Licence to Kill or Thrill ??

From parking fines to speed cameras, from road rage to fatal accidents, it's all because we have (on the most part) obtained driving licences. There seems to be more cars on the road each year and we're supposed to be heading towards a green country!!!!

For those of you who are not so familiar, the building on the hill is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea aka the DVLA. This is where it all happens; provisional licences, full licences, car taxing, car identification, car registrations, cherished number plates - it all happens here.

The DVLA has no legal power to convict a motorist of a driving offence. The DVLA is also incorrectly assumed to endorse driving licences with penalty points. If the licence is surrendered to the police for an endorsable offence it is sent to the magistrate's court in the county in which the offence was committed in, endorsed and returned to the driver. The DVLA's database is updated electronically by the magistrate's court and will only request the licence if the driver has failed to produce it to the magistrates, either through the police, a fixed penalty ticket or summons.

In the late 1980s the DVLA developed a database of drivers and holds details of some 42 million driver licence holders in the UK.