STAFF at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency headquarters, high on a hill above Swansea, enjoy one of the best views in the entire government estate, over a deep green valley and out to sea. However what the rest of the UK sees, looking in, is rather different.

For many motorists the unloved initials DVLA represent the purest embodiment of paper-pushing, data-gathering officialdom. To the press, it has long been a ready target, all the more so since the government made its vehicle database available to the private sector in 2004.

Yet is it time to reassess the much-maligned government agency? You may not have noticed from your post office queue, but the balmy zephyrs that regularly waft out of Swansea Bay have built to a whirlwind of change up on the hill.

In the past five years the DVLA, in the words of chief executive Clive Bennett, has moved “from being effectively a civil-service command and control, paper-based organisation, to an as digital-as-you-can-get organisation”.

And it has the prizes to prove it. The auguries for rapid change based round IT in the civil service are not good, with the agonised gestation of the NHS computerised records system, and big delays in the air-traffic-control computer centre at Southampton. Yet the DVLA is suddenly offering services the original 1970s form-filling staff would scarcely recognise.

You can now, for example, relicense your vehicle online. “Very popular with the public, because they don’t have to send in their documents,” said Bennett. And before long, you will be able to renew your licence via the internet. “Electronic driver licensing is in test phase. We are making sure there are no wrinkles or problems, ready for a launch later this year.”

A cynical observer of the government machine’s ability to reinvent itself will wonder whether the task is achievable without outside help. And they could be right. The changes sweeping through the DVLA are the product of Pact (Partnership Achieving Change Together), one of the first big public-private partnerships involving a government agency.

The partner is IBM, which became a major player in consultancy in 2002 when it bought Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting to provide integrated business advice to clients alongside its computer business.

For the past three years staff from IBM Business Consulting Services have worked more or less full time at the DVLA, with a team from Fujitsu Services, who look after the IT hardware.

“It’s a completely joint partnership,” said Bennett. “We don’t bring them in and send them out — they are part of the team, working with us on all aspects of transformation. We have civil servants reporting to IBM, and IBM people reporting to the civil service. DVLA staff acquire those competences that we need and they move on, and we take over the role under a skills-transfer arrangement.”

A string of initiatives — including Automatic Driver Licence Issue (ADLI), a single process for licensing first-time drivers, from the provisional-licence stage to full licence — can be attributed to Pact. But Bennett can also be credited with much of the overhaul.

After spending his working life in the private sector, from Rank Xerox to Norton Healthcare, Bennett thought he had retired. When the DVLA’s headhunter approached him he said he was not interested.

But the canny recruiter had a winning card — the Gower Peninsula, and its famously seductive landscape, just west of Swansea. “He suggested I take a trip down. The Gower, together with the potential for change here, persuaded me.

Times Recommends

• Blackstone target at $7.75bn on China deal
• An opportunity in the Muslim community
• BSkyB deal may spell trouble for Virgin