Payouts to learner drivers whose tests are cancelled at short notice have increased by almost 50 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic, new figures show.
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has paid almost £1.5 million to compensate drivers for exams cancelled by driving test operators over the last three financial years, analysis of the agency’s end-of-year accounts has revealed.
Drivers whose tests are cancelled with less than three working days’ notice can claim out-of-pocket expenses for travel and lost earnings.
More than 17,000 people in Britain have claimed the payments since the 2021-22 financial year, according to analysis by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) provided exclusively to The Telegraph.
In the three financial years before the pandemic, just £1 million was paid out to fewer than 14,000 people.
While the increase could partly be explained by cancellations made at the tail end of the pandemic, campaigners said the increase in payments showed the current disarray of driving test centres which have struggled to overcome backlogs since lockdown. Figures released this week by the TPA also show that Britons are waiting four months on average for driving tests.
Ellen Pasternack, from the group End the Backlog which campaigns to make it easier to book driving tests, said: “It is disappointing to see that the cost of cancellations has increased by 50 per cent, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.
“Our analysis found that there is currently a backlog of around a million tests left over from the pandemic, meaning that hundreds of thousands of people are still unable to book their driving tests.
“Clearly the DVSA is not equipped to handle the level of demand that we have seen since Covid. It is long past time the Government [should have] stepped in to introduce surge capacity and clear the backlog.”
If a driver’s test is cancelled at short notice, they are entitled to claim for any earnings they have lost through taking unpaid leave.
They can also claim for the cost of hiring their instructor’s vehicle for the test, or the cost of travelling to and from the test centre if they used their own car.
Cancellation payments reached a record high in the 2023-24 financial year, the latest year on record, with £697,000 paid out in 7,593 payments.
A total of £2,798,400 has been paid out in 35,657 payments since 2017-18, an average of £77 per payment.
Elliot Keck, head of campaigns at the TPA, said: “The calamitous quango is not just failing aspiring drivers, it’s costing taxpayers with its incompetence.
“The country remains heavily dependent on driving, not just as a form of transport but as a key part of many forms of employment, meaning that every cancelled test will be doing serious harm to the economy.
“If Labour wants to accelerate growth there are few pieces of lower hanging fruit than fixing the DVSA.”