Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what reports his Department has received on differences between actual and published driving test waiting times in the last 12 months.

The Department receives regular updates from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) on waiting times for practical driving tests.

An important starting point is to recognise that the way the DVSA measure and report on waiting times is not as clear as it may seem to be. The official waiting time is based on more than 10% of test slots being available in an individual test centre. Whilst this approach is useful for planning it does not reflect the situation centre-by-centre across the country nor the availability of the one slot any candidate requires in order to take their test. If DVSA were to report on, for example, the average waiting time for the next available slot the waiting time would be on average, only 7.6 weeks.