Driving Tests (Hansard, 20 December 1979)

§ Mr. Fowler

The driving test fee has remained at £7.30 since June 1978. The tests must be self-financing, and an increase to £10.30 is now essential to meet rising costs and to stop the service from running into deficit.

I very much regret that this increase is necessary when people are having to wait so long before they can get a test. However, we inherited a very serious situation from our predecessors. When we took office there was a backlog of 800,000 people waiting for tests—more 398W than six month's work for the 1,167 examiners then in post. Just to keep pace with the 2 million new applications a year would have required over 1,300 examiners. That was a wholly unacceptable situation. Long waiting periods were inevitable and there were bound to be serious financial problems as costs increased.

I have considered very carefully various ways to improve the waiting time. The most immediate problem is to build up our force of examiners as quickly as possible. This is an exceptional step in the present circumstances, but it is justified by the exceptional delays. There will be no extra call on public funds as long as the scheme remains self-financing.

Over 200 examiners have been recruited since May. We shall intensify our recruitment effort, concentrating on places like London and the West Midlands, where the delays are longest. We are also moving examiners to work in particularly hard-pressed areas. There are too few women in the service and we shall make a special effort to recruit more. We shall also invite examiners reaching retirement age to stay on. We are investigating a number of other possibilities for increasing, numbers, for example, lowering the age limit for examiners.

We cannot cut the backlog overnight. There are beginning to be signs of improvement in some areas, but a hard winter may cost us tests. We have a huge deficit to make up. But I am determined to bring about a real improvement as quickly as possible.