http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2009/04/dvla_removing_license_entitlem.html
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.
This man is one of many bikers who have had their licence updated and their bike entitlement removed.
Keep a record of your old licence if you are sending it off to DVLA and thoroughly check your new one.
this happened to me in 2004. It took a lot of sorting out…
You’d expect a government agency to keep records of insignificant things like test passes wouldn’t you?:Whistling:
This was on Watchdog a couple of weeks back, the guy wasn’t happy (quite understandably mind)
It amazes me, that the DVLA still claim that there is no problem. The list of people complaining on the BBC website and in the press in general, and yet they bury their heads in the sand!
The question that springs to mind, in terms of burying head into the sand which came first Gordon Brown or the DVLA?
The problem is you have people at the DVLA who are in jobs for life and really do not care at all, you and I are othing to them and they know there is very little we can do about it.
My licence used to say my country of birth was the “Umited Kingdom”.
I didn’t notice until a car hire firm in Spain refused to hire me a car and accused me of having a fake licence!!
The thought that there was no way a government agency would spell its own country wrongly on official documents so I must have faked it!
It took 3 send-offs before it came back spelt correctly.
My ex-wife is Australian. When she sent her WA licence off to exchange for a UK one, they lost it! They claimed to never have received it but they managed to cash the bl00dy cheque OK! WA driving licence people wouldn’t issue a replacement to a UK address so we had to wait until we next went back to Perth and get a replacement delivered to a family member’s house, then re-send that one to DVLA. FFS!
Since then, if I move house or whatever, I always pay £19 replacement fee and claim I lost the old one. It’s the only way of guaranteeing they won’t totally balls it up. Bl00dy Welsh!
:w00t:
This happened to me. I moved house in 1997 and dutifully sent my licence off. Months later I noticed it no longer had my motorcycle entitlement recorded on it - although it had been there since 1991. I made a couple of attempts to sort it out but I wasn’t riding at the time so didn’t pursue it.
When I wanted to come back to biking I tried again, I knew the test centre and roughly the date of my original test but who still has their pass certificate after 15 years or more? Anyway, no joy and I just did a quick CBT, theory and DAS; it was less stress and took less time than arguing with DVLA.
Cheers
Duncan
