DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has appointed a new chief exec to tackle spiraling waits for practical driving tests with bots overrunning its aging booking system. Beverley Warmington will join the agency on January 5. "I have every confidence she will grip the driving test backlog and robustly oversee the …
My kids went through all the pain with this system during and after Covid. It's utterly unbelievable that a Government service has simply been allowed to be taken over by commercial touts charging 10x the normal price. The DSVA should have recognised this issue years ago and fixed it. It's even more unbelievable that they still don't have any specialised staff. Complete failure by a public service organisation.
I imagine the failure is central government refusing funding.
The fact that the system is 18 years old or 18 months old is not the issues, it's that it is poorly conceived. If I book a test in my name then someone else can't turn up with ID that says anything else than my name. Don't allow people to change the details of something that's booked without making sure it's fixing a typo or a genuine address change due to a move which should be a very small number of cases.
The failure is also that apparently people are willing to pay significantly more than £62 for their tests, but the government doesn't introduce a sensible pricing model, with higher charges for more urgent bookings, and use the proceeds to properly fund the testing system so they can attract more testers.
If the system were actually working as it should do, the time between applying for a test appointment and the date of the test itself would be short enough that there would be no such thing as an 'urgent' test appointment ;)
Not really comparable with the need for urgent passport renewals which occur solely because someone has either forgotten their passport needs to be renewed until shortly before they need to use it, or possibly because they couldn't be bothered to check, and apply for a new passport sufficiently in advance of needing it.
The logical corollary to your pricing model (pay more for the tests, higher charges for more urgent bookings) is that grocery shopping could be means tested, with the richer paying more for groceries like a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. [Other examples are available...]
Just make the system fair, and safe from the wicked.
> The fact that the system is 18 years old or 18 months old is not the issues, it's that it is poorly conceived
So let me get this straight: you're criticising the system because the people who designed it weren't able to accurately predict 18 years into the future?
It wasn't a case of trying to see into the future - the system has been a problem from the outset. A problem that has become steadily worse as more and more chancers cottoned on to the ease with which the system could be abused and manipulated to line their own pockets.
A potential for abuse that could (and should) have been forseen at the outset.
A problem exacerbated by the abject failure of civil servants to see the problems as they developed, and change the rules governing the system to stop the abuse.
As seems to invariably be the case when politicians and civil servants are involved, inertia is the order-of-the-day, and little if anything gets done, and what is done amounts to little more than tinkering around the edges, whilst allowing the root problems to keep expanding.
The number of people needing to take a test hasn't massively expanded in the last 18 years so it is not simply a case of the system becoming overloaded, and whilst the hiatus in testing during covid did create a very significant backlog when testing resumed, and this has had a massive ongoing impact on waiting lists, it remains the abusive block booking by touts which is perpetuating the problems.
As seems to invariably be the case when politicians and civil servants are involved, inertia is the order-of-the-day, and little if anything gets done, and what is done amounts to little more than tinkering around the edges, whilst allowing the root problems to keep expanding.
Pretty much, because our model of government actively stops civil servants making decisions, and requires them to be passed up the chain to elected politicians. With the average minister of the past fifteen years having only lasted about 22 months in office, most of the time they're the blind leading the hand-tied. Culturally, the Civil Service has also become averse to taking the initiative or innovating, and as a result has very little results focus. I base that on the fact that I've been a civil servant for around five years, but can contrast it to 30+ years private sector experience.
What needs to be different here is a few simple things, but that are culturally difficult for the incumbents of both Westminster and Whitehall. For starters, civil servants need more freedom to exercise some decision making, with that limited by scope to avoid any undemocratic policy changes or major commitments being made without approval, and subject to post-hoc review and approval. That's not really any different from giving senior managers in business their own P&L. Next up, senior civil servants need to be made accountable, and then held to account for their decisions, and the inept need clearing out. And finally, like most of the private sector the Civil Service needs to have bonus schemes that tie a chunk of their pay to ensuring the right things happen. There is a Senior Civil Service incentive scheme, but its a lower share of pay than typical private sector schemes, and more important it is largely tied to trivia like ensuring that their teams have done all their mandatory training and crap like that, not to the outcomes that the public care about.
I think that the biggest problem is expecting a minister to give up power. Although they are over-worked*, have too much responsibility, and too little time to focus on the big picture, can you see any politician agreeing to delegate power to their mandarins? They're quite happy to outsource their thinking to a SpAd, but pretty reluctant to actual use the capabilities of the large organisations who work for their permanent secretary. Whilst the public opinion of the Civil Service is near-universally negative, it is for the most part a professionally run organisation of capable and committed people, but fails to live up to its potential largely for the reasons above, plus a bad habit of giving people specific roles and then not using their other skills and experience more widely.
* Some have been lazy fuckers, but the actual volume of decisions they have to make is enormous. Not unusual for a minister to spend all day in the office, and then be handed his red box with 70 or so papers that they are supposed to read and make decisions on.
> A problem exacerbated by the abject failure of civil servants to see the problems as they developed, and change the rules governing the system to stop the abuse.
You maybe surprised to hear that Civil Servants are perfectly capable of seeing problems, even without the 20:20 hindsight that you have blessed yourself with. The thing that Civil Servants are constrained by, and which you are ignoring, is that (a) Government IT runs on budgets - no budget means no changes; and (b) budgets are allocated by priority and, in Government, there are always more priorities than funding allows.
So until this issue hits the headlines no funding is available. Once it does hit the headlines, funding magically becomes available, which is exactly what we are seeing now.
> weren't able to accurately predict 18 years into the future?
Why should it be better in the UK that here: Nobody seems to know how many kids are born to plan ahead when those kids would need something. KITA places, school sizes, higher education or apprenticeship places, and then a car when they reach adulthood. Those are all totally unknowns 'cause all those institutions are unable to grasp the "Einwohnermeldeamt" data to plan ahead. (Does the UK have an "Einwohnermeldeamt" ??? My preferred translation helper only gives "local residents' registration office", but no information whether UK really has one. USA does not, is against the freedom definition.)
And they do, but (a) politicians don't give a toss beyond the next election, so any resource allocation beyond that doesn't happen because they'd rather spend the money on bread and circuses, and (b) the UK has been subject to significant levels of immigration over the past decade such that any prior forecasting and planning is hugely wrong.
Does the UK have an "Einwohnermeldeamt" ??? My preferred translation helper only gives "local residents' registration office
Not really. There's voting registration but the only consequence of not registering is not being able to vote and it only requires listing of people of voting age. Apart from that there's the census* at 10 year intervals but I think some short-cuts are being put in place for the next one so it will probably become less reliable - the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if it all gets handed over to AI.
* It doesn't really tell where people lived, just where they were on census night.
Maybe the amswer would be to make it illegal with mandatory prison sentences/no parole ( say 10 years) for anyone writing or using a bot to circumvent the DVSA system - might cause a few bot developers/iusers to 'think through' the consequences of what they are doinmg
It seems like a simple fix would be to submit a valid driving licence number when booking a test and limit the number of tests you can book against that same licence number to something very low, maybe even just one.
That would kill the bots immediately, until the bot operators find a way to generate unique driving licence numbers on the fly.
Add to that an inability to route a test appointment to any address except that held on the DVSA record. For this to work would require a physical appointment card to be used when reporting for the appointment but surely that would help exclude the bots from the system, sometimes analogue just works better.
Oh and make obtaining /trading appointments illegal. They are DVSA appointments so they shootout be able to attach whatever T&C they want.to them
My daughter failed her first test after driving down a road with an intermittent (along its length), 24 hour bus lane that had just been opened after approx. 6 months closure. i.e. she had not even been driven down that road during her time learning. She failed for not going into the left hand lane when it was not a bus lane - she would have then had to filter into the solid line of traffic in the right hand lane when it became bus lane again. No regular or local goes in the left hand lane as it is notorious for people getting fines. (It was a pretty spurious reason to fail her - but she did later report the examiner for being a pervert throughout the whole test talking about himself and his pleasures, even when she was supposed to follow the Sat-Nav). It then took 21 weeks to get a booking for a retest that was then nearly 6 months in the future. (We tried from 05:50 to 06:30 every morning.) So nearly a years wait in total.
If you live in the countryside, where there is no public transport and where cycling is dangerous on the narrow, often twisty, (and in my area hilly) country roads with lots of lorry traffic, getting a driving license is essential to getting a job, or going to college, so you can see how desperate people pay desperate amounts.
DSVA have known about this for years. My MP wrote on my behalf to the Transport Minister 10 years ago, when it was not so much of an issue. The answer was just a fob off!
It is ridiculous that nothing has been done about it before.
Dunno what your daughter has been telling you, but that wouldn't be a test fail on its own. It might be part of a totting up of minor faults, but she'd have had to have... IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.
Really, driving examiners seem to use their discretion quite well, on the whole. If someone plainly isn't ready to be out on the roads on their own, but doesn't commit any major faults, examiners will apply the letter of the law and find enough minors to fail the applicant. If someone is ready, the examiners will be more willing to let things slide.
Pre-covid around a thousand complaints about UK driving tests were upheld each year, so it's reasonably likely that at least one poster here would know someone who suffered that.
If your complaint is upheld they basically never change the result, generally they only refund the official test fee. It's probable that the real rate of error is higher, people just don't complain because "what's the point".
> IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.
It is currently 13 minor faults for a fail. Examiners are supposed to use a "13th fault test" before recording any minor fault, i.e. if this was the 13th fault, was it sufficient that you would you record it and fail the learner?
The main underlying issue here is due to a complete lack of investment in just about every government department and system over the past 15 years. Whether you like that assertion or not, it's pretty much true across the whole of UK public services and is why so much of everything in this country is broken or barely fit for purpose.
I'm expecting a few downvotes for this comment but if I'm wrong please give an example of where this isn't true, and I don't mean where a service has been passed over to a private enterprise lock, stock and barrel, or where you are being encouraged to pay to get a service that should be provided free or at a nominal price for you as a taxpayer.
It has the same odour of neglect and (austerity driven) starvation of funding effectively privatising it into an unregulated surge pricing model.
They might as well let scum like Ticketmaster run it.
Shameful. Just like NHS Dentistry Royal Mail, Post Office etc.
Sometimes bots can be defeated by going low tech, however with the enshittification of the world that's ever worsening and the cancer known as LLM driven speech synthesis, it wouldn't take long for some "entrepreneur" to setup something to spam the call centre, that or outsource if to a call centre in the Philippines or something ......
Can we just cut the cord on IT entirely and just go back to pen and paper? (Never thought I would say that, but the last 15 - 20 years have REALLY soured me on tech......bloody tech bros.....
I rather feel the same way.
When I look at the current headlong rush into what they laughably refer to as 'AI', and at what seems may be around the corner in those developments, I don't think it is too far fetched to ask whether IT (and the internet in particular) can remain relevant in the future? Or indeed, even usable for anything higher up the scale than trivially unimportant?
Long time ago but it worked.
You showed the instructor you were ready and they booked you in.
I'd have thought that these days simple SMS/2FA should thin things out.
Only one booking per registered name/phone number with confirmation required.
That stuff is off-the-shelf these days.
As are booking systems.
Put the booking system behind a Cloud front end with appropriate bot protection. Restrict logins and add extra checks at that point
Should be bread and butter for Google/AWS/Azure, with whom the government already have deep relationships.
This way the load on the creaking booking system will be minimised.
Note: I do not have a MBA, so the suggestion probably won't pass the first hurdle
Funny, that's the kind of solution I'd expect from an MBA. The correct solution, as has been noted already, is to require tests are booked in the name of the person taking the test and to disallow name-changes after booking. Prevents mass booking by design, not by technical means.
Indeed, and they should remove the facility for instructors to book tests. That is the facility which is being abused. Tests should be booked only by the candidate (perhaps with a refundable deposit to encourage them to turn up), it needn't have anything to do with the instructors.
What's sad is, there is a shortage of instructors and many are being struck off, because the system incentivises fraud.
It's no different to the mindset where council builds a new sports centre and before the general public even get a look in, the clubs have all had VIP tours and been permitted to block book the facilities, covering most or worse ALL of the slots (given the obsession councils have with putting sports centres on school campuses, which due to "paedophiles, paedophiles, paedophiles EVERYWHERE" means no public access until the late evening (or worse on the weekends ONLY)
Clubs should NOT get special treatment, it's a 1950s Butlins re-education camp mindset that no longer works for the modern world.....
> Indeed, and they should remove the facility for instructors to book tests. That is the facility which is being abused.
Agreed. But I can well imagine that "in the old days" instructors would take the opportunity to book tests for their students while they were hanging-around, waiting for a student to finish their test. The local test centre staff all knew the instructors by sight, trusted them and everything worked well.
Then a centralised IT system was introduced "to save money", the local test centre admin staff were sacked, and that direct personal element was lost. I'd be willing to bet that the facility to allow instructors to book on behalf of their students was included to allow them to continue to do what they'd been doing for ages. Allowing any student to take a test slot was probably even seen as a benefit by the test centre (managers at least): short notice cancellations due to illness etc could be filled by the instructors themselves which was preferable to examiners, aka Civil Servants, being paid to do nothing.
So once this new system comes into force, I'm willing to bet that once the backlog has subsided that will be the next thing the press complain about: examiners sitting idle due to cancelations.
The correct solution, as has bee
perhaps I was too brief in what I wrote - in order to limit the work that needs to be done to the existing system, the idea is to use the cloud as the gateway to the existing system - implement the restricted access at the cloud level - it limits the remediation work need on the existing system, until such a time as a proper replacement can be put in place
The problem is procedural, not technical.
At the moment anyone can register as being a driving instructor, and any test can be swapped for any other learner driver at any time before the test.
So when demand exceeds supply there will be a myriad of fake instructors registering as many tests as they can, swapping these "grey market" tests around between their clients.
If you block all the bots, that only slows them down a little. It won't stop them.
It's not about the tech. A combo of Covid-era hangover capacity issues, pathetic examiner salary, the unchecked bot industry across many sectors, and greedy driving instructors block-booking and re-selling test slots. Learners who had been conditioned to buy concert tickets to flip for profit, are also in the mix for buying multiple test slots.
The problem is that the DVSA isn't being defrauded - they still get their £62
Technical countermeasures are a stopgap and the rule changes planned for 2026 will help but this is a "personation" issue and there are problems with making it illegal to make bookings "on behalf of" someone else
Tarpitting IP addresses or even address ranges would be worked around in a matter of hours. Bot farmers have plenty of IPs to burn on this kind of thing.
REcaptcha and friends have always had the vulnerability of having the images proxied through to being access tokens for pornsites - never underestimate the tenacity and willingness of the average spotty teenager to solve "human only" puzzles to see porn. In addition they can be grounds for discrimination claims.
Or "I'm sorry, I didn't recognise that, please try again using the following phrasing"
Repeat multiple times
"I'm sorry I didn't recognise that, goodbye"
Or
"I wasn't able to understand that, I'll get someone to help, we are very busy at the moment and you can expect to wait in excess of 75 minutes"
(NHS24 and Police Scotland 101 are both apparently EXTREMELY busy no matter what time of the day or night you call.....I think they just leave the message on as a tacit admission they don't want to speak to you)
It's even worse if you're trying to book a motorcycle test as the number of examiners is falling as existing examiners are aging out of the job (either retiring or reducing their hours substantially) and new examiners aren't being allowed to shift across to motorcycles until they have completed several years as a car examiner.
In much the same way that after WW2 the UK handed full driving licences to everyone who had held a wartime provisional licence for more than 12 months and had no serious motoring convictions - my mother was among these and as a result was permitted to drive all licence categories up to 7.5 tonnes right up until she had to renew her licence when reaching the age of 70, but had never taken a driving test on any of them.
Few people do the 'Pass Plus'. They could introduce a 'borderline pass' that includes both those with quite a few minors and those with a few minors and one (non-dangerous) major, requiring those to do a 'Pass Plus' to focused on the weaknesses to validate the licence. That should raise those who were close enough to be safe while improving safety by making marginal passes do a bit more training, while also somewhat increasing the overall pass rate and reducing demand.
They could also allow drivers to use a 4-wheeled mopeds (e.g. the Citroen Ami) on L plates, subject to insurance and perhaps a 1-day CBT-style training course similar to bikes. This would encourage more to start out with a slower, simpler vehicle before moving on to faster ones. It would improve access to transport and should balance risk.
The manoeuvres and other test elements could be split. This would mean retaking one part would take up less examiner time, giving more throughput, while also allowing the test routes to potentially go slightly further afield and include more faster roads.
It's good to see restricting booking by instructors - that was an open goal for abuse. Less good to see restrictions on moving the location and number of moves, because the former will affect those who have to relocate while learning, and those who live outside of cities where there are few other centres nearby who might need to consider an intensive course at a city further away to get quicker progress. The latter will mean while the backlog is long you have to guess between moving things forwards a bit when you find something only a few months away and waiting hoping for something closer, because you won't be able to progressively get better bookings as they become available. It also means if someone finds they're getting rusty or otherwise feeling unprepared, they may end up with a choice of taking the test 'hoping for the best' (which may waste the test slot) or going to the back of the queue again. These parts of the changes will likely not actually help reduce the backlog, although a majority of consultation survey respondents did support the change, so the government appears to have gone with popular support over producing evidence of what will help.
They could of course, go back to the system that prevailed when I took my test in 1980 - when it was deemed that you were nearing readiness to take the test, you filled in a paper test application form and posted it to your chosen Driving Test Centre. In due course, the test centre posted a letter back to you giving the date and time of your apppointment.
Or is this too primitive to be considered nowadays?. I doubt very much that the extra time and manpower required at the test centre to administer this would be much more than the wasted hours taken over rescheduled and cancelled/non-attended appointments that seems to go on nowadays.
Why they ever thought that allowing instructors to directly book appointments was a good idea to start with is beyond me, but taking until now to actually do something about the abuse of that system by instructors taking financial bungs for allowing touts to use their login details to block book huge numbers of tests is even more staggering - even a complete twit can see that it could have been stopped at a stroke by either removing the ability for instructors to book tests entirely, or strictly limit the number tests and number of test centres at which they can place bookings.
Even in 1980, there were significant waits for an appointment - I took my test in Cleethorpes, and the waiting list at the time was about 8 or 9 weeks if I remember right, but it was shorter than the waiting lists at Grimsby or Louth test centres.
... the Reg Number of the car to be used for the test.
I did my later lessons and the test in a car I'd already bought.
By that time the instructor trusted me without having dual-controls for himself.
And, it should be a criminal offence to do the equivalent of ticket-touting. The only person who is booking the test should be verified as the driver
Why the merry fuck does a government agency not have the ability to enforce the log in and application to require the user's name, license number and possibly date of birth in order to book a test. This is hardly rocket science.
Instead the government can waste time and effort on making it difficult for adults to access legal pornography and pissing about looking like they are being assertive
Are we getting as dumb as the US now, where sex is seen as being immoral and dirty and not for the eyes of children but watching films full of death and violence is OK.
As usual, any government use of technology more complex than a pen gets messed up.
It's hardly rocket science but would require a rewrite, retest etc. Then there's be the H/W refresh*. Yes, it's not rocket science but it gets all the expense and complication of being a government job because an extremely complex set of rules have to be followed to ensure the government gets value for money.
Of course it would need new H/W. Whatever made you think it wouldn't?
Oh dear, oh dear. Another online sustem brought to its knees by bots. Perhaps we should go back to a telephone booking sustem where you actually dial a number. Anybody unable to follow this simple task has no business on the roads anyway.
Even better, how about we set BOFH on the bot operators and *clackety clack* reconfigure thr bots to drain the scammers bank accounts.
My instructor got me to drive to a test centre on my first lesson.
When we got there he said, you’re clearly ready to do your full test. No need waiting.
This was partly thanks to a free driving course at high school.
Make students physically present with ID for test bookings. No online bookings, except for remote localities, etc.
From what I can see, the delays in getting a driving test are mainly being driven by scammers.
Buy a test for £62 and sell it for £600. A nice little earner. Get your bots to snap up all open test slots and you control the market.
Stopping the bots booking tests is next to impossible. But the government does have one very easy way to stop driving tests from being a target for scammers.
Make it illegal to sell a driving set booking for anything higher than the cost price. Require all test candidates to confirm how much they paid for the tests and who sold the booking to them. You then have the details needed to shut down the scamners.
Stopping the bots isn't complicated.
Just restrict test bookings so that only the candidate can book the test (and requires their licence number etc. for the booking), and can only hold one test appointment slot at any one time. For an extra bot-frustrating layer, any slots cancelled by a candidate don't reappear for rebooking until a randomised length of time has passed (i.e. 'swaps' are effectively prevented)
There may be a small number of candidates in some edge cases that are slightly negatively impacted by this, but it's more than compensated for by the huge fairness benefit now experienced by the vast majority of candidates.
You think it's bad now but as the thousands of OAP mandatory retests to avoid losing licenses come into force the system will become an absolute nightmare.
I assume HM Government thought of the issues with the underlying system before implementing that policy so they must have an immediate plan of action ...
