As soon as the measures to tackle test booking issues were announced on 12 November, NASP associations gathered thoughts and questions from members and compiled a set of frequently asked questions, which were sent to DVSA for a response. After a two-week wait, those FAQs have finally been cleared for publication today.
DIA CEO Carly Brookfield commented:
“Frankly, one of the key questions in this communications shambles is why these FAQs were not already in the heads of ministerial teams and the DVSA as they discussed such an announcement, so they could have answers ready as they made such an impactful announcement. Whilst I respect that the DVSA communications teams were as caught out (by the timings of the announcements by the Secretary of State) as the rest of us, a professional communications approach would have been to wargame likely concerns, questions and responses as decisions were being formulated to help land overall messaging better and at least look like you care about the impact these announcements would have on major customers and stakeholders, such as trainers.
In a meeting immediately following these announcements, I strongly criticised DVSA and ministers for such poor communications management, as much as for the lack of discussion of the consultation results themselves and the decisions made as a result of that consultation with industry stakeholders beforehand. We also wrote to ministers similarly that very evening. Sadly, we have had no direct response from ministers themselves, who do not seem to think that speaking directly with the driver training profession about matters which greatly impact their work is important enough work for an elected representative. However, we will be giving members attending our conference next week the opportunity to have their frustrations heard too by DVSA’s senior driver policy lead. In the meantime, please keep feeding your views into us via the survey we are running, which looks at both the measures announced and your overall confidence in the Government’s efforts to tackle test waiting times.”
1 thought on “NASP FAQs on test waiting time measures”
For me, three of the worst measures DVSA has taken are:
First, increasing the cancellation period from 3 to 10 working days. There is absolutely no logic in that. It made more and more students not going to their tests without cancelling because they don’t think it’s fair their test slot to be resold and they don’t get any refund. Or even worse, they go unprepared because anyway they will not get a refund, so they just want to try their luck. In both cases, that makes the whole situation worse.
Second, stopping instructors to swap students will only worsen the problem. I swap students all the time, because now with the long waiting period, we book the tests well in advance, not when the students are ready, and some of them are not ready for their test but I have other who are ready and have their test a bit later. So, they are really happy to be swapped and that’s how I can use properly both slots without stressing and frustrating my students. If DVSA is worried about misuse of this option by bots, they can put some restrictions on using this service, like an ADI is allowed to swap one student just once or maximum twice and that’s for the same test centre they were booked initially. We all know that for a genuine instructor that is absolutely enough. Bots are swapping students many times, rebooking them for test centres that are hundreds of times from each other. So this could be very easily solved.
Third, stopping ADI-s from booking tests for their students. I book for most of my students. All my students who were trying to book their tests themselves were trying three, four weeks in a row without any luck. They were put on a queue of thousands of people and when it’s their turn, there’s nothing available. So, how will these people book their seats, I am absolutely terrified.
It’s really a shame that DVSA doesn’t want to listen, there are so many things that could be done to improve the situation and they are only doing things that make absolutely no sense.