A woman who failed her driving test has voiced her frustration after discovering a backlog means the earliest she can rebook is in November – more than 100 miles away from her home.
Ellen Pasternack, 29, who lives in London, found the closest test site to her was in Birmingham.
She told i she feels trapped as she wants to be able to drive, but faces a lengthy wait until she can take her driving test again, as well as potentially having to face considerable time and expense doing it miles from home in an unfamiliar place.
She says the backlog in driving tests is “ridiculous” and feels the situation is worse now than it was after the first wave of Covid four years ago when hundreds of thousands of tests were cancelled. By the summer of 2022, more than half a million people were still waiting for a test. Some parts of the country, including London, remain particularly hard hit.
The AA has called on the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) to recruit more examiners and make more tests available and the DVSA has said it is “working hard” to rectify the problems. Latest figures show that as of June 2024, the average waiting time for a driving test in England was more than 18 weeks.
“It is incredibly frustrating and very expensive,” she said. “I have already had to take my theory test twice because you have to pass your practical test within two years of taking it.
“But how are you supposed to do that when it’s almost impossible to book a driving test without waiting for months on end?”
Ms Pasternack, who works as a researcher for a non-governmental organisation, recently failed on her second attempt to take her driving test. She failed her first test three years ago and says it was a struggle to book a test in between as she was juggling finishing a PhD and working.
“I started learning to drive just before the pandemic and, when Covid hit, there were lots of cancellations and postponements,” she said.
“But since then, it seems to have become harder and harder to get a driving test, particularly in some areas. While finishing my PhD and working, I had too much on my plate to be logging on every morning at 6am to try to get a test, so I let it slide.
“However, you shouldn’t be having to do that in the first place. Since then, things seem to have become worse. More and more people are joining the queue and they don’t seem to have increased the capacity of available driving tests to deal with the backlog.”
Ms Pasternack, who lives in Wembley, north London, failed on her second attempt for driving too close to parked cars. She is confident she would pass if she could book another driving test in a timely fashion, but worries she will have to fork out more money for further tests the longer she has to wait.
She said: “It’s completely ridiculous. There is nothing at all in London and I feel trapped. I wish I could drive and have been trying to learn for years.
“Most of my peers can drive and I’m too old to be driven everywhere like a child. It’s very frustrating.
“It is also expensive and it would cost an awful lot of time and money to do my driving test in Birmingham or Kent or wherever. I’d have to find a driving instructor in that area and take some lessons to practice in that area to ensure doing a driving test there wouldn’t be a complete waste of time.
“But I shouldn’t be having to do that when there is a driving test centre literally down the road from where I live.”
Some people have suggested Ms Pasternack uses a driving cancellation app to notify her of an available test at short notice. However, she says that even this is not currently showing any availability in her area.
“It would also be a challenge for me to do a driving test at the last minute as I would need to arrange some driving lessons beforehand, as well as time off work,” she said.
The issue of touts using bots to cash in on the demand for driving tests is also a concern.
“My driving instructor told me he gets texts from random numbers offering to sell him driving tests that have been booked using bots,” she said. “He showed me them and told me he just ignores them.
“So people are using bots to buy driving tests and then sell them at inflated prices. But if there was sufficient capacity of available driving tests, the bots would not be an issue.
“There is only a black market in driving test slots because they are in such high demand.”
Loveday Ryder, chief executive of the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), said: “In the past financial year alone, we’ve provided almost two million tests and we continue to work hard to increase the number available by recruiting more examiners while tackling bots and those who are exploiting learners.
“We want to see more learners passing first time, so we’re working with the driver training industry to educate and advise learners on what they can do to prepare and improve their likelihood of passing.
“Learners can use our checklist and make sure they’ve had enough lessons so they can drive safely and are ready to pass first time.”
The DVSA says it has created almost 150,000 additional new tests and provided 1.9 million in total in the past financial year and added that it continued to recruit new examiners, offer overtime and have some managers carry out tests.