial penalties.
Dodgy number plate sellers are a public scandal waiting to happen. They are the next chapter in the candy shops or dodgy vape shops story. Those businesses are really fronts for money laundering and criminality. Rochdale trading standards has been superb at exposing this. Its work has uncovered links between DVLA-accredited suppliers and individuals with histories of murder, firearms, drugs, robbery and violent assault—you couldn’t make it up. In one of its inspections, it found 20 number plates that had been sold with none of the legally required ID checks or proof of vehicle checks. Almost half of those plates were later linked by the police to serious and organised crime. Rochdale trading standards officers described finding DVLA-registered suppliers operating out of back bedrooms and garden sheds. One supplier was at 33 Smith Street. The next supplier was at 35 Smith Street. I hope I am painting a picture of the serious systemic failings in how the DVLA operates number plate sales in Britain.
With some estimates saying that up to one in 15 of all vehicles on UK roads has some kind of non-compliant plate, we can see the scale of the problem. Some of these suppliers are using ghost materials so routinely that even law-abiding members of the public may be inadvertently buying ghost plates. I urge anyone listening to this debate that if they need to buy a number plate, they should please ensure that the seller asks for their car ownership document and ID. If they do not, that person is buying from an illegal seller who is breaking the law.
Last year, the all-party parliamentary group for transport safety carried out an inquiry into registration plates and made 10 recommendations, all of which I believe the Government should implement. They include banning the use of 3D and 4D plates, introducing background checks on suppliers and restricting the number of licensed sellers. I would like to praise the Government for committing to action on this in the road safety strategy, and in particular I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who has been absolutely great. However, can the Minister update us on when he hopes some of these system changes will be made to tighten up the number plate system? In particular, will he ask the DVLA what is going on with banning 3D and 4D plates, which are the vast majority of ghost plates, and will he update us on when the next Department for Transport roadside survey will take place, because the last one was in 2023?
I will now move on to the second topic that I am concerned about: vehicle registered keeper information. Even if a driver has a fully compliant number plate, it is still possible for them to cheat the rules and become a ghost on the roads in another way. All cars should have a registered keeper listed with the DLVA but, unfortunately, lax rules mean that many cars do not have, and their owners are therefore completely untraceable. Think about it: with hit and runs, excessive speeding and running red lights, even when a vehicle gets caught on camera doing any of those things, if the DVLA has no information about who owns the vehicle, there is no way to hold those people to account.
According to the DVLA, 7% of vehicles have no registered keeper, and it argues that the majority of them are in the motor trade, but I just do not think that is true, and I have a personal anecdote to explain why. Last summer, I was out with the roads policing team in West Brom, and the ANPR monitor in the police car kept dinging every 30 seconds. I asked the officer, “What is setting off the ANPR?” and the officer said, “Those are cars with no registered keeper.”
Today, The Guardian has covered a shocking freedom of information request made by the British Parking Association to the DVLA. When a car has no registered keeper or it has an outdated or incorrect keeper address, the DVLA sometimes registers the vehicle to its own address. The DVLA has admitted in answer to this FOI request that, at the latest count, 18,260 vehicles are currently registered to its own office in Swansea.
The rise of these ghost owners undermines our ability to enforce the rules of our roads, and it is not just a safety risk. I spoke to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau about the rise in the number of collisions when one party cannot be traced because the vehicle has no registered keeper, the number plate is fake or a ghost plate, or the driver raced away. We all pay a premium on our insurance to cover the costs when uninsured or untraceable drivers are involved in a collision, and that adds up to £50 on the insurance premiums of all of us every year.
There is also a big cost, or rather a big loss, to the public sector through this issue. I feel the pain as much as anyone does when I get slapped with a parking ticket when I think I have done the right thing, or I get a fine for driving down the wrong road. However, some people are flouting the rules constantly, and they are getting away with it by having a car with no registered keeper, or registering with a NIP—notice of impending prosecution—farm so their fine gets sent to a totally anonymous post office box and the fine does not get passed on.
Since I started doing this work, I have realised how much of an issue unpaid fines are. In Hackney, for example, a single individual owes the council £250,000. I recently asked my council, Sandwell, how much it was owed, and I was shocked to discover that almost one third of penalty charge notices had gone unpaid since last April, equating to £1.2 million. Can hon. Members imagine what that money could have been spent on?
I will finish because I know other Members want to speak. A great many good people work in the DVLA, as the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole mentioned, and I know that because I have spoken to lots of them. What is failing here is the system, including how we sell the very plates that identify all our vehicles, and how we regulate and monitor who actually owns the cars on our roads. I know the DVLA has a lot on, but this is a very serious problem, and there is huge opportunity to grasp here, to fix the system for the future.
The DVLA’s target is to resolve most medical cases in 50 days, but even if the target was met consistently—we know it is not—we should really be asking whether 50 days is an acceptable length of time for someone’s independence to be put on hold. The impact is real: people cannot get to work, they miss medical appointments, they lose their independence, and they become isolated from support networks that they rely on. Thankfully, my constituent can use public transport, but in so many Members’ constituencies, particularly the rural ones, a driving licence is not a luxury but a lifeline.
The strain on the system is only going to increase. The proposed introduction of eye testing for drivers over 70 may be sensible for road safety, but it will only increase the volume of medical assessments that we already know the DVLA is not coping with processing. How will it cope when it is already failing so many?
Reform is not optional, and it is urgent for my constituent and for all our constituents who are contacting us on a daily basis. I am afraid that digitisation alone will not fix this. What we need alongside digitisation is far more basic: clear decision-making timelines, reliable communication with applicants, and better co-ordination between the DVLA and the NHS and other agencies so that medical evidence can be promptly assessed. I hope the Minister will be able to set out a clear timeline for reform so that I can reassure my constituents, and in particular the constituent I have mentioned today. If we ask people to follow the rules and they put other people before themselves in surrendering their licence, the state has a duty to respond promptly and proportionately.