Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

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The DVLA's logo.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (the DVLA) (Welsh: Asiantaeth Trwyddedu Gyrwyr a Cherbydau) is the organisation of UK Government responsible for maintaining a database of drivers and vehicles in Great Britain; its counterpart in Northern Ireland is Driver and Vehicle Licensing Northern Ireland (DVLNI). The agency issues driving licences, organises collection of vehicle excise duty (also known as road tax and road fund license) and sells "cherished marks" (private number plates).

They are an executive agency of the Department for Transport and they are directly responsible to the Minister of State, one of the department's ministerial team. The current Minister is Dr Stephen Ladyman, MP. The current Chief Executive of the agency is Clive Bennett, appointed in 2000.^[1]

The DVLA is based in Swansea, south Wales, with a prominent 18 storey computer centre building in Clase and offices in Swansea Vale. It was previously known as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre (DVLC). The agency also has a network of offices around Great Britain, known as the Local Office Directorate.

[edit] DVLA database

Data held by DVLA is used in many ways. For example, by the DVLA itself, to identify "untaxed" vehicles, and also by outside agencies; cars caught entering central London without paying the congestion charge or driving too fast on a road with speed cameras are matched to their owners using the DVLA database. In 2004 the DVLA made the vehicle database available to the private sector (and any person who can demonstrate a legitimate need for the data). This controversial move has been widely criticised in the UK press and in parliament as being a threat to privacy.

The current DVLA database of vehicles was built by EDS under a £5 million contract signed in 1996, with a planned implementation date on October 1998, though actual implementation was delayed by a year. It uses a client-server architecture and uses the vehicle identification number, rather than the registration plate, as the primary key to track vehicles, eliminating the possibility of having multiple registrations for a single vehicle, a scam known as ghosting. However the accuracy of the data held remains a continuing problem.

The database of drivers, developed in conjunction with the Police Information Technology Organisation and delivered in March 2002, enables the police to verify drivers' licences via the Police National Computer, and holds details of around 20 million photocard driving licences. This is an implementation of an automatic number plate recognition system.