In March 2020, everything came to a halt. School, travel plans, hospital appointments: all were abruptly cancelled to slow the spread of coronavirus. But four years later, though some lingering impacts of this strange period may remain, most services have long been back up and running.

Most, that is, with one notable exception: driving tests. After lockdowns eased, there was an avalanche of pent-up demand for driving tests. This was to be expected: many people had had tests cancelled — I was one of them — and while they were waiting, others had also joined the queue.

The result of this is that for long periods, it was impossible to book a driving test. I don’t mean by this that waiting times were too long: I mean it was impossible to book one. After going through a fiddly log-in process, and sometimes held in a queue to access the booking site, you’d simply be told there were “no tests found on any date” — not just near you, but anywhere within a hundred miles.

I first wrote about this problem nearly two years ago, in early 2023. Attempting to pass a driving test had already been, for me, an expensive, frustrating, and time-consuming slog involving multiple cancellations and long waits over the previous three years. Back then, I assumed that the situation must be slowly improving, that the DVSA — the government agency that administers all driving tests — would be chipping away at the backlog, and that things would be somewhat better by now. I was wrong.

The situation has not substantially changed even now, more than four years after the first lockdown. The DVSA’s website is still telling learners there are “no tests found on any date”. There is enough unmet need that it has fuelled a black market of booking agencies that offer tests at jacked-up prices, snapped up from the official booking site with automatic software. And while some learners find that gritting their teeth and paying up is the solution, others report being scammed or having their details stolen by these organisations.

This is a public service that has become completely non-functional

The most recent time I ran up against this personally was in July, when I wanted to book a test near where I live in London. However, there was no availability anywhere in London, neither then nor at any time in the future. There were also “no tests found on any date” in the home counties, in Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Colchester, Bournemouth. The closest test I could have booked was in Birmingham. In November. Complaining about this experience on Twitter revealed that scores of people had similar stories. Many responded with tips: which auto-booking apps I should buy, where in the country I should attempt to book (“have you tried Sevenoaks in Kent?”), and what times I should check the booking website (6AM on the dot on Mondays — “6:05 is too late”).

This is a public service that has become completely non-functional. Even GP appointments, though notoriously scarce in recent years, are not as bad as this — we have not reached a stage where there is a five minute scramble once a week, before dawn, for appointments in six months’ time; or where people are seriously advised to try a surgery hundreds of miles away instead of the one at the end of their road.

To be trapped in a system like this is incredibly disempowering

And the failure of this public service has serious consequences. While researching this topic I’ve spoken to people whose ability to do their jobs has been threatened by the driving test shortage, including both a police officer and a priest. Others are forced to spend thousands of pounds on extra driving lessons as a result of difficulty getting tests; or to regularly make inconvenient, time-consuming, and expensive journeys by public transport or taxi that would be easy by car, if only they had a licence.

To be trapped in a system like this is incredibly disempowering. For a young person who spends half their salary renting a box room in a flatshare, who can’t see how they can ever afford a place of their own, who spent their university years legally prevented from leaving their bedroom, and who is now also in effect being legally prevented from driving to visit their friends on the weekend, it can really feel as though one is impeded at every turn from growing up and living an independent life.

As one recent post on the DVSA’s Instagram account proudly put it: “Learning to drive opens a new world of independence”. What a shame that to those who have been waiting to take their test for years now, this promised “world of independence” remains entirely hypothetical.

My calculation is that the backlog currently stands at about a million tests — meaning that one million additional tests would have to be provided for normal service to resume. And if nothing is done about it, this backlog will stay in place indefinitely, with a huge cost in time, money, and lost opportunities to hundreds of thousands of people.

Any serious solution will have to involve some kind of surge capacity to move through the backlog. One way to do this would be to enlist Approved Driving Instructors (ADIs) to carry out tests — let’s say only those with a clean record, who have been working for at least ten years, and who have passed a short training course — a similar approach to how large numbers of appropriately screened volunteers were quickly trained to administer Covid vaccines on an emergency basis. If even a small fraction of eligible ADIs were temporarily carrying out tests full time, they could clear the entire backlog in a matter of months.

The new government should make it a priority to fix this crisis. Other problems, such as NHS waiting times and the broken housing market, are extremely complex and difficult to make headway on; here is one where a real difference can be made quickly and cheaply, boosting employment and buying an enormous amount of goodwill.

Since the election last month, Keir Starmer has promised a programme of “national renewal”. Labour’s new transport secretary Louise Haigh said in her first speech that she wants to “move fast and fix things”. Here is their first chance to show that they mean it.