Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, if he will make an assessment of the impact of driving test centre closures on the availability of driving tests in each year since 2015.

Driving test capacity is based on the number of available driving tests, which relates to the numbers of driving test examiners and the number of tests that they are able to carry out per day, rather than the number of sites.

The decision to close a test centre is made if the local demand for testing can be absorbed at an existing nearby centre without reducing test capacity, cancelling tests or impacting on the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency’s recovery plan to reduce waiting times caused by the pandemic.

There has consequently been zero impact in terms of the availability of driving tests. The DVSA recovery plan to reduce waiting times caused by the pandemic has resulted in an additional 586,500 driving tests being made available. As of the 12th December there were over 80,000 car test slots available.