Driving test booking rules tightened after thousands of no shows

6 days ago

Simon Browning Business reporter

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Learner drivers are now only able to swap their test to the three centres nearest to their original booking location in a bid to cut down waiting times.

It comes as official figures shared exclusively with the BBC suggest no-one turned up to take 64,500 practical driving tests last year.

The average wait for practical driving tests across Britain is longer than five months. The new rules will stop learners booking the soonest test available anywhere, then making a series of swaps to get a slot closer to home.

Learner driver Emma 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' time.

In England the wait time for a driving test is 22.7 weeks, Scotland 22.9 weeks and in Wales 17.3 weeks, according to figures provided to the BBC by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) for April 2026.

Last year, 1,998,608 driving tests were booked in the UK but no one turned up for 64,500 of them, meaning 3.2% were wasted, according to the DVSA.

Some of these 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 last year was higher than the 52,000 recorded the previous year.

Emma, not her real name, is 21 and has been learning to drive in West London for nearly a year.

"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.

Emma managed to book a test near to 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.

Donavan Smith, an instructor in West London, hopes the new rules will "free up space"

Emma's driving instructor Donovan has been using his local test centre for 10 years.

"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".

However, Carly Brookfield, chief executive of the Driving Instructors Association, says 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 BBC Your Voice last month after her teenage son had failed to get a test in Reading and finally sat his driving test in Bury St Edmunds, more than 130 miles away.

"I was also shocked by the number of no shows listed at Bury St Edmunds. Usually 30 per day! There should be a penalty for not turning up," she said.

Beverley Warmington, DVSA's chief executive, said: "The location restrictions introduced on 9 June will help to deter bookings at locations where learners do not intend to take their test."

She added that the DVSA was "determined to reduce waiting times further" and had delivered more than 217,000 additional tests between June 2025 and April 2026 partly using military driving examiners.