New data on the driving tests crisis

In many parts of the country you can't get a driving test. New data from my PQ shows DFT *don't* have this crisis under control

Ellen Pasternack has been running a very effective campaign to highlight and fix the driving tests crisis.

In the last year or two, for many people it has become either impossible to get a practical driving test - or to get one you have to travel hundreds of miles.

This is a disaster for people who need to drive for work, and particularly for young people.

I asked some Parliamentary Questions to get more data on how bad the problem is in different places.

The results suggest that DFT have not got a grip on this.

Indeed the crisis has been getting worse not better since the pandemic.

First, wait times by region.

In Wales, Scotland and the North, wait times got longer after the pandemic and have still not caught up. But in the Midlands, South and London, it’s even worse - they got substantially worse again since the middle of 2022..

DFT trumpeted what looked like progress in January 2024, but since then things got worse again:

And those are regional averages. Appointments are released on a rolling 24-week basis. If there are no tests available at a centre, you just can’t book anytime in the next six months. DFT said in answer to my PQ that they have have no records of how many have been unable to book.

But it must logically be a large number: the maximum possible average wait time is 24 weeks. So if the average for a test centre is 24 weeks, that means people at that centre are trying and failing to book. Currently 76 out of 241 driving test centres are fully booked up, and more are close to this.

Roughly twice as many centres are fully booked out as two years ago:

Here they are mapped out. The only waits that are not appalling are in coastal or remote locations.

And here is the change in the last two years. Thing have got a bit better in Scotland and are mixed in the north, but are *worse* in the Midlands and South.

I was rather alarmed by the way that DFT rather dismissed the problem in their written answer to me. They imply this is not as bad as it looks, and blame a shift in public behaviour:

“Normal booking behaviour sees candidates move test appointments around routinely in line with their preferences. It is not therefore possible to give a meaningful assessment of the number of people waiting longer than 24 weeks for a test or how long a person waited between booking and taking a test.

DVSA continues to see high demand for driving tests, owing in part to a major shift in customer booking behaviour. Customers now book their car practical test far earlier in their learning journey, sometimes before they have even had a practical driving lesson.”

But wait, maybe people are booking earlier because of… the massive waiting times?

As the End the Backlog campaign point out, at current rates of progress, the backlog may never be cleared.

They give some very sad examples of people whose lives are on hold because of this, and I have constituents in the same boat.

End the Backlog call for a big push to get things back to normal and to do things differently, including extending the validity of theory tests and temporarily enlisting approved driving instructors to carry out tests.

But so far there is great resistance to this: in February DVSA staff went on strike in a dispute over its efforts to cut down driving-test backlogs.

As always when the government creates scarcity, a lively black market has sprung up. There are numerous websites that use bots to book up such slots as are available and then sell them on at a premium - like this one and this one.

They are also on sale to driving intructors via WhatsApp groups - though the cost of a test through a tout is £150-250, which is a long way above the official price (£62). This black market seems to me like a symptom not a cause of the scarcity though - if you could just book normally, the touts would collapse.

All in all, this looks like one of those classic festering crises in government. Not quite high-profile enough to get the attention of Number 10, but making a lot of people miserable.

Often these things rumble along until some trigger event or celebrity suddenly makes them a big deal in politics, at which point everyone throws up their hands and says things like, “how can this have been allowed to go on like this for so long?”

Sadly at the moment I think DFT are still in the denial stage.

Have they got this under control? Nope. Their answer to me suggests this is a test they are currently failing.