Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps he is taking to reduce the waiting time for driving tests.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has a number of measures in place to increase the availability of practical driving tests. These include offering a national recovery allowance and annual leave buy back to examiners, asking all those qualified to conduct tests, but who do not do so as part of their current day job, to return to conducting tests, and conducting out of hours testing (such as on public holidays and weekends).

The DVSA has also started a recruitment campaign to increase the number of examiners. To support this campaign, the agency is exploring options to temporarily contract in experienced driving assessors from other road safety organisations to become driving examiners.

After lockdown, the DVSA returned to six tests per day (rather than seven) to ease examiners back into the workplace and to allow additional time between tests for COVID-secure measures to be carried out. From the 14 June, and following discussion with Public Health England, the DVSA returned to seven practical car tests, per day, per examiner in England, Scotland and Wales.

Returning to seven tests a day per examiner will allow the DVSA to increase capacity across the national network by an average of 15,000 to 20,000 tests per month. The aim is to increase testing capacity as quickly as possible, whilst maintaining a COVID-secure service for customers and examiners.