MSE News: Warning: You need a DVLA code to hire a car in UK or abroad

AlexMac

Is there is a peculiar feature of the English (British?) psyche that makes us more inclined to make a bureaucratic mountain out of a molehill?

Consider the great chopping board fiasco of the 1990’s when armies of civil servants (AoCSs) wrote and enforced directives that wooden butchers’ blocks had to be replaced by plastic ones on ‘elf n safetti’ grounds; reversed when it was discovered that scarred plastic was a breeding ground for germs, whereas the natural enzymes in wood were biologically safer.

Or the great diesel fiasco of the last 20 years where AoCSs changed the tax regimes to incentivise everyone to shift to so-called fuel- efficient gasoil-burners to save the planet; before we realised we were poisoning our kids with particulates? So now I expect that AoCSs are rewriting tax rules to demonise diesel drivers.

Or the way AoCSs wrote hundreds of pages of employment guidance limiting what trades and jobs workers from the European EU accession sates of Bulgaria and Romania could do in a transition period up to 2014? (I must be the only person in the world who actually read this garbage – for a Bulgarian mate who desperately wanted to pay tax - but wasn't allowed to by the AoSCs). All with absolutely no effect as they all just worked off the books or went self-employed.

Or several expensively failed government IT projects involving AoCSs and AoPCs (Armies of Private Contractors) ….

So why should you even hope that the armies of civil servants at DVLC perform any better…?

But as some have said above, it doesn’t really matter. In many years of renting cars on dozens of occasions in Italy and Spain, I’ve never been asked for the paper licence. But just in case, I ignored the AoCS’s instructions to destroy it and kept my counterpart anyway when I recently renewed. Dont tell the AoSCs!