When the opportunity arose, I was more than happy to help contribute to DVSA’s aims in reducing driving test times.Īlthough it involves being away from home, it gives a variety of testing in different locations and also allows me to meet fellow colleagues from around the agency. To bring times lower we continue to ask our examiners from areas with lower waiting times to travel and test in test centres with longer waiting times, such as London, and other highly populated areas of the country.Įmily, who is a driving examiner who usually tests from Hartlepool driving test centre and is one of the examiners who has volunteered to test at other sites, said: Volunteers working away from home to help lower waiting times The number of test centres with waits of 24 weeks has also fallen from 148 in October 2023 to 67 in January 2024.īut as the chart clearly shows, driving test waiting times are still longer in highly populated areas and in the south. So I hope that many of you are starting to see this reduction in waiting times at the driving test centres you use regularly. This chart shows the waiting time over the last few months by the different zones. This map shows the zones and areas.Īll of the work we’ve been doing has helped bring the average waiting time for a driving test down from 20.6 weeks at their peak in August 2023, to 15.1 weeks at the end of January 2024. Each of those zones is then made up of smaller areas. To help us manage our teams at DVSA, we split Great Britain into 4 zones – A, B, C and D. This chart shows how October, November and December 20 compared. This was helped by the busiest December on record for driving tests, with 152,474 being carried out – a 24.2% increase compared to December 2022. Since October 2023, we have provided 100,436 extra car driving tests towards our target of 150,000 extra tests by the end of March 2024. We’re now come to end of the fourth month of our 6-month plan and I wanted to give you an update on the progress we have made so far. This will help us to reduce driving test waiting times. This includes asking more manager and admin colleagues with a driving test warrant card to do driving tests full time from October 2023. Driving lessons could resume in Scotland on 26 April, not 6 May as stated in an earlier version.Towards the end of last year, I spoke at a number of different approved driving instructor (ADI) events to update you on the work we are doing to reduce the driving test waiting times. This article was amended on 5 April 2021. The drop in the recorded number of young licence holders is around six times larger than the overall decrease, however, indicating that the number on the road has fallen, PA Media reported. They were not included in the latest DVLA figures. People who did not renew licences that expired between 1 February 2020 and the end of the year had their eligibility to drive extended by 11 months because of the pandemic. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this fall in the number of full licence holders aged 25 and under in a year when the Covid-19 pandemic increased financial pressures for many, meant driving lessons and driving tests had to be suspended, and resulted in more young people being locked down in their family home,” he said.Ī Department for Transport survey in 2019 found that the most common reasons for 17 to 20-year-olds in England not trying to get on the road were the costs of learning to drive (41%), buying a car (31%) and insuring it (30%).įewer than one in five (19%) of respondents said they were not interested in driving, and 12% cited the availability of other forms of transport. Steve Gooding of the RAC Foundation said the appetite for driving had not diminished among young people, and pointed to recent rises in the number of people holding provisional licences.
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There was “massive pent-up demand for both lessons and tests,” he said, and bookings were expected to “skyrocket when instructors can teach again”.ĭriving lessons could restart from 12 April in England and Wales, but learners in Scotland must wait until 26 April at the earliest. King said the disruption had been made worse by the government’s refusal to extend the maximum two-year period between passing the theory exam and taking a practical test. “This has been a very stressful time for many learners and indeed their instructors who were unable to work,” he said. The AA president, Edmund King, said it was partly as a result of the prohibition of driving tests and lessons for much of the past 12 months because of the pandemic. The drop emerged from analysis of data from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) by the PA Media agency.
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The decline is sharper relative to the total number of young people, which has risen over the same period.