Driving Test Availability

Shaun Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) on securing this debate. It is good to see the Minister in her place. Skills, opportunities and job creation are at the top of my agenda as the Member of Parliament for Telford, and I know that for many in this Chamber, that will be the same for them.

The Government are doing a lot of work to improve skills and opportunities for jobs and qualifications in places like my constituency, but the role that transport plays in that process cannot be overstated. As of September 2024, the average waiting time for a driving test in the midlands and the south-west was more than 21 weeks, or around 5 months, which is the highest of any region in the country. As we have heard, that average does not include the countless people who cannot book a test in the first place or who are put off by the number of delays. The chronic shortage of driving tests disproportionately affects young people and those most in need of access to training and jobs.

There are many parts of the country where having to wait months upon months for a driving test, or not getting one at all, is an insurmountable problem for young people because opportunities to walk or catch public transport simply do not exist. For young people in places like mine, the difference between waiting one month or one year for a driving test could mean not getting the qualification at their local college, or not being able to do the job that they have applied for and have been successful in obtaining, or it could mean worse outcomes for their families. I conducted a survey in my constituency on this issue, and over 40% of the constituents who responded said that they have had to book a driving test before they have taken a single driving lesson, which puts a huge amount of pressure on those young people. Around 50% of those who completed my survey said that the delays in booking a test made it less likely that they would start to learn to drive in the first place. It is a barrier to development, and it is a barrier to getting to work.

Unless this issue is addressed, the problem is only going to get worse. We know from the Government that economic growth is quite rightly the No. 1 mission, but breaking down barriers to opportunity should also be a priority. Getting a grip of the issue will impact both of those missions, and I ask the Minister whether she will create a taskforce so that she can hold these officials to account for improvement on this because, ultimately, it is a barrier to opportunity and employment for our young people.

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[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?