If you have a current passport there's a much less worrying way to do it. You can apply online and give your passport number as well as the normal details. They use this to retrieve your photo and your signature from your passport, and send you your new licence (in my and my husband's experience) in just a few days. You are supposed to return your old licence to them, cut in half, but you get about three weeks to do this, meaning that you get the new one and have time to check it before surrendering the old one.
My husband and I have both done this within the last couple of years to get our first photocard licences - apart from anything else our old paper licences, of 1987 vintage, were starting to fall apart. Both of our new licences were entirely correct, even though they contained extra information (dates tests passed which were back in the 80s, etc) which hadn't appeared on the old paper licences.