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Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite complicated.

Organisations often fall into this trap - spending years and huge amounts of money fixing the underlying foundations before starting to do new things. We worked with them to squeeze and narrow the batch window as much as possible, and shifted it a little so there was more availability in the evening (when user research showed people would be more likely to use it). Over the next few months we added more parts to the service - you could buy and sell a vehicle online, manage your personal registration plates, update your address etc.

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