Big news out of the DVSA

It's been an incredibly rough couple of months for the DVSA and for anyone who has to rub shoulders with this industry.  Waiting times for tests are still sky high, booking systems are decades out of date, driving examiners are leaving in droves are but a few of the reasons the chief had to fall on her sword.  Here's the low down on what's been happening with the dumpster fire that is the DVSA this autumn.

Tests are still borderline impossible to get

The single biggest issue the DVSA has been failing to tackle since lockdown finished, which was the summer of 2021, is the backlog on driving tests.  No one had the insight to update a 15 year old, out of date booking system when it was closed for years due to Covid.  No one in the industry passed a thought of how tens of thousands of people would want driving tests the moment exams were reopened and tsunami of bookings has continued to batter the driving instructor world ever since.  Bots were created to snap up exams and a black market opened up fleecing learners for cash that the head of the DVSA was aware of, but refused to act upon. 

The state of the black-market is so prevalent that even the BBC was able to find some scammers in their report in early December.  Dodgy instructors have been selling their booking details for £250 kickbacks a month for touts to resell exams for up to £500 a test.  The DVSA, including the outgoing head, has been aware of this for years and did nothing.  I personally reported a few years ago after being contacted via WhatsApp to the DVSA and heard nothing back from them.

Deadline after deadline has been missed to get the wait times under control and just the other day the most recent deadline was pushed back from summer/autumn 2026 to November 2027!  That will be 6 years of having to put up with impossible waiting times. No other developed country around the world has had to suffer the way UK learner drives have, it's simple not good enough.



Chief Loveday Ryder's legacy

Literally every driving instructor I know is happy to see the back of Loveday Ryder.  She failed miserably in helping us in our day to day jobs.  Yes, it was a tough challenge in the wake of Covid, but she did accept the role in late 2020, the pandemic had already been ravaging the world for a year.  And when you earn £120,000 a year and receive bonuses on top of that, you need to do better.

The multi-million pound scheme "ready to test" was launched under her, knowing that tests were borderline impossible to get.  Which make a complete mockery of the entire project.

Her 7 point plan to tackle the backlog has been an abject failure and had to resort to asking what driving instructors thought she should do to make it better.  Why not have this consultation when she took the post?  Another example of a person in a high position with no background in that industry failing again.  Sadly lessons haven't been learned and the new head also has zero experience in this world.  Work and Pensions is hardly similar working territory.

Multiple changes to the driving test were made in this time, the latest being making the independent driving potentially longer, up to 40 minutes on a sat nav and having less chance of doing the emergency stop.  Hardly ground-breaking ideas.

The mass exodus of examiners

The DVSA would have you believe that they've been doing a great job, hence why Loveday was pocketing and extra £10,000 a year for making students wait in excess of 6 months for a driving test, but the figures speak for themselves. 

Recruitment has been something they've been pushing for years.  More examiners means more tests can be taken.  I've been stunned on more than one occasion when taking a student for a test to see them as the only student going out for that slot.  At my local test centre, ten should be going out each time.  At least.  This smacks of not enough examiners. 

Apparently in the last year, the DVSA have recruited 316 instructors.  Which sounds great.  However due to the rate of them leaving the industry, they actually only managed a net gain of 33.

The following is taken from a letter dates November 10th 2025 from Simon Lightwood MP for roads and buses, to Ruth Cadbury MP Chair, Transport Committee.

"The DVSA is continuing with recruitment campaigns across the country to provide as many tests as possible. In the last 12 months, the agency has seen an increase of 32.7 full time equivalent driving examiners. Work continues to tackle driving examiner attrition rates; the current rate of attrition for driving examiners is 12% as at September 2025."

A carrot of £5000 one off payment has been dangled in front of examiners to stay in their roles, but will that be enough for them to stay in the role permanently?

The shortage must be really worrying as the government has called in the army to help.  There are military driving examiners out there.  44 in fact that are due to help out.  Considering we have over 300 test centres in the UK and conduct nearly 2,000,000 tests a month, I fear this is just a drop on the ocean and a mere deflection tactic to show that the DVSA are doing something.  Because in reality, they're not doing enough.

And what I found just this morning whilst researching this post is that there's a deadline for wanting to become an examiner. 

"The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is recruiting driving examiners across Great Britain - the deadline to apply is 11:55pm on 31 December 2025."  This is according to the gov.uk website dated December 15th.

Details on the role -

Salary

£30,485

There is an associated London Weighting Allowance of £4,000 for centres within the M25 - please see attached list for details.

A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Job grade

Executive Officer

Contract type

Permanent

Business area

DVSA - Operations Driver Services

Type of role

Operational Delivery

Working pattern

Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time

Number of jobs available

200

Merry Christmas readers and hopefully next year, sorry, the year after, will see the backlog finally fall.