Communications on test delivery recovery efforts have seen the agency furnish MPs with updates to share across social media, but not necessarily provide the driver trainer stakeholder with the information they need – despite promises of monthly updates. And where’s the new leadership in all of this?
Despite one of the key recommendations resulting from the National Audit Office’s investigation into DVSA’s handling of test waiting times (published in December last year – summary and full report available here https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/investigation-into-car-driving-test-waiting-times/) being that DVSA more regularly publishes meaningful metrics on test waiting times, a quick scan of the most obvious communications channels the agency could be using to communicate with a particularly youthful audience, i.e. social media, reveals very little mention of their driving test tribulations, how the agency is tackling them, or advice for how pupils to deal with the problem it presents to them in accessing a test slot. Instead we get lots of perky posts about events they’ve attended and new initiatives they’re launching in lots of areas other than driving test delivery. Insta, Facebook and Linkedin – you wouldn’t look at the agency’s own channels and think there even was such an issue…
And then there’s the promise of keeping us informed on a monthly basis. In June, DVSA wrote to stakeholders to outline their new way of reporting test data, stating that
‘This data publication is not a one-off. From now on, we will be updating the waiting times data on the second Wednesday of each month, covering the previous month’s performance.
To make sure this information is useful to you and your members, we will use each monthly data update as the basis for a regular newsletter briefing. This will give you, your members and employees an accessible summary of the latest figures — including the median waiting time, availability data and any notable changes at regional or centre level — so that you can keep your networks informed and have up to date information for conversations with, members, employees and learners’
Note to DVSA, we’re still waiting for July and August’s updates. Meanwhile, we note that during July and August DVSA made a number of posts across social media, and whilst some referenced booking rule changes, none gave any real updates on progress on tackling test waiting times. Nice posts about Wimbledon and Stonehenge though!
And finally, pondering where the new DVSA CEO is, and what she’s actually doing at the agency, has become somewhat a game that we’ve christened ‘Where’s Warmington?’.
Apart from a brief appearance at the Car Driver Forum in May, where only a handful of industry stakeholders had half an hour to hear her script on what she’s going to do to make a dint in DVSA’s many challenges (and ask any questions) the industry has not really seen hide nor hare of the new Chief in the 8 months she’s been in post.
As DIA fedback directly to the DVSA Comms team, we absolutely recognise that a new CEO should be focused on getting their head under the bonnet of this broken down vehicle of an agency and seeing what fixes need to be made. But to not issue a single communication to a key customer base (i.e. licence fee paying) ADIs and Rider Trainers in 8 months seems questionable.
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Read the full series:
Questions over net new examiner numbers
New examiners waiting to be deployed while pupils wait for tests
Locked out and left waiting: pupils blocked by DVSA’s bot protection
A crackdown with unintended consequences?
Selective social media, missing updates and an invisible new CEO
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