Patience needed at Paphos department

Sir,
The Department of Transport in Paphos is a busy place. Every working day from 8am until 12.45pm it is thronged with people queuing to gain or renew licences, register new vehicles, or otherwise attend to the business of running a vehicle in Cyprus. On July 2, for example, there were just two ladies attempting to cope with the shouting, the complaints, the extraordinarily impatient, those with the wrong papers, and the several dealers who came in each to seek the administration for perhaps a dozen cars.

Every application takes about ten minutes, so that anybody unfortunate enough to be behind a dealer or their representative can stand waiting his/her turn for a very long time.

I wrote on June 2 to the Nicosia headquarters of the Transport Department suggesting that this situation be looked into and perhaps eased by establishing a separate desk for dealer applications, but no response has been forthcoming.

When you realise that this one office has to handle all of the Paphos business – and people even travel from Limassol because they mistakenly think their applications might be handled more quickly in a smaller place – the overload is intolerable.

I feel genuinely sorry for the highly pressured staff there whose patience and relatively good humour is sorely tested.

All the public notices are in Greek, so the hundreds of expatriates who use this office must accept this situation and concentrate on improving their language ability, or trust that they are guessing right about the requirements. One such instance is that when first registering a vehicle, make sure you have at least four months insurance cover otherwise your long wait can be in vain. It is not enough merely to have current cover in date.

Those of us expatriates now living permanently in Cyprus should make no spoken critical comparisons with the lives we have voluntarily left behind in the UK, otherwise we stand to be rightly censured, and this applies also to people who come here regularly for several months at a time and keep a car in Cyprus, but there is a certain nostalgia for the DVLA postal service, or for the convenient and simple walk in and out facility in almost any UK post office when licence renewal time comes around.
Clive Turner, Tala

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