It is good to know that Nanny tries hard to spread her "diversity" awareness attitudes to every part of her bloated bureaucracy.
Her minions in the Driver Vehicle Lincensing Authority (DVLA) have been labouring hard to prove to their mistress that they are as aware of diversity issues (ie the fact that everyone is different), as any other part of Nanny's bureaucracy.
As such the DVLA opened a £224K a year diversity unit in 2004.
Now that is rather old news, is it not?
However, the reason that I am writing about it now is that the cost of this daft waste of time and money has only just been unearthed via the Freedom of Information Act.
This Diversity Unit, what a splendid piece of nonsense, consists of nine people which replaced the equal opportunities unit in September 2004.
Aside from the annual cost of this unit, a further £50K is being spent on making the DVLA's 7,000 staff more aware of diversity issues; eg it is introducing systems to let Muslim women customers show their faces only to female staff.
This is all very well, but there are other issues that Nanny's trolls might like to address instead; eg complaints to the DVLA have gone up from 1,468 in 1997 to 4,777. Furthermore, the DVLA admits that it "loses" 734 documents annually.
The trouble is, resolving problems such as incompetency requires time, effort and skill. The fact is Nanny doesn't give a stuff, and prefers to waste her time and our money on pointless "easy" activities such as Diversity Units.
Nanny's trolls in the DVLA said:
"Diversity for DVLA means understanding and valuing
the full diversity of the community it serves."
No, I have no idea what that means either!
What they should have said is that the DVLA will endeavour to improve its appalling performance.
One other point, if the DVLA believes that its staff are not sufficiently "diversity aware", what have Nanny's other agencies such as the Commission for Racial Equality been doing?
Any objection to my stealing that splendid picture? It would come in handy almost daily.
ReplyDeleteHow much more diverse can you get than having a Welsh Language version of the DVLA web site for the, what, 100,000 welsh speakers plus a few hundred English kids whose parents think that learning Science in Welsh is a good idea. (Once they have learned Welsh of course.)
ReplyDeleteJust had some dealing with the DVLA (at 9p per minute to call their call centre !)
Doumentation request via web site - 5 working days. Via call centre - 4 working days (Using first class post apparently)
Time to process exchange of cherished number - 8 working days (Target seems to be 7) but 1 month in all including getting initial log boook for the new vehicle then the documentation for the swap and so on. Quite why it takes so long and is such a badly explained and complex process I cannot imagine. The target is seven days. I suspect they will take thatt long even if they could do it in seven minutes.
And now, apparently, a need to wait for 4 to 6 weeks before the new log book arrives. At which point we will need to fill it in and send it back to advise change of ownership of the old vehicle.
If one was tasked twith setting out to design a less efficient way of doing things I am convnced one woul dfail. Utterly.
Does Crapita already run the DVLA operation? If not I bet they will soon.
You ain't seen nuthin' yet for incompetence. Just you wait till the ID card scheme comes in! You ain't seen nuthin' yet for incompetence. I look forward to becoming a non-person. Herr Kakfa, where are you when we need you?
ReplyDeleteI see have been incompetent in my last post, having failed to delete a sentence I'd decided would be better placed at the beginning of the message ...
ReplyDeleteP.S. Nothing to do with DVLA, but I remember hearing an interview with John Prescott on the radio. He'd just been up in an Army helicopter on a demonstration flight.
REPORTER: How did you enjoy your flight, Mr Prescott?
PRESCOTT: It were very naice, but I'm glad to be back on terra cotta.
He's on terracotta now, all right. The terra comes from Labour MPs who see their measily majorities melting away under JP's methane.
Grant,
ReplyDeletecount yourself lucky. The DVLA have been unable to successfully send me a letter for two years, and I haven't changed address in that time.
I know for definite I've missed two renewal notices, my new style logbook and a fine in that time!
The diversity and value licencing authority?We do not need it.!it is time that we English repatriated this diversity nonsense back from whence it came.
ReplyDelete