Learner drivers are now only able to swap their practical test to the three centres nearest their original booking location, after official figures shared exclusively with the BBC revealed that 64,500 tests were wasted last year when no one turned up.
The new rules, introduced by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), are designed to stop candidates booking the soonest available test anywhere in the country and then making a series of swaps to get a slot closer to home. The average wait for a driving test across Britain now exceeds five months – 22.7 weeks in England, 22.9 weeks in Scotland, and 17.3 weeks in Wales, according to DVSA data from April 2026.
“New driving test rules limit swaps to three nearest centres after 64,500 no-shows last year.”
Emma, a 21-year-old learner in West London who asked not to use her real name, told the BBC she has been waking up at 05:30 every Monday to try to book a test, only to find herself in a queue of thousands. She eventually secured a test seven months from now. “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,” she said.
Her driving instructor, Donovan, who has used the same local test centre for 10 years, described how some learners would “book tests in Scotland just to get the date and then change it to London when one became available”. At one point he went six months without a test at his local centre because none of his students could get one there. He hopes the changes “will reduce people booking tests that they have no intention of taking” and “free up a bit more space on the booking system”.
The DVSA reported that 1,998,608 tests were booked in the UK last year, but 64,500 – 3.2% – were no-shows. Some of those slots were booked by third-party resellers using bots with the intention of charging inflated prices but were unable to sell them, the BBC understands. The number of no-shows was up from 52,000 the previous year.
But 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”.
Emma, who has been learning to drive for nearly a year, said some of her friends who need to drive for work were booking tests at centres they had never driven in, “just so that they could get the test and just try and pass as fast as they could”. Now, with the new restrictions in place, the question remains whether supply can ever catch up with demand.