Top staff at the DVLA have received bonuses totalling more than £2m - despite the organisation apologising earlier this year for long delays in processing paper driving licence applications. It's understood these extra payments have been given whilst the government agency still has a huge backlog in cases of more than 300,000 applications, although the Swansea-based DVLA has said turnaround times on applications are now at normal levels.
According to the Daily Express, Department for Transport records show a whopping £2,163,414 was paid in "non-consolidated bonuses" to staff at the Agency for the financial year, 2021 to 2022. The newspaper said this was despite a huge reported backlog of 1.2m delayed applications earlier in the pandemic - and also follows claims earlier this year that thousands of staff were paid their full wages at the Agency despite not completing any work while based at home.
Commenting on the staff bonuses, Conservative MP David Jones described the situation as "outrageous". "The perception of the DVLA is at rock bottom," he said. "There are people across the country bitterly inconvenienced. If we were talking about payments to MPs, the country would be up in arms. The country will also be up in arms that £2 million of bonuses are being handed out to people who have let them down so badly." You can get more Swansea news and other story updates by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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A spokesperson for the DVLA defended the bonuses and said: "Our staff have worked incredibly hard to help keep the country moving throughout the pandemic and, despite a number of issues including coordinated industrial action, our services are operating within normal turnaround times. Paper applications are being processed within three to four weeks."
News of the bonuses comes two months after the Agency was forced to respond to claims made in The Times that 3,400 of its 6,200 staff were sent home during the first lockdown and placed on "paid special leave" - allowing them to be paid fully despite not having to work at all. You can read The Times investigation in full here and for more stories about the DVLA, go here.
The newspaper also claimed that in nine months of the past two years, there had been more than 500 members of staff officially declared as not working, because they were either on strike or on paid special leave. An undercover reporter for the newspaper worked for the DVLA in February, 2022 and found that millions of drivers had been affected by a massive backlog on licence applications and renewals.
Some members of staff reportedly said they had spent many working days in bed watching their favourite television programmes and not doing any work, whilst members of staff who had been working said they felt frustrated that their colleagues who claimed to be too vulnerable to go into the office were "not doing any work yet they are out and about mingling with others and going on holiday".
But The DVLA told WalesOnline at the time the allegations did not reflect the hard-working demeanour of staff members at the DVLA throughout the pandemic. Whilst there was still a substantial backlog on applications in March, 2022, the Agency said at the time that it intended to have the application waiting times "back to normal" from around May, 2022, for standard driving licences, and from September, 2022, for applications involving medical forms. Y ou can read the DVLA's full comment, and our full report, in a previous article here.
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