Plans for a crackdown on motorists who’ve held provisional licences for years and sometimes decades have been delayed over fears of a knock-on effect on waiting lists for driving tests.
A detailed briefing from the Department of Transport said any dramatic change on how many learner permits a person could hold was likely to lead to “a surge of applications”.
Officials warned this would end up “causing extra stress on the already overburdened testing system”, according to records they released.
The briefing added: “That is why it is so important for the testing capacity to get back to service level agreements [a ten-week maximum wait] before the changes can be announced.”
At the time the document was prepared late last year, there were more than 230,000 holders of learner permits who had not taken a test.
This included up to 32,000 people who were on a third or subsequent provisional licence and hadn’t sat their driving test.
The briefing said: “However, there were no records until 2009; therefore, it’s impossible to say, of the learner permits issued from 1994 to 2008 how many didn’t sit a test. So, the figure could be lower.”
A more detailed breakdown of the data showed that 317 people had been on a learner permit since 1994, of whom 117 of them had taken no test since 2009.
There were a further 327 drivers on a provisional licence dating from 1995 and 124 of those never sat a driving test over a fifteen-year period.
Others on learner licences dating back more than two decades included 414 from 1996, 463 from 1997, and 594 from 1998.
Another paper in May on proposed changes to the system said it was “a very complex project” which included the introduction of new legislation.
It said: “System changes are required in many areas of the RSA and some systems identified would not be able to cater for the change and a new system may not be in place for up to two years.”
A memo from January after a workshop between “stakeholders” detailed the scale of the challenges that were involved.
It said driver education systems were long “past extended [on] Microsoft support”.
The memo added that updating of records would need to be done manually with problems around “fringe cases” where a person had for example been disqualified.
It added: “Full and accurate costs cannot be established until change requests have been issued and responded to by contractors.
“Caution advised regarding system rule complexity and build effort and future maintainability. This is a significant project for the RSA requiring substantial budget and resourcing.”
Asked about their plans, a spokesman said the Department of Transport was committed to addressing drivers who spend long periods driving on learner permits.
He said: “An approach to address this issue has been agreed with the RSA, and discussions concerning the implementation of the planned approach are ongoing.
“The intention is to proceed when the driver testing backlog is resolved. The driver testing service is currently facing unprecedented demand, with the number of applications for tests rising by 23% year-on-year.”
The spokesman added that a large number of new driving testers had been hired this year and last to help bring test waiting times back below the target of ten weeks.
