Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to improve the efficiency of the process for securing a practical driving test.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is taking a number of actions to improve the process of securing practical driving tests by increasing the number of available slots.

It:

• continually monitors demand and staffing levels to make sure it deploys the right number of examiners to each location and consequently, more examiners have been recruited.
• launched a successful initiative to offer examiner testing over the October half-term, which led to an extra 1,000 test slots being available in this period.
• is running a ‘winter hours’ initiative between 1 December 2016 and 31 March 2017 to offer weekend testing and extra hours for part-time examiners to increase test slots.
• is reducing the number of motorcycle slots by 10% to free up slots for car testing to take advantage of the fact that bike testing naturally declines by 20% during the winter.
• has stopped taxi driver assessments as of 31 December 2016, which has freed up considerable examiner resource.

DVSA publishes all details of short notice cancellations and extra appointments being offered at local test centres on its online booking service on GOV.UK and on its twitter account: @DVSA_HelpMe