Driving: Eyesight

Transport written question – answered at on 6 May 2014.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Gerry Sutcliffe Gerry Sutcliffe Labour, Bradford South

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what assessment he has made of the level of potential loss of trade to independent high street opticians following the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency's decision to award its vision testing contract to Specsavers.

Photo of Stephen Hammond Stephen Hammond The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)

In the past, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) dealt with many individual opticians on an ad-hoc basis. Although the individual cost per optician was relatively low, the aggregated spend on the service meant that the contract had to be tendered via the Official Journal of the European Union process. This is in accordance with the Public Contracts Regulations 2006.

As part of the procurement process, the DVLA identified that 2,009 optical practices carried out vision testing services. The new contract means that independent practices are no longer required to carry out on average 20 assessments per year. This equates to around 10 hours of work.

Does this answer the above question?

Yes1 person thinks so

No2 people think not

Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.

Annotations

Andy McGregor
Posted on 8 May 2014 10:49 am (Report this annotation)

As I said earlier
The question seems vague as the particular contract was for Visual Field Testing, not simple "vision testing".
The phrase in the answer " are no longer required to carry our" makes it sound as if it is a relief to independent practices not to have to do this task, in fact it represents a loss of income of £50.40 for each test.
Awarding the contract to Specsavers, rather than an industry-wide "consortium" of practices (which Specsavers could have joined) reduces the choice of locations for the tests which will inconvenience many drivers.
The former system was ridiculously inefficient in that individual paper cheques were sent for each patient seen. Improvements to the payment system without wholesale change could have made savings and retained the wide network.
There are concerns expressed by some in the independent sector, and possibly other large multiple opticians, that there is potential for the single supplier of the service to use it as a "loss leader" to get footfall into their practices