Driving Test Availability

Greg Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

Sir Roger, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today and I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) on securing this important debate.

Like other Members who have spoken this afternoon, I see the impact of this issue every week in my own inbox. Indeed, I saw it in the last Parliament, during the four and a half years that I spent on the Transport Committee, examining this issue as it evolved, particularly through the pandemic and the post-pandemic period.

Teenagers wait for months and sometimes over a year to get a driving test. People who have come to the United Kingdom to work also find themselves stuck in limbo, waiting for a test. I see the worrying knock-on effects for social and economic mobility for young people, particularly in rural areas such as mine in Mid Buckinghamshire, where freedom and opportunity very often come with the keys to a car and the ability to drive it.

As other Members have already mentioned, in rural areas public transport is often not a viable option for many journeys. Young people can be locked out of opportunities, even those within short distances of their own homes. Despite being qualified, young tradespeople—plumbers, electricians, carpenters and builders—cannot do their job without a car or a van. That creates a shortage in the local area, which in turn creates inflation for homeowners who cannot source labour for weeks or even months. It is not just individuals who suffer. I also see the impact on communities of young people and others who are stuck at home, unable to support elderly relatives and family members who require care. In some cases, they are unable to respond to a family emergency that could be a matter of life and death.

It is simply not tenable to stand by and let the situation continue, not when, as the RAC reports, unofficial websites are exploiting learner drivers to the tune of hundreds of pounds, which is more than three or four times the cost of an official DVSA booking. Other third parties are profiting from the backlog through cancellation alert schemes and apps that charge users a one-off fee to receive alerts every time a slot becomes available sooner than their original test booking. Sign-up fees can set drivers back nearly twice the amount of an official test, with VIP action and VIP packages. This problem requires very firm action.

As Government Members have criticised the previous Government, I will mention the fact that post-pandemic the Conservative Government took clear action. By the end of 2022, we had opened up nearly 10% more driving tests every week than had been the case before the pandemic, but despite the DVSA making 1 million extra tests available since the pandemic—1 million extra tests—waiting times have remained stubbornly high. That is partly because of the growing economy that the new Government have inherited and the demand that that growth has created for new tests—those are not my words, but the words of the chief executive of the DVSA.

A huge amount of work needs to be done, but I am concerned that we have seen frighteningly little urgency from the new Government to sort the problem out. Just last week at transport questions, the Secretary of State for Transport responded to a question about the crisis by suggesting that examiners would simply be deployed to areas with higher waiting times from areas with lower waiting times. If that is the extent of this Government’s plan—to move examiners around like a game of whack-a-mole—the backlogs will be going nowhere. We need to increase capacity, but according to the DVSA one of the main contributing factors to the lack of tests is “sustained industrial action”, which must be combated head-on.

Post-covid, the Passport Office showed the way: within two years of the pandemic finishing, thanks to a great new system and brilliant leadership, its backlog was smashed. There is hope that if the right measures are put in place and the Government really put their mind to it, these problems are not intractable and can indeed be solved.

[Shaun Davies]

Some of this has also been a long time coming. In Telford, for example, there are just two driving test assessors for the whole of the borough, which serves most of Shropshire—a population of about half a million. The previous Government should have done succession planning on driving test assessors and recruited more of them. Why did they not do so?

[Greg Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. As I stressed, the pandemic blew a hole—it did so in virtually every walk of life—in the availability of driving tests. We got a million extra tests in place. Did every single test centre have exactly the resource it needed? The answer is clearly no. In the spirit of the debate, I am perfectly happily to accept that. I was on the Transport Committee for four and a half years, serving for some of that time alongside the now Minister, and we saw these problems emerging.

Governments are not able to solve every problem. The Minister will be happy to admit that she will not be able to solve every problem that comes across her desk but to solve the backlog that still persists from the pandemic as well as the growing demand for driving tests—that is not just my analysis; the DVSA acknowledges that there is a growing demand—greater resource is required and the whole system must be scaled up.

Where does this issue sit on the Minister’s priority list? Is it a matter of urgency for the new Government? Motorists up and down the country want to get their driving licences so that they can get on in life, access opportunities, achieve freedom and get the pleasure of driving in the United Kingdom. Or will this issue fall down the priority list and not get the action that thousands of people up and down this land want and deserve?