Read carefully the following extracts from an article in The Times.

Then summarise, taking not more than 180 words, the problems which the Licensing Centre has faced and the ways in which it tries to deal with them and to cope with its work-load. There are 630 words in the passage.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre at Swansea, which handles the vast mass of paperwork necessary to keep the country on the road, has a bad reputation. It is criticised for delays and bungling. MPs are asked to sort out its mistakes, magistrates' clerks grumble that delays upset the flow of justice and the girls who answer the centre's telephones are hardened to the ripe language of fuming cu,gtomers.

Delays and well publicised mistakes have made the centre a frequent target for abuse. Modernisation and centralisation, it is said bitterly, have led to bureaucratic chaos and a worse service.

Inside the 16-floor centre, however, the picture looks different. The 5,300 people who work there, many of them school-leavers and married women, reckon they provide an efficient service. They are, to quote one of them, 'absolutely fed up' with their bad press and they pin on their notice-boards the many letters of appreciation they receive.

One license application in every 20 has to be returned to sender because the form is wrongly or inadequately filled in, or is not accompanied by the fee. That is one of the roots of the delay. An MP who complained loudly of delays to his own documents had sent them to the wrong place. A writer who criticised dealys in getting a license had, it turned out, written his name wrongly on the form.

The centre, built as part of the Government's office-dispersal policy, is a data superbank with the largest computer complex of its kind in Europe. It is the apex of the new system of vehicle and driver documentation, replacing the licensing network formerly run by 183 local authorities. The disjointed nature of the old system and the burdens it imposed made modernisation urgent.

The centre sent out its first licence in 197 3 and is now the sole issuing authority for driving licences. It holds 25 million drivers' records and issues about 900,000 new, amended or renewed licences every month.

It expects to process a licence in 10 working days, so that a person sending an application to ·swansea can expect to get his licence back about three weeks after posting.

The huge volume of work means that the centre will not, in the foreseeable future, be able to process applications in less than 10 working days. So the three-week round trip for a licence will remain standard. Overtime or weekend working would make the operation too costly. Fewer mistakes are being made with the steady improvement of the system as experience grows.
Computers, of course, are only as good as the information provided, and the mistakes have human causes. A keyboard operator can make a slip that will get through the net. The indistinct writing of an applicant can be misread; a bilingual licence, as issued in Wales, can go by mistake to England; and some motor dealers still use the wrong forms, which leads to someone being credited with a car he does not own.
Mismatching and discrepancies can compound delays. People grow anxious, sometimes angry, when they find their departure date for a motoring holiday abroad coming closer, with their licence still in the Swansea system. Magistrates' clerks are often badgered by convicted people whose licences have been sent to Swansea, and who find they need their licences in a hurry. Most police forces take a reasonable view in cases where a licence is 'held up in Swansea', and the centre has a unit to deal with complaints of delay and work with the police and the Home Office.
One complaint made about the centre is that callers sometimes cannot get through on the telephone. In the driving licence section there are 24 lines and 24 girls answering up to 2,500 inquiries a day, from 8 am to 5 pm.
(LCC Private Secretary's Certificate)