Letter response from DVSA Chief, Loveday Ryder

Letter received on the 23 May 2025 

Dear Dr Pinkerton,

Thank you for your email and letter of 9 May on behalf of your constituents, about the practical driving test booking system.

We recognise that practical driving test waiting times remain high, and I understand the impact this is having on learner drivers. Our priority, at this time, is to reduce car practical driving test waiting times while upholding road safety standards. We are working hard to provide as many practical driving test appointments as possible at all test centres. It remains to be a challenge, but we will continue to look at new ways of tackling this issue.

We have made progress on implementing our 7-point plan to reduce waiting times. But we know that our customers are not seeing the immediate effects of the measures. The Secretary of State for Transport has asked us to take further action to accelerate those measures. An accelerated consultation will also launch this month to improve our booking system and block bots from accessing tests.  

Since we announced our seven-point plan, we have recruited and trained 167 driving examiners (DE) since July last year. These DEs are now in posts and are delivering driving tests (a net gain of 44 DEs between July 2024 and April 2025). There are 47 trainees in training and 137 more who are booked for a future course. We continue with our recruitment campaigns, and once all additional measures are in place, we expect them to create up to 10,000 extra tests a month.

Test appointments are not allocated to regions, rather than to where there is a DE available, additional tests are added to their test program. For example, successful completion of training, agreeing to work overtime, and volunteering to be temporarily redeployed to a high-volume area from a quieter area, are all times when additional test appointments might be released. 

Our booking service is live, and as well as releasing tests on a rolling 24-week basis on a Monday at 06:00 for the whole week ahead, we do release additional appointments throughout the week like for the reasons mentioned above. New appointments appear on the booking service at different times of the day, and I would advise candidates to continue to check for new and earlier appointments regularly.

You ask how many third-party Bots have been identified and blocked. I should explain that we do not track the number of individual third-party Bots or services accessing our systems. Since late April, we have blocked millions of automated requests daily. One Bot can generate many requests, and while protections are effective, they are not always persistent; Bots adapt to circumvent them. 

We have implemented multiple layers of protection that have significantly reduced traffic without affecting legitimate users; these measures have blocked millions of automated attempts per hour. In response to patterns like the Monday 06:00 activity spike, we have introduced targeted rules, and we are deploying new technologies to detect and adapt to evasive Bot behaviour. Specifics are withheld to avoid aiding those attempting to bypass our controls.

We have zero tolerance for those who exploit learner drivers and are committed to tackling the reselling of driving tests at a profit. We want it to be a fair playing field for everyone wanting to book a practical driving test. To try to resolve issues with the booking service, we are increasing the number of nodes on our booking services for the public and businesses so we can allow in a larger volume of traffic, particularly early in the mid-week mornings. A node is any device that is capable of sending or receiving data to and from other nodes at definite and desired flow rates securely and reliably.

The queue system is in place on our booking site, when traffic reaches a certain threshold, the queue starts to work. This is to protect the site’s infrastructure during surges in demand. We do see a large surge in traffic every Monday morning at 06:00. We believe that the queue size increase and system crashes are as a direct result of BOT traffic which is causing instability on our systems; despite the protections we have in place. We hope that the increase in nodes, as mentioned, will help the stability of the booking system and in turn limit the timeouts.

We continue to encourage learner drivers to use only the official GOV.UK website to book and manage their driving test and published advice aimed at learner drivers to warn of the risks of using third parties to book a practical driving test. Further information can be found on GOV.UK at learner drivers warned about the risks of driving test cancellation finders.

We are working hard to improve our test booking system and make more practical driving test appointments available at all test centres and will continue to look at what more we can do.   

Yours sincerely,

Loveday Ryder, Chief Executive of DVSA