Learner drivers face more than a year of additional delay before the government fulfils its promise to slash backlogged waiting times. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs on Wednesday that the target of reducing the average waiting time for a driving test to seven weeks will not be met until autumn next year — despite having already been pushed back from the end of 2025 to summer 2026.
Latest Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) figures put the average wait last month at nearly 22 weeks. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the typical wait was about five weeks. Alexander had initially aimed to cut waiting times to seven weeks by the end of 2025, then revised that to summer 2026, but admitted to a committee of MPs that even that would not be possible.
“Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander says driving test wait time target of seven weeks will not be met until autumn 2026.”
“Demand is still very high,” she said, acknowledging “there was still a lot of work to do”. She said she understood people’s frustrations and insisted the government has done a lot to tackle the issue. The BBC has repeatedly heard from learner drivers frustrated by the difficulty of booking tests when and where they need them. Some have bought slots from resellers charging many times the official cost. A BBC investigation in December found driving instructors were being offered kickbacks of up to £250 a month to sell their login details to touts.
In response, the government has introduced a series of changes to the booking system. Since 12 May, only pupils themselves — not instructors or anyone else — can book a test. At the end of March, a rule came in limiting changes to a booked slot to just two. From 9 June, learners moving a test can only shift it to the three test centres closest to the original booking, a measure designed to stop speculative bookings that are then swapped to a more convenient location.
Alexander told MPs it was too early to draw conclusions, but pointed to evidence of less speculative booking since the latest changes were brought in. “The volume of test swaps has gone down by 70%,” she said. She also reported a net increase of 147 examiners in the 12 months to May, addressing a previously highlighted issue of recruiting and retaining enough staff.
“My aspiration is to get us back down to a point where when someone is booking a test, they’re not having to wait months on end to get one, which is the situation for some people in some locations at the moment,” she said. The revised autumn 2026 target means that hope remains at least a year away.