DVLA - terrible at data management

Mr Mustard made a Freedom of Information request to DVLA. He did this because a lady, let us call her Jayne, purchased a used car, and posted in the V5C with her complete and accurate address. Mr Mustard has a copy of what was sent to DVLA. Somehow her car got registered to a non-existent address in Mansfield, a town she has no connection with and has never visited.

Let us suppose the motorist lived at 4 Shakespeare Court, 111 Woodville Road, Barnet EN5 4LX (Mr Mustard's former address by way of illustration as he can't use the actual one for Jayne).

Using the Royal Mail postcode checker we can see the following:

Mr Mustard surmises that because the flats had a block name which precedes the street number, blocks don't come up when you search using the DVLA's method. Staff also can't be expected to know every location. There are 1.3 million postcodes and goodness knows how many blocks of flats.

Searching by road name alone brings up the correct address as the fifth choice. An under strain or slapdash DVLA employee might select the wrong one.

It is only by inputting the complete postcode, a maximum of 8 digits, that you can be sure of getting the correct locale.

The system that the DVLA are employing is more likely to end up in error with their partial matching method, which looks to have a huge flaw within in.

Mr Mustard is going to ask a follow up question to test his hypothesis.

In Jayne's case, she correctly wrote on the form an address in London N2, which is a flat in a block which block has a street number. Somehow, perhaps because of the name of the block, her car was registered in Mansfield.

What is worse is that it was registered at an address which doesn't even exist. Using a different address as an example. If the physical address used was 12 Regina Court, West End Lane the postcode used was for 12 Regina Court Lane which did exist but still wasn't Jayne's address and gave the postman a delivery problem.

The first she knew of the PCNs was when the bailiff knocked on her actual front door and demanded £2,000 at the risk of having her car removed and so she paid up even though she had received nothing at all in the post. It has taken Mr Mustard 3 months to ascertain the cause of the problem, which is one he hadn't ever seen before. He much prefers to keep PCNs out of the hands of bailiffs. It isn't clear that the bailiff had a valid warrant as it may have still had the out of date (and obviously invalid) Mansfield address on it. That is a blog for another day.

Some of you might have noticed that you had purchased a car but not received the 'logbook' from DVLA a month later, others wouldn't. As you don't need it unless you travel abroad or decide to sell your vehicle Mr Mustard thinks the non arrival is an entirely understandable oversight. If you buy a used car, make a note for a month later to chase up the missing registration document ('logbook').

Having watched much of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry Mr Mustard is no longer shocked by the incompetence at high levels in large organisations but DVLA's data processing disaster method is of the same ilk. He has seen complaints on the internet in which a resident complains that an unknown person has registered a vehicle at their address. The suspected rogue clearly isn't always a scam artist but could be the DVLA.

The end, for now.

OCR ANPR failure

Here are the final 3 letters on a number plate. The very first vehicle registration in the UK was 'A1' so more correctly the plates were registration plates but have been called number plates for all of Mr Mustard's life.

Sorry it is slightly blurred, it had to be blown up a bit, from this.

The vehicle in question was parked in a resident bay with 6 months still remaining on the permit. The owner was surprised to be given a PCN for not having a permit. It is a PCN that is easily defeated as the car in question on the PCN isn't the one that is parked.

Mr Mustard has though made an informal challenge (the one you make in response to a PCN placed on the car) as if he doesn't the owner of the vehicle which has the plate which was erroneously selected will receive a Notice to Owner in a month or so's time and have the bother of dealing with a demand that is wrong (which becomes legally payable if you don't fight it).

The vehicle which was parked ends with the letters NVG but the PCN has been issued to NVC. This is an error which a traffic warden in a hurry could make but given that they supposedly observed the car for 6 minutes (Mr Mustard suspects they didn't, they checked the whole row of parked cars which took 6 minutes) this is a human error which seems unlikely to have been made.

More likely in Mr Mustard's eyes is that the plastic capped screw which holds the number plate on the car, as fitted by the garage, not by some fool trying to turn two ones (11) into a H to make a name, just happens to be over the horizontal bar of the G which makes it, if you don't look carefully, appear more like a C. The back of the car, was clear.

A traffic warden always notes that they checked all windows (for notes and permits) so had to walk past the rear number plate.

Having eliminated the possibility of human error what Mr Mustard thinks is more likely is that the traffic warden was using computerised equipment which reads number plates (Barnet experimented with these but didn't persist, he thinks) and in this case got it wrong. One presumes that the little computer then looks up the vehicle concerned on the DVLA database and it would have disclosed that the vehicle in question was a blue Toyota not the white Toyota (a different model) which was parked there. It is all very well to use technology to assist you in your work but it shouldn't and can't, take the place of a person's judgment. The PCN must contain a statement of what the Traffic Warden believes - if you don't look at the number plate on the equipment and compare it to reality, there is no basis of belief.

End.