DVLA NO TRACEMotoring Courts are an infrequent sitting. Lists of non appearances can, on odd occasions, reach three figures. Generally these are tried in the absence of offenders who have failed to take the opportunity to appear in person often to their financial detriment.

Being not an every day occurrence my colleagues and I on the day in question were struck by the number of times an inquiry to DVLA about an offender`s road traffic history was returned “no trace”. We estimated between one third and a half were returned thus. Post sitting discussion with our legal advisor and the prosecutor returned the opinion that the cause had to be down to one of two reasons:- either the name was wrongly reproduced by police or where police were not involved DVLA`s name search facility was not flexible enough to cope with perhaps a single letter error. Of course it was also possible that many applicants for driving licenses make deliberate errors in their application forms. Whatever the reason[s] there seems to be an unreported problem at DVLA.