Directors Report

Directors' report

On 2 April 2010, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) celebrated 20 years as an Executive Agency of the Department for Transport (DfT). DVLA (previously the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre (DVLC) opened for business over forty years ago. Since then, the Agency has been through a radical process of change, moving away from a paper based organisation to a modern and highly efficient electronic business, providing online services to customers.

Our people

At the end of March 2011 the Agency was employing 5,561.3 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff. The majority of staff are based in Swansea, but the Agency has 39 local offices with over 1,222.8 FTE staff working for the local network.

Our main responsibilities include:

maintaining over 44 million current driver records and 36 million current vehicle records, handling around 200 million customer interactions each year as a result
collecting over £5.7 billion of Vehicle Excise Duty (VED)
through enforcement action, collecting in excess of £100 million in additional VED
supporting the police and intelligence authorities in dealing with crime.

We also:

lead the way in government in providing electronic service channels to our customers drawing on public sector best practice to make such transactions easier and more secure
seek out opportunities to work in partnership with other government agencies and industry representatives to make our activity more effective and efficient
contribute to the Government sustainable development (SD) agenda by reducing carbon emissions, energy use and waste.

Our vision is:

To be a modern, highly efficient organisation, providing complete, accurate and up to date information and services that fully meet customer and stakeholder requirements.

Our key purpose:

Is to keep complete, accurate registers of drivers and vehicles, and make them as accessible and as flexible as possible to those who have the rights to use them.

These registers underpin action by DVLA, the Police and others to keep road users safe and ensure that the law is respected and observed, allow us to collect VED effectively and can be used to deliver other government initiatives such as traffic management and reducing carbon emissions.

DVLA governance

DVLA Executive Board and Non-Executive Directors

A full account of DVLA’s governance procedures are detailed in our Statement on Internal Control. A brief overview of the building blocks of Agency governance is as follows:

DVLA is one of the Executive Agencies sponsored by the Department for Transport (DfT) and plays an integral part in the corporate processes of assurance and risk management.
The Agency Accounting Officer/Chief Executive chairs an Executive Board (EB) of five Executive Directors and two Non-Executive Directors. The EB meets monthly to review and manage operation performance towards milestones and strategic direction and the progress of the Change Portfolio against its milestones.
Executive Directors agree personal performance contracts and staff working for each Executive Director are set personal objectives. Performance is formally reviewed both mid-year and end of year with documented evidence of what is delivered.
The Accounting Officer’s responsibilities are to safeguard public money and assets. To fulfil these responsibilities, the Accounting Officer is supported by risk management and an audit programme within the Agency, reporting to an Audit Committee of the two Non-Executive Directors and senior representatives from our sponsor department. The Chief Executive and Finance and Strategy Director attend this committee as observers.

Risk management

DVLA’s risk management function is structured to take account of the internal governance structure and external environment to ensure DVLA can deliver its primary purpose and key performance measures. Risk management helps protect DVLA’s reputation as a highly effective and efficient provider of services to customers and stakeholders. For more information see the Statement on internal control.

Disclosure of information to auditors

In so far as the Accounting Officer (AO) is aware, there is no relevant audit information of which the auditors are unaware and the AO has taken all steps that he ought to have taken to make himself aware of any relevant audit information and to establish that the Agency auditors are aware of this information.

The purpose of this document

This Annual Report and Accounts should be read in conjunction with the DVLA Business Plan 2010-11. This document sets out our performance and achievements for 2010-11. This year, we have adopted a different approach to presenting our documents and are treating the internet as our primary way of presenting both the Business Plan 2011-12 and our Annual Report and Accounts 2010-11. We are updating our Business Plan on the internet monthly and quarterly to show progress to date, entirely in line with the Governments Transparency Agenda. As a result, both documents on the website benefit from additional navigation tools to make them more accessible and understandable for our stakeholders and the public. In addition, this has reduced costs for the Agency whilst widening the understanding of what we do. We would welcome feedback and suggestions to improve this new approach through our website. For more information visit http://www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/publications.aspx

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