Learner drivers can no longer swap their practical test to a centre on the other side of the country, after figures shared exclusively with the BBC showed 64,500 people simply failed to turn up last year.
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) tightened the rules so that learners can only move their booking to one of the three centres nearest to their original location. The change comes as the average wait for a test across Britain stretches beyond five months — 22.7 weeks in England, 22.9 in Scotland and 17.3 in Wales, according to DVSA data for April 2026.
“Driving test rules tightened after 64,500 no-shows wasted slots last year.”
Out of almost 2 million tests booked last year — 1,998,608 — 3.2% were wasted because nobody arrived. That is up from 52,000 no-shows the year before. The BBC understands some of those slots were hoovered up by third-party resellers using bots, who planned to charge inflated prices but could not sell them on.
Emma, a 21-year-old learner in West London, told the BBC she was waking up at 05:30 every Monday to try to book a test, only to find herself in a queue of thousands. She now has a test in seven months. "Some of my friends who need to drive for work were booking tests at test centres not local to them in areas that they hadn't really driven before … just so that they could get the test and just try and pass as fast as they could," she said. Though Emma managed to secure a slot near home, she added: "I'm then paying for lessons every week, which is fine, it's good to have the practice, but when you've got so long until your test, it's just a little bit of a waste of money and a massive time burden."
Her driving instructor, Donovan, who has been using his local test centre for a decade, said: "At one point, I didn't have a test there for six months, simply because none of my students could get one at booking there." He described the old system as allowing people to "book tests in Scotland just to get the date and then changing it to London when one became available." He hopes the new rules "will reduce people booking tests that they have no intention of taking" and "free up a bit more space on the booking system".
But not everyone is convinced. Carly Brookfield, chief executive of the Driving Instructors Association, said the industry "doesn't have a huge amount of confidence that any of these measures are realistically fixing the booking system problem".
Ann Harvey contacted the BBC last month after her teenage son failed to get a test in Reading and finally sat his driving … The full extent of the frustration, however, is written in the 64,500 empty seats at test centres across the country.