Learning to drive is hard work,  difficult, and stressful.  When students have put in their time, effort and money to develop the necessary skills, they deserve the opportunity to be able to prove that they are safe to drive alone.

The majority of the time when logging on to the government official website, there are no Practical Tests available at all anywhere in the UK, in a system which only shows 6 months’ worth of Practical Test dates.

The largest problem is lack of Examiners, many of whom retired in the pandemic.  The DVSA advertised for 700 replacements March 2021 but did not get enough applicants; why?  They advertised at £26K which is not a competitive salary for this type of role in most areas of the UK.

The DVSA have repeated the same advert without changes in July 2021, and then expanded it to August 2021 and will get the same result.

This staffing problem existed before the pandemic.  The Reading Test Centre should have 16 Examiners, before the Pandemic it only had 12 Examiners.  After April 2021 / the final lockdown Reading had 8 Examiners, and we are about to lose 2 more Examiners.

The DVSA Examiners are the ‘income generators’ for the DVSA.  A Practical Test is £62, if an Examiner does 7 Tests a day,  5 days a week, 46 weeks of the year, they will generate £99K each for the DVSA.  Increasing their salary by a few thousand in order to get more applicants would not only increase the Practical Tests for the students by having enough Examiners to meet the demand, but also by conducting more Tests would overall generate more income for the DVSA as well. 

Many students are missing out on job opportunities, simply because they cannot get a Driving License.