CSW visits Swansea for a wide-ranging conversation with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency boss
It’s been a while since CSW last travelled to Wales for business. Back in 2013, our reporter went to Cardiff to interview one Tim Moss, who was then chief executive at Companies House.
Twelve-and-a-half years later, we’re back to interview – checks notes – Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency chief exec Tim Moss. Making my way by train from London Paddington, I wonder: is CSW only willing to travel to Wales to speak to Moss – or is he the only senior official in Wales who has invited us?
Arriving in Swansea, greeted by hailstones, I begin to regret my journey west. The bus arrives, I check for traffic and rush across the road. I cannot get in a road accident on my way to interview the chief executive of the DVLA, I tell myself. Imagine the headlines. I buy a return ticket, climb up to the top deck, then accidentally get off four stops too early. The hail has been replaced by soft spits of rain. I take a bridge over a motorway and then another over the River Tawe, crossing roads without traffic lights where cars whizz by. The rain starts to get heavier. I arrive damp and in need of a cup of tea.
In 2013, CSW’s correspondent described Moss as a “barely contained bundle of energy, words tumbling out of him at breakneck speed” and said interviewing him was like “trying to engage a machine-gun emplacement with a bolt-action .303”.
His family hasn’t let him forget it. “The amount of stick I got from that,” he says with a smile. “They still take the mick out of me.”
The description remains fairly accurate and I’m grateful for the ability to reduce the playback speed on my recording to 0.8 when transcribing it a week later. Moss reckons he has mellowed a bit, but he doesn’t want to go too far down that road. “Ultimately, we’re here to deliver really good public services,” he says. “That’s the bit I love. We all mellow over time, and I probably don’t have quite the energy I had back in 2013, but we should never lose that passion.”
Having necked some tea and wolfed down a few Welsh cakes, my tour begins.
The DVLA contact centre, in the Sandringham Park business estate in Swansea Vale, is what would have once been known as a call centre, although phone calls are no longer the only option. Some 800,000 individual customers per month speak to the centre’s 1,000-strong cadre of advisers over the phone, while 300,000 get in touch via webchat, where they speak to both advisers and chatbots about driving licences and vehicle registrations.
There are 150 multitasking advisers who do everything at once: web chat, emails, social media and telephony. “I’d be hopeless at it,” Moss says, as we walk past them. “I’d be hopeless just on the phones. It’s not for me.”
To take contact services to the next level, the DVLA is “pushing the boundaries of AI”, Moss says. “When you look at how they’re using AI for digital development and some of the agentic AI stuff, to me this is almost black magic,” he adds.
One example is the integration of an LLM with the contact centre knowledge base. This enables ChatGPT-style searches of the 2,500 knowledge articles that help advisers get the information they need to help customers more quickly. The plan is to roll this out over the next few months to all advisers.
DVLA is also working with the Government Digital Service and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on Gov Voice, an exploration of how AI voice technology can improve citizens’ experience of government call centres. Instead of talking to an adviser, for some of the simpler queries, customers could interact with the AI “as if you were talking to a human being and it’s answering back to you”, Moss says. “Ultimately, it’s about: how do we deliver something better for our customers? But then also it’s the learning and the testing to say: how can that be applied across any of the other 90,000 people in government contact centres?”
“Once we get to the level of customer experience we want, we can then look at how we make this more efficient, more effective”
Moss believes that AI can help with the agency’s task of finding 15% efficiency savings over the Spending Review 2025 period, but adds that “the primary focus has to be around the customer experience”.
“For me, it’s not about saying: how can we replace people or do things cheaper? It’s about saying: how can we use AI to deliver a better customer experience? That’s what we’re here to do. Once we get to the level of customer experience we want, we can then look at how we make this more efficient, more effective.”
Moss grew up in Barnet, North London. His first job was at a manufacturing firm that made copper wire. Initially working at the company’s HQ in nearby Enfield, he soon moved to its factory in Llanelli, Wales, and worked his way up to become site manager. He then almost ended up in China but, having met his wife in Swansea, decided to stay put. “And, hey, it’s a brilliant part of the world,” he says.
Taking a year out to do an MBA at Swansea University opened Moss’s eyes to a career beyond manufacturing and he got his first job in the public sector in 2002 – an operations role running a paper factory at the Cardiff-based Companies House. By 2012, he had risen through the ranks to become chief executive.
His departure in 2017 to head up the Intellectual Property Office was a somewhat daunting move. On his first day, walking through the doors of IPO’s Newport HQ, he recalls thinking: “‘I’m here as chief exec and I know less than anybody else in the organisation about intellectual property.’ But actually, it was brilliant. The strategy we developed there was really simple: how do we create an excellent customer experience, how do we create a world-leading IP environment, and how do we make it a brilliant place to work?”
Moss then spent two-and-a-half years as chief operating officer at the Welsh Government, “really thinking about how we can make that organisation better”. “It’s a unique place,” he says. “For an organisation which is about the same size as DVLA, the breadth of what it covers is mind-blowing. But then comes the consequence: things are spread really thinly. So the people there do amazing jobs.”
When the gig at DVLA came up, “that desire to get back to do some frontline service delivery was too good not to think about going there,” he says. “I feel really fortunate to be in this role and I’ve absolutely loved the nine-and-a-half months I’ve been here. The really exciting bit for me is the potential.”
DVLA has often been used as a testbed for new technology. “We’re big enough and we have a really big reach, but we’re also small enough as an organisation,” Moss explains. “We’re 6,000 people, but we’re actually quite a small management team – our senior leadership team is 40 people. So we can probably be more nimble.”
Moss reckons DVLA interacts with more members of the public than any other organisation in the public sector – it handled 99.4 million individual customer transactions in 2024-25. This means it can be “at the forefront” of public service delivery, he says, but also that “even if a fraction of 1% [of transactions] go wrong, that’s still a really big number”.
In his first few weeks as chief exec, Moss received an email from a woman who was a victim of domestic abuse and needed to change her driving licence to protect her identity so that her abuser couldn’t find out where she was. She had to do this before the court documents were filed but, Moss explains, “there was a problem with the documents, and we hadn’t done everything right and had mislaid them.
“We can get lost in the numbers but, every time, it comes back to: it’s a human being. We must never forget that every customer interaction counts”
“But the team did a fantastic job, found the documents, got her a new driving licence, and then hand delivered the document to her to enable that to get done on time. And it reminded me that we can get lost in the numbers but, every time, it comes back to: it’s a human being. We must never forget that every customer interaction counts.”
One area where Moss is keenly aware of the need to improve customer service is the drivers’ medical backlog. DVLA is responsible for determining whether a driving licence holder or applicant meets the medical standards required for driving.
The volume and complexity of these decisions is increasing, partly due to an ageing population. DVLA is also often reliant on information from third parties – including medical professionals – before a licence can be issued. To help, the agency employs 50 doctors and nurses.
“Some of the decisions are simple ones – like if you’ve got diabetes, you have to notify us and you get a decision quickly – right up to complex multi-condition medical things where we need a huge amount of information to be able to judge,” Moss says. “These are life-changing decisions.”
DVLA processed around 581,000 medical licensing decisions in 2021-22. By 2024–25, that had risen to 830,000, and it expects to receive more than 925,000 medical applications and notifications this financial year.
The rise in casework has coincided with an increase in the number of decisions taking longer than normal. In 2019, 346 decisions took a year or longer. By 2022, this had risen to 14,105, with a Public Accounts Committee report that year warning that DVLA’s system to process applications from customers who have notified it of relevant medical conditions was “slow, inefficient and in need of major improvement”. More recent figures from this February showed there were 3,012 medical cases that were more than a year old in progress.
To address the backlog, DVLA has been moving medical cases over to a new Microsoft Dynamics platform since September to enable more customers to notify, apply and renew their licence online, and bring about quicker and more accurate decisions.
This initially made things worse. Naturally, Moss uses a car analogy to explain: “We’re in the difficult bit where we’ve been running down the old casework system while we’re driving up the new one, and one of my operation leads said to me yesterday, ‘it’s a bit like you’re driving a car and changing the wheel at the same time’. Actually, I would go further – you’re driving the car and changing the engine. So our backlog has gone up to a level which we’re not happy with but it’s part of what we forecast. It will probably take until the second half of this year to really get to where we want to.”
All cases have now been migrated over to the new system.
The transformation of the drivers’ medical service also includes a new portal, set to go live this spring, which Moss hopes will be a gamechanger. In the week of the interview, DSIT announced the creation of a new unit, CustomerFirst, to enable the digital transformation of government services, drawing on the expertise of private sector leaders, and said its first partnership would be with DVLA.
Moss says the partnership will focus on taking the drivers’ medical service “to the next level”, which couldn’t happen without the new portal. “At the moment, if we write to the NHS or a GP, it takes at least six weeks for that to come back,” he says. “How can we get that from six weeks down to six days or even six minutes?”
Another big transformation programme at DVLA is the creation of the Driver and Vehicles Account, which allows motorists to view their driving licence and vehicle details in one place.
Since it launched in 2023, 7.5 million of the UK’s 53 million drivers had signed up to the account by mid-January 2026, and Moss says this is growing by about half a million drivers per month.
“In the past, DVLA has almost been separate organisations,” Moss says. “You had a drivers bit and a vehicles bit. The systems were all separate and trying to link them up if you were a driver but also had a vehicle was nigh on impossible. Through the account, we can now start to do that.”
The aim is to eventually create “a seamless, end-to-end journey” where drivers can access everything in one place, be it taxing a vehicle, changing a log book or chatting to an adviser – potentially even booking driving tests, normally the domain of sister organisation the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. Moss says the two organisations are working together to explore how integrating their systems could help to tackle the driving test backlog crisis at DVSA, which has seen waiting times grow from five weeks in 2020 to 22 weeks in 2025, in part due to bots buying up test slots and reselling them at inflated prices.
“If we could integrate our systems, we could ensure it’s only learner drivers that can come through the Driver and Vehicles Account and book their theory test and practical tests,” Moss says.
Why not merge the two agencies? “You probably don’t need to,” he says. “The world is littered with people trying to merge organisations... it takes an awful lot of time and doesn’t really deliver.”
He says the conversation should be: “How can we develop more end-to-end, joined-up services for citizens? Because why should a public service be of less quality than you get from private sector organisations?”
He later partly answers this, noting that “unlike a private sector business, we have to deal with all of the customers all of the time. The breadth of what we cover is phenomenal. That means that some things we will do brilliantly and other things – this is quite tricky stuff and it doesn’t always work in the right way.”
In September, the government announced plans for a digital ID. What does this mean for the digital driving licence, another initiative the DVLA is developing, which is currently in private beta and due to launch publicly later this year? “Long-term, we still need a digital driving license,” Moss says. “One of the conversations we’re having with DSIT is: what is the longer-term aim?” He suggests that a decade from now, people could have a digital ID that they could add credentials to, including the digital driving licence.
Moss says the digital driving licence will also help keep people safe. He gives the example of an 18-year-old woman going into Wetherspoons needing to prove her age: “The beauty of that is when they put it on the reader, it will just come back with a photo and ‘this person is over 18’. Unlike the current physical ID, it won’t give your date of birth or your address.”
Moss says his leadership style is “to be open and engage with people”. He works on the basis that “very little is secret”, and holds “talk with Tim” coffee sessions with 10-15 members of staff where virtually nothing is off limits.
One of his first commitments when he joined DVLA was to address the issue of hybrid working. “The important bit for me was: how do we make sure it’s as fair as we can make it across the agency?” he says. “I think there were about 2,000 staff who could go hybrid who hadn’t had the opportunity and about 1,000 of them then took that up. So we now have a fair situation and that’s based on the 60% guideline.”
Moss says he’s also “always worked on the basis that work is work and home is home” and tries to keep the two separate. “I will rarely look at emails at the weekend,” he says. “You work hard during the week and you then have your time off, and that’s always been important to me. There will always be priorities and peaks that come in, but let’s make sure they’re true priorities and not that we just get into a habit of working 24/7.”
Rhossili Bay beach on the Gower Peninsular. Photo: Tevye Markson
Home for Moss is not all leisure though. He has lived on a working farm with his in-laws for the last 24 years. “I should get a medal for that,” he jokes, but adds: “It’s less of a working farm now. We’ve got 21 sheep and 11 cows.”
Does he get stuck into it? “I’m a part-time farm hand. I wouldn’t ever describe myself as a farmer,” he says. “Yesterday lunchtime, I was putting the straw down in the shed for the cattle because they’re in for the winter, and I was sorting the sheep out two weekends ago. I get called on to do all sorts of things.
“So I’m a dab hand at sheep chiropody, and I’ve had to do my fair share of castration as well – maybe that’s not one for the article, but you can add it in if you want. It’s a nice foil to the day job because ultimately when you get home and something needs doing, it’s got to be done.”
When he’s not working on the farm, Moss goes for walks, tames the garden, drives a Land Rover, does a bit of golf, relaxes with friends and family – and, living just one mile from the beach, makes the most of living in “a beautiful part of the world”.
Visiting Rhossili the next day, with not a hint of cloud in the sky, I can only agree with the sentiment.
This article first appeared in the spring 2026 issue of Civil Service World. Read the digital magazine here