The NAO’s own report – not a headline grab, but a forensic look at how the practical test system has been run since the pandemic – lays bare some stark realities. It confirms that waiting times remain painfully long and that the DVSA’s actions haven’t delivered the turnaround the government repeatedly promised. Waiting times haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Learner drivers are often left in limbo, with waits stretching into over 20 weeks on average at many centres – far from the aspired seven-week benchmark.  

A few key findings that matter to instructors and learners alike:

The backlog isn’t just “post-Covid” dust settling. The NAO found the DVSA failed to really understand or model the sustained increase in demand, and it didn’t adapt its forecasting or operational response in time. That meant waiting times stayed stubbornly high even as other parts of government tried to act.  

The test booking system itself is broken for learners. Bots and third-party resellers have exploited weaknesses, buying up slots and enabling auctions of test dates at many multiples of the official fee – up to around £500 in some reports. That doesn’t just slow access, it creates an exploitative secondary market that punishes everyone trying to book properly.  

Examiner recruitment and retention is another glaring failure point. Over several years DVSA repeatedly promised big increases in driving examiners – but net gains have been a tiny fraction of targets, with recruitment campaigns yielding far fewer new examiners than planned. Issues cited include low pay and workplace pressures, which combined to make the workforce unstable.  

Taken together, those elements paint a picture of an organisation that consistently under-estimated the scale of the demand challenge and didn’t move fast enough, structurally or culturally, to tackle it. The NAO explicitly says DVSA did not adapt at pace and that this undermined not just waiting times but confidence from learners and partners alike.  

Here’s where we read between the lines: the wider media and official releases from DVSA have, at times, leaned on narratives that shift blame onto external actors – “bots,” “unscrupulous third parties,” “booking behaviour” – and occasionally on driving instructors’ use of booking systems. Those narratives risk making it sound like the backlog is something outside the agency’s control or caused by others, rather than a product of its own structural shortcomings and leadership choices.

The NAO doesn’t pull punches: the systemic issues are internal to DVSA’s forecasting, recruitment, retention, and tech systems, and the downstream effect is learners waiting far too long and the public paying more (directly and indirectly) for that inefficiency. The result is a service that lacks resilience and hasn’t delivered what government repeatedly promised.  

Framed plainly: the problem isn’t just bots or weak demand modelling. It is a series of avoidable strategic failures inside the agency tasked with delivering this public service. The narrative around “external abuse” can sound convenient when the underlying systems are old and brittle and when the real work of fixing them is slow to take hold.

Where the DITC stands

The Driving Instructor and Trainers Collective continues to both support and challenge the DVSA and the National Associations, including NASP. That challenge is not from the sidelines. Chris Bensted and Ian Brett remain active participants at DVSA forums, engaging directly with officials and stakeholders to push for practical, evidence-led change that reflects what instructors and learners are actually experiencing on the ground.

However, the NAO report reinforces a reality many in the industry already recognise: even when the DVSA acknowledges problems, meaningful change is often short-sighted or constrained by wider governmental structures. Targets, funding cycles, civil service frameworks, and ministerial priorities all limit how quickly or how boldly the system can respond. The risk is that surface-level fixes are announced, while the deeper causes remain unresolved – leaving instructors to absorb frustration, learners to absorb cost, and the narrative to drift toward blame rather than accountability.