The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is the UK Government organization, which is responsible for gathering and maintaining a database of vehicles and drivers and in Great Britain. The same agency in Northern Ireland is called the Driver & Vehicle Agency (DVA).

DVLA Information

DVLA organizes and controls collection of vehicle duty (road fund licence and road tax), issues driving licenses, and sells private number plates. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is an executive agency of the Department for Transport. The Minister of State directly controls its activity.

The main office of the DVLA is located in Swansea, South Wales. It has a huge 16-store building in Swansea Vale. The organization also has a wide network of local offices across all the Great Britain. This network is known as the Local Office Network.

Recently DVLA has introduced Electronic Vehicle Licensing (EVL) and now drivers are able to pay their vehicle excise duty by phone or even online. Surely they still are able to pay taxes for their vehicles via ordinary mailing.

The huge vehicle database which is possessed by the DVLA is used in many different ways. Authorities use it to find vehicles, which drivers haven’t paid taxes for; other state agencies use it to identify owners of cars who enter central London without paying the special charge; the police use it to catch drivers who break the rules and shot by street cameras (DVLA database helps them to match cars and their owners).

Building of the current DVLA vehicle database was started by EDS in 1996. It cost almost ?5 million to Great Britain authorities to do that. It was implemented three years later. Now it uses a client/server architecture and relies not on the registration plate, but on the vehicle identification number to track vehicles. This helps to eliminate the possibility of registering a single vehicle multiple times. Surely they constantly work on the accuracy of the data.

The whole database of drivers holds about 42 million UK driver license holders. It is often used to help other agencies like the Police, the Driving Standards Agency, and courts to enforce legislation concerning driving and road safety.

You can find DVLA addresses through this link.