New regulations designed to slash the enormous driving test backlog — which has left some learners facing an average wait of five months to sit their exam — have come into effect today. The DVSA overhaul, introduced on June 9, means learners will only be permitted to swap their test to one of the three closest centres to the one where they originally made their booking.
According to reports, automated online bots have been bulk-buying tests and flogging them on at vastly inflated prices, pushing up both the waiting times learners face and the costs they are forced to fork out. Meanwhile, some desperate learners have been booking tests at centres sometimes hundreds of miles away, before later switching them to somewhere more convenient.
The new measures come after it emerged no one turned up to 64,500 booked tests last year. Now a driving instructor has explained why the fresh regulations are good news for learners, reports Birmingham Live.
Aman Sanghera, who runs Clearview Driving in West London, set out what the changes mean in a TikTok video.
She said: "Today's change is, when your driving test is booked at a certain test centre, you are then geographically locked into that location.
"So, if I book my driving test in West London, I can only then change my driving test to the local three test centres from that test centre. I can't then move my test from there and go over to Swansea.
"Because what was happening previously is people would book a random test centre and then just try and swap over to a more popular one if a date became available, which is how they were selling them back to you.
"I think this is going to be be a great change, because I know a lot of people travel hundreds of miles to get hold of a driving test, and because they've never had practice in that area, they end up failing their driving test.
"So less people will be failing, which means pass rates will go up, and ultimately it will bring down that waiting time overall.
"This way examiners won't be wasted, so that 64,000 will no longer be a wasted opportunity for somebody to go out and do their driving test. So this is great news."
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However, Beverley Warmington, the DVSA's chief executive, said: "The location restrictions introduced on June 9 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".
However, Carly Brookfield, chief executive of the Driving Instructors Association, claims the industry "doesn't have a huge amount of confidence that any of these measures are realistically fixing the booking system problem".
In England the average wait time for a driving test stands at 22.7 weeks, while it's marginally longer in Scotland at 22.9 weeks, and shorter in Wales at 17.3 weeks, according to figures supplied to the BBC by the DVSA for April 2026.
