United Kingdom Photocard Driving Licence Renewal

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live authenticated flow at apply-for-driving-licence.service.gov.uk. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/dvla/driving-licence-renewal-photocard / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
• Authority: Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.uk/renew-driving-licence
• Secondary sources:
  • https://www.gov.uk/renew-photo-driving-licence ("Change the photo on your driving licence" — a near-duplicate answer page for the same online service entered via a different task, used to cross-check the photo-reuse/upload rule and the fee/channel rules)
  • https://apply-for-driving-licence.service.gov.uk/before-you-start?locale=en and its before-you-continue step — the online service's own pre-login screens, reachable without authenticating, confirmed live at retrieval time
  • https://www.gov.uk/driver-vehicles-account (consulted to confirm the online service is reached through DVLA's GOV.UK-One-Login-backed account, not a driving-licence-number/National-Insurance-number/postcode lookup — that three-factor lookup belongs to the separate view-driving-licence "check code" service and was not carried into this document)
  • https://www.gov.uk/id-for-driving-licence (identity-document evidence for a driving licence application; read to confirm it applies to the name/title-change postal path, not the online renewal flow — see Scope notes below)
• Official form id: none for the online or Post Office channels. A paper "D1 pack" exists (obtained in person from a Post Office, not downloadable), so — like gb/dvla/vehicle-tax and gb/hmpo/passport-application-first-adult — this document is transcribed from GOV.UK guidance prose and the online service's own pre-login screens, not an independently captured screen-by-screen review of the full authenticated flow.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01 (all sources fetched live via the GOV.UK Content API and direct HTTP requests at authoring time)
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Why GOV.UK guidance prose (plus pre-login screens) was used as the field-level source

Like gb/dvla/vehicle-tax and gb/hmpo/passport-application-first-adult, the online renewal sits behind a GOV.UK-One-Login-backed DVLA account with no published field-by-field specification of its authenticated screens. Two things went beyond those precedents here: (1) the same task is documented on two near-identical GOV.UK answer pages (renew-driving-licence and renew-photo-driving-licence), which cross-confirmed the fee, channel, and photo rules; and (2) the online service's before-you-start and before-you-continue screens were reachable and readable without signing in, directly confirming the photo-reuse-from-passport-vs-upload step (photoSource/photoFile) rather than relying on guidance prose alone for that part of the flow.

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) | |---|---| | "Renew your: full driving licence / provisional driving licence" (page title, both renew through the same service) | licenceType | | "If your name or title has changed since you got your current driving licence, you must apply by post. You cannot renew it online or at a Post Office." | nameOrTitleChangedSinceLicence, applicationChannel | | Three renewal routes: online (Start now → apply-for-driving-licence.service.gov.uk), Post Office (reminder letter or photocard + fee), by post (D1 pack) | applicationChannel | | "If you have a valid UK passport, we may be able to use your passport photo on your licence" / "you will need to upload a new one" — confirmed live on the service's own before-you-continue screen | photoSource, photoFile | | "DVLA will send you a confirmation email once you've applied" | email | | Online fee £14, paid by MasterCard/Visa/Electron/Delta debit or credit card; no fee if over 70 or on a medical short-period licence | paymentMethod, feeExemptionReason | | Post Office: reminder letter, or photocard if no reminder letter, plus the £21.50 fee | hasReminderLetter, currentPhotocardPresented | | By post (D1 pack): a recent printed passport-type photo (back not signed), current photocard if held, cheque or postal order for £17 payable to DVLA | printedPassportTypePhoto, currentPhotocardIncluded, paymentInstrument | | "You might be asked to take part in research by email, but you can opt out" | researchContactOptIn |

Scope and jurisdiction notes

• Great Britain residents only. The source states "there's a different service in Northern Ireland"; this document models the GB (England, Scotland, Wales) online/Post-Office/post service only. jurisdiction.level is national, matching the gb/dvla/vehicle-tax precedent for a GB-wide DVLA process. Northern Ireland residency is not modelled as a field. It is a hard eligibility gate, not a branch within this service.
• Renewal only. A first-ever provisional licence (never previously held one, or applied before 1 March 1973) is a separate apply-first-provisional-driving-licence service and is out of scope; so are the dedicated 70-or-over (renew-driving-licence-at-70), medical short-term (renew-medical-driving-licence), and 5-year bus/lorry (renew-lorry-bus-coach-licence) renewal services, each with its own GOV.UK page. feeExemptionReason's over_70/medical_short_period_licence values reflect only the no-fee note stated on this service's own page, not those dedicated services' rules.
• Name/title-change identity evidence is out of scope. A change forces applicationChannel = post per the source, but the specific identity documents required (per gov.uk/id-for-driving-licence) are not modelled as fields in this version. That page's branching (UK-passport-number entry, UKVI share code, or a substantial by-post document list with further name/gender-change sub-branches) is complex enough to warrant its own review pass. A future minor version can add it once independently reviewed.
• Address is not modelled. Changing the address on a licence is a distinct GOV.UK service (change-address-driving-licence); nothing in the retrieved sources suggests the renewal flow re-collects or re-confirms the applicant's address, so no address field is included.
• Fees are intentionally not encoded as amounts, consistent with other reference schemas (e.g. gb/dvla/vehicle-tax, gb/hmpo/passport-application-first-adult). DVLA fees change periodically and are out of scope for a field-collection schema; they are described qualitatively in field/document descriptions only.
• Not time-versioned. Applying GSP-0005 §2's coexistence test: the process does not encode a year-varying value and its "editions" would not meaningfully coexist, so this is a plain v1.0.0 document, not an edition-axis schema.
• Conditional requiredness that v0.2's flat/linear model cannot express (fields gated by applicationChannel, photoSource, hasReminderLetter, or feeExemptionReason) is documented in field descriptions, per the limitation tracked in GSP-0004.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• The exact screen order and wording past the before-you-continue photo step (e.g. declarations, review, and payment screens) were not captured screen-by-screen, since they sit behind GOV.UK One Login sign-in.
• Whether the online service asks the applicant to reconfirm any existing personal details (e.g. medical conditions, licence categories) before renewal was not confirmed in the retrieved sources and is not modelled here.
• The Post Office channel's exact in-branch process (e.g. whether a new photo is captured in branch) was not independently confirmed beyond the reminder-letter/photocard/fee requirements stated on the source pages.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field against the live authenticated online flow specifically, step 3 flow), confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.