Location: Following centralisation of the DVLA’s 39 regional offices a couple of years ago, the vast majority of DVLA employees are based at its headquarters in Swansea
Employees: 5,610 full-time equivalent staff
Number in HR team: circa 50
Case study focus: successfully bringing a £1.6 billion IT contract in-house
The organisation
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) maintains registers of drivers and vehicles in the UK. It is responsible for more than 45 million driver records and more than 38 million vehicle records, and collects around £6 billion a year in vehicle tax. Responsibilities include issuing licences to drivers and the maintenance of the vehicle driving entitlements, keeping records of driver endorsements, disqualifications and medical conditions, and helping the police and intelligence authorities deal with vehicle-related crime.
The challenge
For all sorts of companies and organisations, an ever more digital world means an ever more digital-technology-focused way of offering services. And the DVLA is no exception. The recent abolishment of the vehicle tax disc is just one notable example of the organisation moving to increasingly digitised record keeping and service delivery, with recent digital innovations including direct debit payment for Road Fund Licences and drivers enabled to view their details online.
The organisation decided that bringing in-house all IT activity was the best way to support the creativity and efficiency with which they could offer such digitised services. For an organisation the size of the DVLA, and so using four different suppliers for its IT function, this of course was no mean feat.
“It was quite scary and challenging and something no one had done before on this kind of scale,” says chief executive officer Oliver Morley, referring to the fact that this initiative went very much against the grain of many public sector bodies currently outsourcing, rather than bringing in-house, an increasing number of services and functions.
The method
Strong HR support for the TUPE process was vital in ensuring the project’s success, reports HR and estates director Phil Bushby. “One of things this project reminded me of was to make sure you have the right people working on this. We had an excellent team really sweating the detail,” he said. He explains that four of DVLA’s HR team “lived and breathed” the process, with various other experts, including employment lawyers, brought in where needed.
HR co-operation with other departments right from the very beginning of the process was key, he reports. “It was about working with IT and seeing what they wanted from the new IT structure, and we also worked with our colleagues in procurement.”
When reassuring employees being moved across, the little things -such as matching terms and conditions and ensuring everyone is paid at the correct time- are crucial, says Bushby. “The stuff that makes the big difference to people are the little things,” he says. “It’s ‘where am I going to sit?’ ‘how am I going to feel?’”
Strong communication with staff, including through a large event held at a local football stadium and then through smaller workshops, throughout the TUPE process was therefore vital. “As well as matching conditions we also had to make it an attractive place to work and tell a really good story,” says Morley. “In the end it was their [the employee’s] choice whether to transfer.”
To make working at the DVLA an attractive offer, the innovative nature of the IT work employees would be doing was really capitalised on. “If you want to really build your digital skills with a customer base of 40 million you’re not going to get a much better experience than with us,” says Morley. “So it was about generating that feeling of excitement.”
He adds that taking things one step at a time was invaluable. “It’s a similar situation to an acquisition and having been through that myself on both sides, you realise it’s about simplicity,” he says. “It’s about ensuring continuity by looking at transformation later and not restructuring too rigorously during the TUPE process.”
The result
The first sign channelling significant time and resource into the TUPE process had paid off, was the number of employees happy to transfer, says Morley, who reports “the vast majority” did so.
And the overarching decision to bring IT in-house to ensure time and cost efficiency and innovation is already proving a highly sound one. Morley cites the example of the DVLA’s data request service. “Before the changeover this one third party request we had recently might have taken a month to go through and cost tens of thousands. One of the people we brought in-house has just done twice the volume in about two days,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, then, both Morley and Bushby are strong advocates of other public sector organisations, where appropriate, treading a similar bringing-things-in-house path. And, with HMRC apparently “doing something similar” to the DVLA at present, it seems there could be a fair few more TUPE success stories to come.
