Driving test booking rules tightened after thousands of no shows

Learner drivers are now only able to swap their test to the three centres nearest to their original booking location in a bid to cut down waiting times.

It comes as official figures shared exclusively with the BBC suggest no-one turned up to take 64,500 practical driving tests last year.

The average wait for practical driving tests across Britain is longer than five months. The new rules will stop learners booking the soonest test available anywhere, then making a series of swaps to get a slot closer to home.

Learner driver Emma told the BBC she was waking up at 05:30 every Monday to try to book a test only to find herself in a queue of thousands. She now has a test in seven months' time.

In England the wait time for a driving test is 22.7 weeks, Scotland 22.9 weeks and in Wales 17.3 weeks, according to figures provided to the BBC by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) for April 2026.

Last year, 1,998,608 driving tests were booked in the UK but no one turned up for 64,500 of them meaning 3.2% were wasted, according to the DVSA.

Some of these were booked by third party resellers using bots with the intention of charging inflated prices but were unable to sell them, the BBC understands.

The number of no shows last year was higher than the 52,000 recorded the previous year.

Emma, not her real name, is 21 and has been learning to drive in West London for nearly a year.

"Some of my friends who need to drive for work were booking tests at test centres not local to them in areas that they hadn't really driven before...just so that they could get the test and just try and pass as fast as they could," she said.

Emma managed to book a test near to where she lives but it is not for seven months.

"I'm then paying for lessons every week, which is fine, it's good to have the practice, but when you've got so long until your test, it's just a little bit of a waste of money and a massive time burden," she said.