The broken driving test system proves our public services are fraying at the edges

For many young people, taking their driving test will be one of the most stressful things they have done. The experience of having an examiner silently sat next you, judging every action, is enough to send your heart rate racing and your blood pressure soaring. I should know – despite no longer qualifying as young, I’m pleased to say that I recently passed my test, and was able to finally wave goodbye to the L plates.

The stress of taking the test, however, was nothing in comparison to the stress of actually booking it in the first place. For several months I diligently woke up at 6am every Monday morning and logged on to the DVSA website to wait for the latest batch of tests to be released. Each time I found that every test at my local centre had immediately been taken, with the only ones available being in almost comically far away places.

When I did finally managed to book one, it was for nearly six months in the future, and almost an hour’s drive from where I live. It was far from ideal, but it was better than nothing.

My experience wasn’t unusual. Research by the AA shows that, as of March this year, the average waiting time for a driving test had reached 20 weeks, compared to less than nine weeks in 2019. Currently, more than half of all testing centres are at the maximum 24 week waiting period, and many people simply can’t find an available test at all.

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There are various reasons for how this current situation has come about. During the Covid pandemic, nearly all driving tests were cancelled, leading to huge backlogs which the government is still struggling to clear. This in turn led to many learners changing their behaviour and booking their tests earlier, often before they were ready, meaning fewer people were passing and needed to take the test again.

The difficulty of getting a driving test has led to an influx of online bots, which automatically book up slots as soon as they became available. These are then resold to desperate learners at many times the original cost. While the DVSA charge £62 per test (or £75 for an evening or weekend slot) you can easily find numerous websites and online ads offering them for £200 or even £300 each.

This is having an emotional and financial impact on learner drivers. Learning to drive is already an expensive process, but many are now having to pay for extra lessons to remain test-ready while they wait. At the same time, the lack of places at local testing centres is forcing people to travel to other centres further away, all of which adds to the cost. For learners on low incomes, this can simply be too much.

Many young people are also finding themselves unable to move forward with their lives – effectively shut out of employment, education and other opportunities as they are unable to travel to them. This is especially challenging for people with disabilities or mobility issues, who have to use a car to get around.

To make matters worse, over the last decade there have been cuts to many local bus and rail services. This has led the Campaign for Better Transport to calculate that nearly a million people live in “transport deserts”, where cars are the only option. All of which means that, for some young people, having a driving license an absolute necessity.

These delays are also having a wider psychological impact. Like potholes in the road or long waits for GP appointments, it is a visible indication that our public services are fraying at the edges. Meanwhile, the ability of unscrupulous firms to profit from this chaos by selling on tests hugely undermines public confidence in the whole system.

The government needs to get a grip on this problem, and quickly. Labour won the last election by promising to fix our public services, but a year later the delays are worse than ever. A good first move would be to stop the bots from hoovering up all available test slots for resale. While this won’t increase the number of tests available, it would at least make the system fairer. For a government that boasts about harnessing the power of AI, a simple technical solution must surely be easily achievable.

The ideal outcome, of course, would be to create a comprehensive and affordable public transport system, which removes the need for most car journeys altogether. While the government has taken the welcome step of announcing a huge programme of investment in local bus services – this doesn’t go far enough, and will take years to come into effect. In the meantime the government must fix this broken system, and allow learner drivers to get on with their lives.

James Rose is a journalist specialising in demographics.

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