Recent enhancements to the DVLA’s Access to Driver Data (ADD) service has seen new customers sign up to its licence checking solution.

It allows fleet customers with the driver’s explicit consent, to retrieve driving record details when queried with a valid driver licence number. The retrieved record will contain details about a person’s entitlement to drive as well as any endorsements which may exist on their record.

The service, which is available 24 hours a day, is fully responsive – providing real time data, enabling fleet customers to validate licences and schedule checks on an ongoing basis, says the DVLA.

Since it launched in June 2015, there have been more than 100 enhancements to the ADD service.

With Certificate of Professional Competency and Tachograph data now available through this system, the DVLA says that it ensures that fleet driver services are able to access live and up-to-date data on drivers that may be used in conjunction with the licence.

DVLA has reduced the cost per enquiry by more than 50%, with set-up charges and annual line rental costs reducing for new users by approximately 50% since the introduction of ADD. This saving for the customer is partly down to efficiencies made possible by DVLA bringing IT in-house as part of its IT transformation work, it says.

In March this year, the service received more than 300,000 requests with an average response time of 0.075 seconds.

Applied Driving Techniques recently came on board as a new customer of the ADD service. A provider of driver training and risk assessments to the fleet industry, with predicted volumes of up to 60,000 requests per year, it is already seeing the benefits.

Andy Phillips of Applied Driving Techniques said: “Since using the DVLA’s ADD service we have seen a reduction in costs, reduction in admin time, improved reporting and improvements to end user customer satisfaction.

“The DVLA’s ADD service offers a more streamlined, user-friendly process for our customers. We can get instant results that are accurate and meaningful. We can now build a report tailored to users’ needs. This is something our customers have been asking for and we are very happy to be able to deliver.”

The DVLA also offers a free ‘View Driving Licence’ online service which allows drivers to view their own driving licence record.

As part of this the ‘Share Driving Licence’ service enables individuals to generate a code to pass to hire companies or employers, allowing them to view the record with their explicit consent. To protect an individual’s privacy each code can only be used once and it will expire after 21 days.

This free online service has proved popular with drivers and corporate customers, achieving volumes of over 16 million requests in the past 12 months, resulting in almost 8 million check codes being generated. 

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