Why is it impossible to book a driving test in the UK?
How the DVSA still hasn't cleared the Covid backlog. And is bad IT, low wages or too many immigrants to blame?
My daughter is a relatively rare teen – a 17-year-old keen to drive. Driving has fallen in popularity among this age group. It is expensive to own and to insure a car. But she has, unlike her older brothers, sensed it would be a very useful skill to have under her belt.
She’s (finally!) passed her theory test and is, after expensive lessons and going out regularly in a little Suzuki Alto with her parents, ready to take her practical exam. But I cannot book one.
It’s not that I cannot book one at a nearby test centre. I cannot book a slot in the 60-plus test centres listed on the Driving and Vehicle Standards Authority (DVSA) website in London, Kent, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Surrey. The furthest ahead you can book a test is six months, and 79 per cent of all test centres in the UK are fully booked for the next six months, according to the AA.
Something has gone seriously wrong at the DVSA. It appears to be in complete meltdown and its problems have worsened dramatically in recent months.
The AA points out that the number of test centres with a maximum 24-week wait rose from 183 in February 2025 to 253 at the start of April 2025 – an increase of 38 per cent.
What’s gone wrong? Is this *still* a hangover from Covid? Or a systematic failure that speaks to a greater malaise within UK institutions?
It is now nearly five years since we tentatively started to come out of the first Covid lockdown. Today is 1,767 days since driving tests were resumed in July 2020. Understandably, there was a backlog and everyone understood that waiting times might increase. According to the AA, at the end of 2019 (pre-Covid) the average wait time for a driving test in London and the South East was seven weeks. Once lockdown was lifted, it jumped to ten weeks, and by summer 2022 – after another lockdown – it had crept up to 12 weeks.
A full three years on, it hasn’t improved. In fact, it’s got much, much worse. In March it was 20.6 weeks, last month it had climbed yet further to 21.3 weeks, the AA says.
Some insist it’s little to do with Covid backlogs not being cleared. Seb Goldin is chief executive of RED Driver Training, a large school. “There’s just a huge amount more demand than there’s ever been. There’s net migration of 900,000 people coming into the country. Let's say half of them are wanting to work rather than be students. And let's say half of those wanting to work need a driving licence,” that’s a lot of pressure on the system, he argues. It’s true that many gig-economy jobs now demand a driving licence and my daughter tells me that on all three (three!) occasions that she took her theory test, she was pretty much the only English speaker in the room.
It is also true that though many 17-year-olds are not keen on driving, lots of 25- and 26-year-olds are. This is the average age of first-time takers, Goldin says.
But in a functioning system, supply would increase to meet demand and the DVSA has neither recruited enough new examiners nor retained enough existing ones. Maybe that’s not surprising when the average examiner’s salary is about £26,500 – well below the salary of a driving instructor, who can earn as much as £60,000, Goldin says.
The DVSA argues that it is working hard to recruit more examiners, announcing it will recruit and train an extra 450 more. But will this be enough? It is very hard to find out how many examiners are actually working in the UK and the DVSA told me I would have to submit a Freedom of Information request to find out this statistic. Luckily, the assiduous AA found the number at the end of last year. It was 30 fewer than the year before. Has it fallen further since then? It is possible.
Into the chaos have stepped enterprising driving-test ticket touts, who scrape the sluggish DVSA website, snapping up rare free slots and selling them on at a profit to desperate learner drivers. In some cases slots are being sold for as much as £500, compared to the official fee of £62.
That’s one problem and the DVSA is working hard to crack down on these bots. But its IT is so unsophisticated it thinks any normal consumer who refreshes a page a couple of times, or logs on more than a couple of times a day – in a desperate bid to find a slot! – is a bot and it then shuts you out of the system. I am confronted with endless error messages on the DVSA website.
There are also lots of apps, which promise, for a fee, that they can find you a booking and close to home. They do this by finding cancelled tests and swapping with your existing one – but that requires you to find a slot, any slot. Which in turn encourages people to book a test in Peebles in November, even if they live in Poole and want to take it now, which in turn means any slot gets snapped up within seconds of it being released.
It is insane. Ordinary, well-meaning consumers have responded — completely rationally — by booking up tests the moment they become available, even if it’s the other side of the country.
Goldin blames consumers for “overloading the system” and booking tons of tests that they just don’t turn up for. I am not sure that’s true. For starters, you can only book one test per person and your test is linked to your provisional driving licence. Secondly, the vast wait times between tests means you just can not book more than one test every 3, 4, or, frankly, every six months.
Part of his evidence that people are “panicking” and booking tests willy nilly is that the pass rate has gone down from about 53 per cent to 47 per cent in the last few years. But this increase in people failing their test could just be because of the huge wait people have – meaning they get more rusty between tests.
The DVSA also hints at the idea that learner drivers are to blame for the chaos, by booking and taking tests before they are ready. “Our research shows that about 23% of learner drivers take their first attempt at the driving test within one month of starting driving lessons,” it says. It has spent a great deal of money and resources on a campaign called ‘Ready to Pass?’ – an effort to persuade learners to take more lessons before they book a test.
Maybe too many learners are being foolish. It is possible that some members of a generation brought up in a culture of instant gratification expect to gain a pass after minimum effort. Entitlement culture has led to over-inflated expectations, which the slow, steady driving examination system can’t cope with. Or are learners, in fact, acting rationally by desperately booking any test and hoping they will be up to scratch the time they take it? Because if they don’t book a test NOW, they won’t get another chance.
It reminds me of when queues started to form outside Northern Rock in 2007, amid rumours it was running into trouble. Various news reports said customers were behaving irrationally. Collectively, yes they were. But individually it was a perfectly sensible decision to withdraw your money if you thought the bank was about to collapse – which it was.
The key issue is that the DVSA did not get a grip three years ago when it had an opportunity to clear the Covid-backlog. Its failure back in 2022 to throw resources at the problem means it has got worse and worse. Like a motorway pile up causing a traffic jam on the other carriageway. On top of this, its IT is clearly not fit for purpose.
It is five years since Covid and many organisations are still operating at pandemic-levels of customer service and hoping we, the consumer, will just accept this new, worse status quo. What’s curious is that HM Passport Office has completely transformed itself from basket case to exemplary public body in the same period of time that the DVSA has lost its marbles. It can process passport renewals in just a fortnight, sometimes quicker. I am not entirely sure how it has managed to do this so successfully, but this Daily Telegraph article from last year gives some answers.
A vast effort was made to upgrade its digital systems, a project done in house, rather than relying on expensive outside consultants. I would like to know more about the culture inside HM Passport Office and how it focused its resources on sorting out its problems. Because whatever the magic sauce is, DVSA needs to acquire it.
Does the DVSA need a huge IT upgrade? Yes, very possibly. Does it need to hire far more examiners and persuade those currently working to do overtime? Yes. Does it need to work out how to shut out bots and third-party apps? Probably — but they only exist because the current system is so dysfunctional. And the DVSA has allowed the system to become dysfunctional.
I'm so sorry your daughter's having problems booking her test!
In my 40s, I decided to learn because of the pandemic. My examiner told me to book and I arrived at the test centre in February 2022. I wasn't ready, but when I looked at rebooking a test further ahead, it was months away. So I took a chance a turned up. I got to the top of the road from the test centre and... Failed. Back then, because of covid, you didn't do the whole length of the test, which is handy practice. They booted you out as fast as they could, so my test lasted 5 minutes.
My instructor told me to rebook, and the next test wasn't until June. I was absolutely terrified on the day because if I messed up again, it meant more waiting. And more money on driving lessons. The pressure was just appalling. The nerves were so bad that my legs were shaking (I nearly fell over walking from the car to the test centre) and I was braking too heavily. And yet - miraculously - I passed.
I'm really stunned that the DVSA haven't sorted the problems out. I remember back in 2022 that they were pleading with retired examiners to come back! I'm amazed at how low their wages are, too.
It makes the process far more stressful for learners and no doubt people are failing and having to restest because of the pressure. And bearing in mind that instructors train you on the roads near your test centre, taking a test at a centre miles away, on roads you don't know, would make the test harder.
Having worked in an area used by local driving instructors I'd say that part of the problem is the standard of driving taught. It seems to me that it's about passing the specifics of the test and not all round driving. Also, the instructors would daily get learners to park on double yellow lines while they talked, ignoring the fact it was an industrial estate with large lorries about.