Driving test waiting times are the subject of the latest DVSA Despatch blog.

It is an area of immense interest across the industry and the learning public following the backlog caused by the Covid pandemic and lockdowns.

This has left “many learner drivers waiting longer than we’d like to take a driving test”.

Call to action

The DVSA state that they have asked all eligible managers and administrative staff back on the front line to carry out driving tests full time.

This is to carry on until the end of March 2024, creating about 150,000 extra driving tests.

On 16 October 2023, the current national average car driving test waiting time was nearly 19 weeks.

But they point out, this is an average and that each driving test centre also has its own waiting time.

The latest blog states:

“The figure we report is how long it is until at least 10% of the weekly appointments are still available to book.

Let’s look at an example.

If we have a test centre where there are 175 tests available each week, the waiting time is the first week when 18 or more appointments are still available to book.

Week number Number of tests still available to book Total number of tests in the week Percentage of tests still available to book
1 0 175 0.0%
2 4 175 2.3%
3 6 175 3.4%
4 4 175 2.3%
5 14 175 8.0%
6 12 175 6.9%
7 13 175 7.4%
8 15 175 8.6%
9 19 175 10.9%

In this example you can see that it’s 9 weeks until 18 or more appointments are still available. So the waiting time here is 9 weeks.

But you can see that there are still 68 appointments available in the weeks before then – so many people would not be waiting 9 weeks, and some would only need to wait 2 weeks.”

Tracking waiting

DVSA track the number of driving test centres that have waiting times in different bands.

For example, as at 16 October 2023:

  • 36 test centres with a waiting time up to 9 weeks (14.8% of all test centres)
  • 103 test centres with a waiting time between 10 and 23 weeks (42.4% of all test centres)
  • 104 test centres with a waiting time of 24 weeks (42.8% of all test centres)

More capacity

The priority for the DVSA at this time is to reduce waiting times, while upholding road safety standards.

Increasing the number of available test slots i being achieved by:

  • carry out tests outside of regular hours, including at weekends and on public holidays
  • buy back annual leave from driving examiners
  • invite recently retired driving examiners to return to work

Since April 2021, the DVSA claims these measures have created an average of more than 40,000 extra car test slots each month.

More driving examiners are still being recruited. Combined with bringing more eligible managers and administrative staff back to the front line of examining means capacity should continue to increase.

You can read the full Despatch blog here.