I have much good fortune in my life, but in one respect I am unlucky: I live in the part of the country with the longest waiting times for driving tests, and I have been learning to drive.
I began learning in 2022. In June 2023, I was test-ready. But when I tried to book my test, there were none available until mid-November, meaning I had to pay for six extra months of lessons so I wouldn’t forget what I had learned.
I failed that test – a stupid, nervous mistake. After time off to lick my wounds, I rebooked my test in January. The earliest test I could get? In late June 2024.
The result of all this was that by the time I went for my second test last month, I had spent at least £1,000 on a year of unnecessary lessons. And I had the pressure of knowing that if I failed, I’d have to wait another six months, and pay out yet again.
I am not alone. In 2019, the average waiting time for a driving test at my local London test centre was 2.8 weeks. As of 4 March 2024, it was 24 weeks. Four years on from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused driving tests to be suspended, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), which carries out the tests in Great Britain (Northern Ireland is the responsibility of the Driver and Vehicle Agency), has not recovered.
While waiting times are coming down in Wales and Scotland, in England the situation is getting worse. In March 2022, the average waiting time for a practical car driving test in England was 14.5 weeks. In March 2023, it was 15.8 weeks. As of March 2024, it was 17.8 weeks, more than double the seven-week target set out in the DVSA’s annual report.
But according to the DVSA, I am the problem. Me and all the other learner drivers, for booking driving tests before they’re ready. As a result, says the DVSA chief executive, Loveday Ryder, in a chiding blog post, “those who need to drive for their job, such as nurses and carers” aren’t able to access tests. If only we’d stop being so irresponsible, NHS nurses and carers could go to work.
There is a straightforward way to determine whether this is true. If learner drivers booking tests when they aren’t ready is causing the backlog, the pass rate would be down post-Covid.
But Guardian analysis of DVSA data reveals that the pass rate for learner drivers has actually gone up post-pandemic. In the five years from April 2014 to March 2019, the average pass rate in England was 47.8%, whereas post-Covid, from April 2021 to December 2023, it averaged 48.2%. England is no outlier: throughout Great Britain the pass rate post-Covid is higher – 46.6% for April 2014 to March 2019, versus 48.9% for April 2021 to December 2023.
So if learner drivers aren’t the problem, what’s really going on at the DVSA?
“It’s like waiting for festival tickets,” says Calu Malta, 27, who works for a non-profit organisation. In March, she woke up at 6am on a Monday morning, when the DVSA releases new tests, to book a driving test near her home in north London. Malta will have to wait six months for her test, in August.
When a test becomes available, says Sue Smith, 62, a Newbury driving instructor who searches for her students, “it’s like having heart palpitations. You have to have the fastest fingers in the west.” As a result, some learners are seeing their theory tests, which are only valid for two years, expire before they can pass.
There is a way to get a test faster – on the black market. Dozens of businesses offer fast-track tests, advertised through WhatsApp groups, websites and driving schools. The array of dates on offer is staggering. Fees range from £120 to £350 for tests that should cost £62.
When faced with an impossible dilemma – spend hundreds on extra lessons, or pay touts – many decide that the second option is cheaper. “It’s unfair,” says Dan Cloake, a 35-year-old lighting technician from east London. In April, he paid £170 for a fast-track driving test through a WhatsApp group promising “early driving bookings”. “This is a public service and we are having to pay this private tax.”
In order to book his test, Cloake sent the touts a photo of his provisional driving licence. “It had my home address, my date of birth, quite a lot of personal information on it,” he says. Is he worried about what the touts have done with his data, I ask.
“Yeah,” says Cloake slowly. “A little bit. Now I am thinking about it.”
“It is a constant battle to keep on top of these bot things,” said Ryder when giving evidence to the transport committee last July. Touts use automated software, known as bots, to reload the DVSA website until a test becomes available, then grab it.
“It’s all above board,” insists a Bradford-based driving instructor as he offers me a fast-track driving test slot for £200. “Nothing illegal.” I’ve called asking for his assistance in booking a driving test in Thornbury, where waiting times last year averaged 24 weeks. “You tell me when you need it,” he says genially.
He’s right. It’s not illegal to sell a driving test for profit, although it is a violation of the DVSA’s terms of use. But when you examine how the touts operate, evidence of illegality emerges.
There are two main ways to book a driving test: the public access system, open to the general public, and the business system, accessible to driving instructors and driving schools. On the business system, instructors and schools can book multiple tests, and, crucially, they can swap tests between different learners.
But in order to book a test, everyone, including instructors, needs a provisional driving licence, registered to someone who has passed their theory test. So how do the test companies do it?
“On our system,” boasts the director of one firm that offers fast-track test slots for between £190 and £250, “we have loads and loads of other licences, all looking for test dates. So what we’re able to do, using their licence, is hold and reserve test dates, basically swap people in.”
The smooth-talking Londoner says that one of the agencies he partners with to book tests has “8,000 licences able to hold and reserve test dates for other customers. And as soon as one comes available, they’ll hold it, reserve it, wait for the customer to confirm, then just swap them in.”
This is how some touts operate: by reserving tests using other people’s driving licences without their consent, in a probable violation of data protection laws, and then switching in the details of whoever buys the test. A Time Out writer recently wrote about having her driving licence used to book 53 tests without her knowledge. She’d previously given her details to touts.
Fraudsters have even sent out phishing emails, purporting to be from the DVSA, asking driving instructors to share learners’ licences. “The police don’t have the resources to take proper action against fraud,” says Dr Ben Collier, an online crime expert at the University of Edinburgh. “Frauds like this are almost seen as not illegal.”
In the driving instructor community, it’s common knowledge that some instructors participate in these scams, to the frustration of their peers. “Instructors are buying tests,” says Simon Brady, 59, an instructor from Bradford. “They do it without their pupil’s knowledge. They get their driving licence details and sell it to someone else.”
When Max Sobol, a 39-year-old film director from east London, paid £132 for a fast-track driving test in April 2022, he sent a photo of his driving licence over WhatsApp to the touts. Sobol failed his test in May and struggled to book another. Not wanting to pay for another black market test, Sobol’s partner contacted the DVSA in July 2022 – only for the DVSA to tell her that Sobol actually had a test booked for that October.
“I suppose it’s silly to be giving these companies your driving licence details,” Sobol says. “But it’s the only way you can get a test. You give them your personal information, they use it to abuse the system, and create a bigger backlog, and it goes on. You’re over a barrel with it.”
Like an arsonist who burns down your house, then sells you a tent, the touts offer a solution to a problem they created. But Ryder doesn’t see the black market touts as fuelling the crisis, only as a symptom of it. “This problem,” she told the committee, “will go away when the wait times come down.”
As well as blaming long waiting times on the public, for booking tests before they are ready, the DVSA has pointed the finger at the people who carry them out. Driving examiners went on strike in December 2022 and January 2023. “We were seeing a steady improvement … until the industrial action part started,” Ryder told the select committee.
The DVSA does not appear to have undertaken much soul-searching about whether it might have done anything differently. After scores of driving instructors left angry comments under a post about waiting times, the DVSA turned off comments on a subsequent post. “This is not about censoring your views,” it said.
Yet the cause of the waiting times crisis is simple. There aren’t enough tests to clear the backlog, and many of those that are available are being sold on the black market.
According to Guardian analysis of DVSA data, as of 2024, the total Covid backlog for Great Britain is more than 1m tests. Since pandemic restrictions ended in 2021, the agency has made available an extra 212,000 tests, meaning that, at the current rate, it will not clear the Covid backlog until 2026.
“The core of this problem is that there are not enough practical tests for everyone,” says Rachel Newland, 46, a driving instructor from Reading. “And the reason for that is that there is an examiner retention crisis. Until the DVSA acknowledges that, nothing will be fixed.” Newland campaigns for the DVSA to increase examiner pay: a petition she set up currently has 1,883 signatures.
As of July 2023, the DVSA had recruited 474 new driving examiners since March 2021. But about 15 examiners quit each month.
It’s not hard to see why. Examiners test seven students a day, work weekends for no additional pay and are often abused by members of the public. For all of this, they are paid about £27,000 a year.
As civil servants, driving examiners cannot speak to the media. But conversations with well-placed sources reveal a stressed-out workforce. Candidates are angry at having to wait so long for tests, and take it out on them. They are being sent out with unsafe candidates in non-dual control cars. They are genuinely fearful of crashes. They feel frustrated and underappreciated. Another strike was narrowly avoided earlier this year.
Because the government determines civil service pay, the DVSA cannot put up salaries. But it could ask the government to make reselling tests illegal.
“Stop the ability to swap tests,” says Brady. “Then the whole scam will fall to pieces. It’s the only solution. But the DVSA won’t do it.”
The DVSA is resistant to this change because most driving instructors use the test-swapping service responsibly, to trade candidates who aren’t ready for their tests with candidates who are. Yet those benefits are marginal, given the way the system facilitates an exploitative black market. We cannot swap GP appointments, or primary school places, or NHS operations. Why must we be able to switch driving tests?
In the absence of the one change that would work, the DVSA has reduced the amount of times driving tests can be changed from 10 to six, and implemented more anti-bot protections incorporating AI technology. It says it has created nearly 150,000 new tests and redeployed managers to help clear the backlog. It has a counter-fraud team that reports to social media networks if necessary. To date it has issued 231 warnings, suspended 687 accounts, and closed 570 accounts for misuse of the booking system, and removed 4,700 accounts that were not linked to approved driving instructors. It urges the public only to book their driving tests themselves, or through their driving instructor, to prevent their information being misused.
In January 2023 it made it a violation of its terms of service to sell driving tests for profit, or use driving licences without consent. But dozens of touts continue to flout these rules. And so English learners must choose between waiting six months for a test, or paying the touts and risk having their data misused. But there is a third way.
“It didn’t feel right that I should have to pay the black market for something that’s a public service,” says Paul Weinberger. In July 2022, Weinberger, who is 31 and lives in south London, needed a driving test, but his test centre had an 18.5-week wait.
It took Weinberger, who is a software developer, one evening to build a bot to search the DVSA website, and it took that bot two days to find him a test. “It was quite simple,” he says. After he’d passed his test, Weinberger uploaded details of the bot to Reddit. “Please be kind,” he wrote, “and do try to not make a business out of this.”
Since Weinberger built his bot, the DVSA has introduced stricter anti-bot protections. I meet Weinberger in a cafe to see if his bot still works. He instals it on my laptop and smiles as it begins reloading the DVSA page, looking for slots. “It still works,” he says.
Ryder has said that the DVSA plans to rebuild its booking system. If that removes the ability to switch tests, an exploitative industry will slam to an emergency stop. But the conditions that allowed it to start up will remain.
“It feels like a lot of public services are broken,” says Cloake. “This is just another example.” Fourteen years since austerity began, we are used to non-functioning public infrastructure. We pay a tax to access basic services, such as booking driving tests, because we have no expectation of things getting better.
“I’m originally from Brazil,” says Malta. “In Brazil, you have to pay to make things accessible. It’s scary to see that happening here.”
As for me, I passed my driving test. If I’d failed, I wouldn’t have waited another six months for a test. I’d have fired up Weinberger’s bot instead: my indefatigable friend, a middleman who’s not trying to make money from my misfortune.
With data by Tural Ahmedzade
