More than 64,500 learner drivers failed to turn up for their practical driving test last year — a figure that has prompted the government to tighten booking rules in an attempt to slash waiting times that now stretch beyond five months in many parts of Britain.
From this week, learners can only swap their test to one of the three centres nearest to their original booking location, a move aimed at stopping the practice of booking the soonest available test anywhere and then making a series of swaps to get a slot closer to home.
“64,500 no-shows for driving tests last year prompt new rules limiting swaps to three nearest centres.”
Official figures shared exclusively with the BBC by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) show that of nearly 2 million tests booked last year — 1,998,608 — 64,500 were wasted, a 3.2% no-show rate. That is up from 52,000 the previous year. Some of those empty slots were booked by third-party resellers using bots, the BBC understands, who hoped to charge inflated prices but failed to sell them on.
For learners like Emma, a 21-year-old who has been learning to drive in West London for nearly a year, the frustration is daily. She told the BBC she wakes up at 05:30 every Monday to try to book a test, only to find herself in a queue of thousands. She eventually managed to get a test near where she lives, but it is not for seven months.
"I'm then paying for lessons every week, which is fine, it's good to have the practise, 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 been using his local test centre for 10 years, described how the old system encouraged abuse. "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 said. "Effectively, you had people booking tests in Scotland just to get the date and then changing it to London when one became available."
He said 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".
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".
According to DVSA figures for April 2026, the average wait for a practical test in England is 22.7 weeks, in Scotland 22.9 weeks and in Wales 17.3 weeks. The new rules come as Ann Harvey, a mother from Reading, recently contacted BBC Your Voice after her teenage son failed to get a test in his local area and finally sat his — with the system still struggling to clear the backlog.