Inside the DVLA call centre as millions are hit by backlogs

She smiles and swivels on her chair. “Or if someone was ringing me I’d be scrambling to find the remote, like oh my God I need to turn this down.”

Courtney describes how over the past two years many staff at the DVLA have been unable to do their jobs properly. With strict Covid safety rules at the agency’s offices in Swansea, there have not been enough people on site to open and process all of the 60,000 pieces of mail that it receives every day quickly enough. Crates of post have built up, including licence application and renewal forms and drivers’ original proof of identity documents such as passports.

The DVLA has about 6,200 staff. On an average day about 4,500 of them are usually meant to be working, with others on scheduled days off, holidays, not working because they do part-time hours, or on other forms of planned leave.

Out of the 4,500 or so who are scheduled to work on a typical day, during the pandemic usually less than half have been on site. Many of the others have not had remote access to the DVLA’s computer systems so have not been working properly, or at all, from home.

Drivers are so angry about the extraordinary delays at the DVLA that call centre staff coming into the offices and dealing with the influx of inquiries have sometimes been allowed to work effectively part-time hours. At times they have been on a week-on, week-off rota, to help them cope with the calls and avoid them “burning out,” Courtney said.

I applied for a job as a call handler for the DVLA after reading repeated claims from drivers that they have had their lives on hold because of delays in processing their applications for new or renewed licences.

One of the first things that became apparent during my training in February was that the Covid safety rules were incredibly strict, with very few people working on site.

Inside the DVLA’s main call centre, which is usually packed with call handlers and loud with the noise of them helping thousands of drivers every day, there were rows and rows of empty chairs and black screens.

There were restrictions on the number of staff in each room, wide spaces between employees’ desks and high perspex screens. Staff were told not to talk face to face without a screen between them. In the main call centre there was a one-way walking system, as well as free lateral flow testing and temperature checks on site.

The rules were in place even though from January 28 in Wales the law was no longer that people should work from home if possible. Even in restaurants by this point there were no restrictions on meeting people indoors and the 2m distancing rule had been scrapped. Similar rules had not been in place in England for months.

• Listen to Stories of our times: Inside the crisis at the DVLA

My training at the DVLA was taken by three managers. They explained how during the pandemic the agency had built up an enormous backlog of cases. The size of the backlog has fluctuated, peaking at 1.6 million cases in September. It has since dropped to about 945,000 cases. In normal times the agency has about 400,000 live cases being processed.

Internal staffing figures showed that out of the government agency’s 6,200 workers an average of between about 2,000 and 2,200 have been on site each day. The others have been on scheduled days off or at home, but many have been unable to work remotely.

There are two main reasons DVLA staff have struggled to work from home. The first is that so many driver applications have to be sent by post, so forms and ID documents have to be processed on site.

Courtney, the DVLA trainer, said many staff did not have access to work systems from home

Courtney explained to the newly hired civil servants how a mistake had exacerbated this issue. “The problem that they made right at the beginning of the pandemic, the applications were coming in, they get loaded onto big trolleys,” she said. “But they put the oldest ones in the corner which then filled up with all the new ones outside.” She pointed to the corner of the room. “They couldn’t get to the old ones.”

The manager said even the call centre staff regularly coming to work at the office during the pandemic had often been given paid days off when there had been no space for them to come in, instead of being asked to work from home.

“I think it started the end of December we were having a day off a week,” she said to the trainees. “If you couldn’t work from home then you would just get given the day off for special paid leave. They were doing a week on and week off as well at one point, that was right at the beginning of the pandemic.” She said staff were given weeks off at a time to give them “a breather” because callers were becoming angrier, making the job more stressful.

Record backlogs in driver applications have affected millions of people

GETTY IMAGES

As paper applications have been piling up at the offices, many staff at home have also been unable to help drivers who are becoming increasingly upset about the delays and the impact on their lives. The DVLA managers said some staff have not had access to work systems from home for almost two years.

Britain’s centralised drivers’ licensing system was set up in Swansea in the late 1960s under Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Staff working there now described trying to log on from home as a “nightmare” and the work systems as “prehistoric”. The main system used by DVLA call handlers is called D90 and looks like teletext. The 90 refers to the year it was first installed — in 1990.

Many staff have not been able to log on to the system from home because of concerns about remote access to drivers’ sensitive personal information. This has meant far fewer call handlers being able to help drivers who phone the DVLA asking for updates on their cases.

Every day drivers write online complaints to the DVLA about the extraordinary delays in processing their applications. Some told of not being able to visit elderly parents abroad and of missing family funerals because of delays in returning passports.

During training recruits were repeatedly told to tell drivers that they should expect to wait between six and ten weeks for applications to be processed during the pandemic, even though hundreds of thousands of people are waiting longer than this. Courtney said call handlers had been instructed to continue saying this to customers by the government, even though it would often be untrue.

Asked why they could not be honest with callers who had to wait longer, she said: “The minister for DVLA, so the actual person that’s in parliament that basically rules what we do, they won’t let us change it.”

Central to the problems at the DVLA has been a battle between bosses and the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents civil servants at the agency. The union has argued that the offices have not been safe for workers to be on site, putting pressure on the agency to keep numbers as low as possible. It said the DVLA had “rushed staff back into work to deal with backlogs” towards the end of 2020, resulting in Public Health Wales declaring an outbreak at the offices.

Sarah Evans, chairwoman of the branch, told MPs on the transport select committee in July that there were “massive safety concerns within the agency”. The union said there had been more than 2,200 reported cases of Covid among staff at the DVLA in Swansea and this was the highest number in any one workplace in the UK, although the DVLA said rates had always matched those in the local area.

The union has also called for the DVLA to do more to facilitate home working, saying that the DVLA’s technology was “substandard” and “meant most staff could do little or no work” from home at the beginning of the pandemic.

In April last year members went on strike over the issue. In total there were 58 days of industrial action over almost six months. More than 1,000 DVLA staff were on strike on some days and the industrial action added a reported 400,000 cases to the DVLA’s backlog.

In November the union balloted its members for further strikes but support had waned. Fewer than 40 per cent voted so the legal threshold for industrial action of 50 per cent turnout was not passed.

Last summer the union appeared to have reached a peace deal with DVLA bosses but it was abandoned. In June Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, told parliament millions had been spent making the DVLA offices Covid-safe, adding: “What we need to know is why the demands then switched to demands about pay and demands about holiday.”

During my time at the DVLA I joined the union and found a backlash among some members, particularly those who had worked in the offices throughout the pandemic. On the DVLA union branch’s closed Facebook page, one member wrote: “Do you not realise how demoralising this is to staff who have worked in the office throughout the pandemic and see people off on full pay ... Even now some are still off and are not doing any work yet they are out and about mingling with others and going on holiday but cannot come into work. This is why you lost the ballot for more strike action, people are fed up of it.”

My experience was that the Covid rules at the DVLA’s offices in Swansea were extremely strict and more akin to rules in other offices at the height of the pandemic in 2020.

Staffing figures showed that in the first months of the pandemic 3,400 were put on paid special leave without having to work at all. By that summer there were still almost 2,000 staff on paid special leave and in nine of the past 24 months more that 500 staff have officially not been working, either because they were on paid leave or on strike.

The latest staffing figures I saw from January 17 showed there had been an increase in employees working from home, up to 2,598 by this point, with 41 staff still on Covid-related special leave. The DVLA said this had since fallen to 14 people. However, there were still only about 2,000 staff on site.

In November 62 cross-party MPs wrote a letter to Shapps raising concerns about their constituents’ problems with the DVLA, with some facing the prospect of losing their jobs and being unable to go to family funerals abroad because of the backlogs.

Sarah Olney MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for transport, organised the letter. In light of the Times investigation, she said: “It seems wrong to me that they’re both having very draconian restrictions on how many people are in the office and not mitigating that by making better arrangements for people to work from elsewhere. To have both is not providing an acceptable level of service that the British public expect.”

The PCS union said the dispute was “entirely justified” given the Covid outbreak at the DVLA offices. A spokesman said: “PCS members felt measures should have been in place to support more staff working from home to avoid further risk of catching Covid in the workplace.”

The DVLA said it had spent more than £6 million on Covid safety measures and backlogs were badly affected by strikes, with them having previously returned to normal processing times by late 2020.

It said placing crates in the corner of a room had not affected waiting times, it processed 97 per cent of its applications digitally, online services have worked well throughout, there were no longer delays for bus and lorry drivers and it aimed to be back to normal processing times by the end of May, with more staff hired at new customer service sites. The agency denied misleading drivers about application delays and said it openly published waiting times online.

The DVLA said some staff could not work from home due to access to personal information rather than technological problems. A spokesman said: “We take the allegations made extremely seriously and are urgently investigating. These claims are not representative of the hardworking culture in DVLA.”

She is the hardline union leader who has been fighting for civil servants at the DVLA not to have to go to the office.

But just days after submitting her latest set of demands to bosses to “keep staff safe” from the coronavirus, Sarah Evans was planning a holiday to New York.

“Can anyone recommend a hotel in NYC that’s central to everything?” she asked her friends on Facebook on January 23. “Going round in circles looking so want personal recommendations please.”

Sarah Evans, chairwoman of the PCS union branch at the DVLA

Evans is the chairwoman of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union branch at the DVLA. Its members have gone on strike for 58 days over the past year, adding a reported 400,000 cases to the DVLA’s backlog of drivers waiting for licence applications, renewals and ID documents to be processed.

At the time she was asking friends for holiday tips, the DVLA had implemented a four-day working week for staff at its offices in Swansea following pressure from the union. The new rota meant further minimising the reduced numbers on site during the spread of the Omicron variant. Many staff members on the new rota were not expected to work at all on their one day a week at home.

Evans, who is employed by the DVLA rather than by the union, has been vocal throughout the pandemic with claims that the DVLA offices have not been a safe place to work. In July she gave evidence to MPs on the transport select committee, saying there were “massive safety concerns within the agency” and that “staff safety and staff concerns are not being listened to”.

In March last year, as the union prepared to go on strike over Covid safety fears, Evans wrote to members in a private Facebook group that despite not working in the offices at the time, she had to be convinced not to join them on the picket line. The union had agreed that only staff working on site would go on strike.

“I am currently home ... I am therefore in the group of people who are not being asked to strike,” she wrote. “I had not even thought about the idea of not striking and it didn’t even enter my thoughts that I wouldn’t be. PCS have, however, rightly said that the rules around the strike apply to all, myself included.”

When giving evidence to MPs a few months later, she explained that she could not work from home. “People who do my job at my grade are stopped from having this access remotely, which means that we have to be on site. If I was allowed to do my job at home ... it would free up space in the agency to spread out more staff to open the backlogs of mail,” she said.

Evans, who is married and has children, is a rugby fan and has written online about her array of pets, including parrots, stick insects and a scorpion. She works in the DVLA’s Drivers Medical department and is understood not to get any additional money for her voluntary role leading the union branch at the DVLA.

The PCS, responding on behalf of itself and Evans, said there had been at least 2,277 reported cases among staff at the DVLA in Swansea and this was the highest number of any workplace in Britain, and that it had called for the agency to do more to allow workers to work from home. It said the DVLA “rushed staff back into work to deal with backlogs” towards the end of 2020, resulting in Public Health Wales declaring an outbreak at the offices. The DVLA said its Covid rates have matched those in the local community.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS union general secretary, said: ‘’PCS members employed by DVLA were extremely brave to have stood up for their safety in the way that they did. Taking strike action is always a last resort for any worker, but our members felt they were faced with no other choice to protect their own health and that of their families and communities during the pandemic. The dispute was entirely justified given the huge Covid outbreak in the offices’’.

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