Safe Speed Forums

At last they finally allowed my petition. and not my spelling mistake
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/DVLAlicence/

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to DVLA return
original driving licences .

Most people are aware that upon renewing their driving licence
that catagories have mysteriously disappeared from their
licence, We the publice pay a fee for our licence therefore i
would like to see our old out of date licences returned to the
owner to avoid mistakes being made by the DVLA

Thanks for submitting your petition.

-- the ePetitions team

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nigel_bytes

Im still waiting for a response from this petition but it seems MCN beat me to it ?
MCN ends lost licence chaos
By Steve Farrell -
General news
08 December 2009 10:07


MCN has ensured no more motorcyclists need lose their licence to DVLA cock-ups by rewriting the government agency’s policy on licence renewals.

DVLA bosses have agreed to immediately implement an MCN proposal that old licences be returned to riders when replacements are issued.

It means that if motorcycle entitlement is missing from the new licence, riders will have the old one to prove it.

We put the proposal forward in August after hearing hundreds of reports of DVLA deleting people’s motorcycle entitlement in a saga which spanned years.

Rider’s who’ve had to take a motorcycle test from scratch include Donington Park chief executive Simon Gillett and a police technician who’d been riding force bikes for over a decade.

Our proposal won the backing of the RAC, AA, MPs and many of you who signed a petition. Because it has been adopted, no-one who has genuinely had a motorcycle licence in the past need ever retake their test.

DVLA’s decision follows a consultation with motorcycle groups, the police and MCN.

Our original proposal was that old licences be returned with the corner cut off. DVLA has agreed instead to return them with a hole punched in the photograph.

The agency was concerned some people may try to pass the old licence off as a current one by covering the corner with a finger while showing it to police.

Paper licences will be returned with ‘cancelled’ stamped on them.

The new procedure will apply whenever any licence holders apply for a replacement licence, for example because their address has changed or because their photocard licence has expired.

All they must to do to get the old one back is include a stamped self-addressed envelope with the application and a note asking for it to be returned. The change comes into effect immediately.

DVLA’s decision was announced today by the agency’s corporate affairs director David Evans.

He said: “If you put a stamped address envelope in with your application and ask us to return your old licence, we’ll return it to you with a hole punched through the photograph on it.

"If you send the paper counterpart in, we’ll send that back with ‘cancelled’ stamped on it.”

The stamped self-addressed envelope is needed because old licences are processed at a different DVLA office to the one which issues replacements.

Evans said licence holders who had changed address could alternatively keep their old licence until the new one arrived if they did the application on the agency’s website.

For a full report on this, get next week’s MCN, on sale December 16
http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/News/ ... %20%281%29

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nigel_bytes

Wouldn't keeping a copy of your old licence be enough?

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

i don't think so. I saw something on watchdog about this a few months ago. Apparantly this government believes 90% of British motorists are hardened criminals (probably the ones that exceed speed limits... ) so don't accept a photocopy as evidence.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Whether we drive a car or ride a motorcycle, the DVLA keeps records on 43 million of us in the UK. The DVLA know where we live, when we got our licence and most importantly they know what we're entitled to drive - or do they?

Had to retake motorbike test
Jon Jones has been riding motorbikes for more than 30 years, passing his motorcycling test in 1981. He has ridden across Europe six times, competed in speedway and motocross since the age of 10 and covered more than 100,000 miles on his bike. Regardless of this, the DVLA told him he needed to retake his motorbike test.

Jon had a licence that allowed him to drive a car and a motorcycle. When he sent his licence to the DVLA to update his details, the DVLA returned it without his motorcycle entitlement.

Without his motorcycle entitlement, Jon was not legally allowed to ride his motorcycle. When Jon phoned the DVLA, it told him it had no record that he'd ever had a motorbike licence at all.

The DVLA told Jon that he would have to provide a copy of his pass certificate from when he passed his exam 28 years ago or start all over again and retake the motorcycle tests.

Paying out more money
With no option but to take the tests again, Jon had to book time off work, and pay for an instructor as well as the costs of the tests.

Watchdog covered a similar story in 2005 and Dave Hancock of the DVLA visited us in the studio. Back then, he told us that the DVLA "take it very seriously" and wanted to "work with customers to make sure the entitlement that appears on their licence is in fact correct for the test they've taken."

Jan Shepperd says the DVLA also stripped her of her motorbike licence. Jan sent her licence back to the DVLA to change her name because she got married. When the DVLA returned it, the motorcycling entitlement had been removed. Jan was also told to prove her case by sending in her original pass certificates.

"They were asking me for proof for the certificates that I'd sent in, but you had to send the original so therefore I have no proof of that." Jan told us.

When Jan rang the DVLA, they agreed she'd passed her test and could even tell her when. However they still insisted she'd never had a licence.

One customer feels disgusted
"I feel disgusted really. I'm saying one thing and they're saying I'm lying. How do you fight a government agency when I'm just one person on my own?"

The DVLA doesn't just wipe motorbike licences from their records, sometimes it invents them. Late last year Oliver Dunn noticed that when he sent his licence to the DVLA to update his address, they removed his entitlement to drive a car - and replaced it with the category A motorcycle entitlement.

Oliver told us that, despite never even having sat on a motorbike, "according to the DVLA he'd had a bike licence for 15 years."

Fortunately, Oliver was able to track down his old driving instructor, who agreed to sign an affidavit, to prove to the DVLA that he'd actually had a car driver's licence for the past 15 years.

DVLA response
When Watchdog contacted the DVLA it said: "It is vital that the DVLA protects the safety of road users and pedestrians by ensuring that only people who can prove they have passed the relevant driving test are allowed to drive on our roads.

"Errors are extremely rare - a recent check of 1,000 motorcyclists licence transactions showed that 100 per cent were completed correctly - but we thoroughly investigate all cases reported to us and do everything we can to resolve them."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/200 ... itlem.html

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nigel_bytes

I meant an officially notarised copy. But more expense.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

IIRC an officially stamped by the DVLA copy was rejected. The rider had gone to his local DVLA office and had the entitlement confirmed by them before sending it off to be changed. It still came back minus the bike entitlement and was rejected when a copy was sent with this error pointed out.

"Computer says no"