Driving test delays

Practical driving test availability is an important problem for a number of people locally.

In fact, Birmingham has been named as the fifth hardest place in the country outside London to get a test.

I got hold of the current average waiting times for local test centres:

Test centre	Average waiting time
Shirley	22.8 weeks
Kings Heath	24 weeks

The Transport Select Committee looked at the problem earlier in December. I raised delays in Birmingham (and other high-delay areas) with the head of the DVSA.

The causes of the delay are complicated. They is a national shortage of examiners. Third-party apps and bots are leading to block-bookings which then traded across the country. A focus on HGV examinations during the pandemic drew resources away from car driving assessments.

The Government has just announced that hundreds of new examiners will be recruited, and legislation on bots has not been ruled out.

The investment should hopefully start to bring delays down.