The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) will boost driving test capacity by 10,000 slots per month in a bid to cut the months-long wait faced by learners across the UK.
According to DVSA figures, learners face a wait of more than half a year at 57% of test centres. Moreover, the number of centres with an average waiting time of more than six months almost doubled between February 2024 and February 2025 to 183. Meanwhile, the average waiting time for a test nationally increased from three and a half months to five months.
The DVSA has now promised to double its capacity for training new driving examiners and will reintroduce overtime incentives for existing examiners. This should increase the rate at which tests are conducted.
“I am instructing DVSA to take further action immediately to reduce waiting times, which will see thousands of additional tests made available every month,” said transport secretary Heidi Alexander.
Speaking to Autocar recently, AA Driving School spokesperson Lorna Lee attributed the large backlog of tests to the DVSA's failure to fulfil pent-up demand from the Covid lockdowns of five years ago.
“During all those lockdowns, driving tests are one of the things that were stop-start, because of various restrictions at different points,” she said. “It’s understandable how [the backlog] built up, because you ended up with people who had been hoping to take their tests and then they couldn’t, or they couldn’t have lessons. There was pent-up demand as we all came out of lockdown and things got back to normal, but that pent-up demand has never been satisfied.”
The DVSA recently implemented changes to the terms and conditions of booking or cancelling a test to crack down on the practice of tests being resold for profit.
The changes are intended to prevent driving instructors from booking tests for pupils they don’t teach and from booking tests that a learner has no apparent intention of using.
The DVSA said this will prevent resale services from bulk-booking placeholder slots for to resell to (and rebook in the name of) other learners.
But these measures are only addressing the symptoms of the backlog and not the root cause, according to Lee. “It is a capacity issue – supply and demand – and there has just not been enough supply of test slots to fulfil the demand,” she said. “If that was sorted out, then some of the peripheral issues that are talked about would be [resolved].”
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BOTS, they're a big part of the problem. Why can't the Gov website just ask the applicant for their current driving licence Nr, it would be easy to cross check and enforce the one test at a time rule.
What goes around, comes around as they say; I remember in the mid-70s that there were horrendous waiting lists for driving tests, at least where I lived. My instructor got me to apply for a short notice cancellation - I got my test and passed first time within 10 weeks of starting lessons!
It was a nightmare during the covid era as I had two young people to get driving. We used a great app that for a modest fee, you book the earliest test you can, tell the app any dates you can't do then the app servers constantly check for a cancellation and grab it, automatically swapping your booking. It shaved months off the wait every time. (There are free apps too but they don't have the resources to check as often).