PPC searches at DVLA costs the public purse

James_N

Apologies if this is elsewhere in the forum - I could not see it.

CAG is reporting that WE the tax-payer are supporting private companies searches from the DVLA to retrieve registered keeper details. This is because it costs the DVLA more to process the request than the £2.50 charge.

The Daily Mail (that fine upstanding honest and unbiased paper) apparently made a FOI request that shows each search costs the DVLA 34p more than the fee paid - making a charge on the public purse of £612,000 "this" year (I expect they mean 2013).

If accurate, this is an outrage. Not only are the records being retrieved for often dubious reasons, we pay for it.

More at:

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?421533-PPC-s-costing-DVLA-%A3600k-a-year&p=4507396#post4507396

and

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-2593596/Parking-firms-requests-drivers-details-cost-taxpayer-600k-year.html#ixzz2xjeRUCzi

HO87

This is not particularly new news. Not them I'm suggesting that the Daily Fail are resorting to churnalism (again). The cost relates not to the checks made via the EDI (electronically) but to manual applications. There are other factors which have not been included so the figures are somewhat misleading.

bargepole

It's very misleading.

The EDI applications, which constitute the vast majority of PPC data requests, only cost around 10p to process as it's all done automatically online.

Paper applications cost a bit more because they require a couple of minutes of human intervention.

This is just an example of creative accounting by the DVLA, who don't want to admit that PPC data requests provide them with a healthy revenue stream, out of which they can pay bonuses to senior staff and shout 'trebles all round' when they get to the pub after work.

Annie1960

bargepole wrote: »

It's very misleading.

The EDI applications, which constitute the vast majority of PPC data requests, only cost around 10p to process as it's all done automatically online.

Paper applications cost a bit more because they require a couple of minutes of human intervention.

This is just an example of creative accounting by the DVLA, who don't want to admit that PPC data requests provide them with a healthy revenue stream, out of which they can pay bonuses to senior staff and shout 'trebles all round' when they get to the pub after work.

This is a complex area. I spent many years in the public sector calculating how much things 'cost'.

It depends on what you mean by a cost. Do you mean marginal cost, full cost, or what?

Even if you know which cost you intend to calculate, it is still difficult to get the data you need to calculate it. Some of the new IT systems in Whitehall are quite good at recording how much staff time is spent on various activities, but you still have to add other costs such as the buildings, utilities and everything else required to run the office, and at best these are estimates.

HO87

One doesn't need to be an accountant to understand that the charge for each and every registered keeper check by PPC's is a standard £2.50.

The vast majority of of the roughly 2.5 million checks made (by PPC's) are made via the EDI at a cost (the DVLA admit elsewhere) of marginally less than 10p.

My simple 'O-Level' maths tell me that equates to a surplus (one hastens from describing it as a profit - a government agency, even as powerful as DVLA, can't possibly make a profit) of £2.40 per electronically made check. Using the most recently obtained figures that runs to a profit surplus of £5.52million.

Do the DVLA seriously expect us to accept that carrying out the 118,000 manual checks done in the year to March 2014 (in order to have "cost" the taxpayer 34p each) cost a total of more than £5.85million pounds (in order to have wiped out the surplus and eaten into taxpayer funds to the tune of 34p each: In other words each cost £496?

Clearly that is arrant nonsense but is nevertheless the implication of what the DVLA are saying.

Or is it, more simply, that each manual check actually costs £2.84 and the £40,000 underrun is taken out of the taxpayer's "surplus"?

As bargepole has said this is an exercise in hiding the bonus-supporting revenue stream that PPC's provide not in providing any degree of transparency. With respect complexity is being used to hide the truth here from the public who fund it and civil service accountants are conniving at that as much as any of the other civil servants.