A generation of learner drivers is under threat from spiralling costs, stress and even career damage as the waiting list for a practical driving test balloons to unprecedented size.
Learners now face a wait of more than half a year at 57% of Britain’s test centres, according to new data released by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.
DVSA figures state that the number of centres with an average waiting time of more than six months almost doubled between February 2024 and February 2025 to 183 sites. Meanwhile, the average waiting time for a practical test nationally increased from three and a half months to five months.
The problem, according to AA Driving School spokesperson Lorna Lee, is the DVSA’s failure to fulfil pent-up demand for tests that accumulated during the Covid-19 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].”
Lee noted that when the DVSA temporarily boosted test capacity by 150,000 slots between October 2023 and March 2024, “you could start to see average waiting times come down”. However, it “was not enough overall” to resolve the full backlog, and because it was not sustained, “it just cranked back up again and now it’s higher than ever”.
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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).