The winner was … a prototype of a quick and easy online service to let people pay fines using a simple reference number. With a working payment system, the prototype wouldn’t be far away from a releasable public beta. In fact, DVLA intends to do just that.
This is from Amy Whitney’s blog post yesterday about the DVLA Hackathon. It’s a throwaway line, but things like this are really important.
Currently, you can only pay fines like these over the phone. It requires dozens of call centre workers to process them.
There’s no reason for that still to be the case when a motivated, multidisciplinary team can prototype a digital alternative and test it with real people in just a couple of days.
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