As many of you will already know, waiting times for a practical driving test were standing at 20.4 weeks in October last year. The situation was so bad that it led to the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency creating a six-month plan to increase available tests by 150,000 to tackle the issue.

We’re now four months in and the DVSA’s boss, Loveday Ryder, has issued an update on progress. She writes in her blog that “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.”

That’s in spite of a 24.2% increase in driving tests in December 2023 – the busiest on record – compared to the same month last year (152,474 tests in 2024 versus 115,641 tests in 2023).

Helping hand

To help bring down waiting times, the DVSA has been drafting in examiners from areas with lower waiting times into areas that need additional support – and this approach appears to be paying off.

For instance, at its peak, the average waiting time for a test stood at 20.6 weeks in August 2023. This has now fallen to 15.1 weeks on average by the end of this January. Just as importantly, waiting times at driving test centres have also fallen. Ryder explains: “The number of test centres with waits of 24 weeks has fallen from 148 in October 2023 to 67 in January 2024.”

However, waiting times in highly populated areas and London remain longer than other areas with the DVSA committed to driving them down further.

Booking unblocked

The DVSA is also analysing appointments. “We measure and track the percentage of all the appointments in the booking service within the next 24 weeks that are still available to book,” says Ryder.

This analysis reveals that, on 24 April 2023, 5.9% of tests within the next 24 weeks were still available to book. This availability has now grown – from September 2023 through to January 2024 – to 21% nationally and in much of Northern England and Scotland, that figure stands at 34.1%.

Road ahead

So what does this all mean? Your driving instructor should now be seeing a wider choice of test appointments available when booking tests for their students, i.e., you.

Bottom line? It’s all a promising update from the DVSA and represent a genuine move in the right direction, one that we hope continues across the entire country in the future.

“We’ve made some good progress, but we still have long way to go. It’s challenging work, and we’ve been up against unforeseen circumstances, such as the continued increase in demand and changes to customers’ booking behaviour … I know many of you will be keen to know what measures we’ll be taking to reduce waiting times from April. We’ll update you on this as soon as we can.”

Loveday Ryder, DVSA

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Main photo by Levi Jones on Unsplash