Alison Thewliss – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Alison Thewliss on 2016-04-12.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many full driving licences have been issued to people in (a) the UK, (b) Scotland and (c) the city of Glasgow in the last 10 years.

Andrew Jones

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) only issues licences to drivers in Great Britain. Since July 2007, 68,096,270 full driving licences have been issued to people in GB. This is the number of driving licences produced and despatched by the DVLA and includes new licences, renewals, exchanges and replacements. The DVLA does not hold statistics on the number of licences issued before July 2007 as this is when the current method of producing licences began.

The DVLA only retains information about the number of full and provisional driving licences issued and does not record how many of these licences were issued by country or region.

However, it is possible to extract figures from the DVLA’s drivers’ database to show the number of people who hold full driving licences for countries and regions of GB. There are 38,571,679 full driving licence holders in Great Britain, 3,205,868 in Scotland and 651,045 in Glasgow.