New Driving Test Booking System Piloted in Durham as Waits Stretch Past Five Months

Learner drivers in Durham are the first in the country to try a driving test booking system built entirely from scratch, as the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency works out how to replace the online service that millions of people use every year to book, change and cancel their test appointments.

The trial began this month and involves a single driving examiner at a single test centre for one day of testing. If it works, the software behind it will eventually replace the booking service used by anyone learning to drive a car, ride a motorcycle or gain a vocational licence. The DVSA has been blunt about what the new system will and will not fix: it will not create a single extra test appointment. Its job is to make the process of finding, booking and managing a test you can already have far less painful.

The pilot lands in the middle of the worst driving test backlog in years. Learners across Great Britain are currently waiting an average of 22 weeks for a practical test, and seven in ten test centres are stuck at the maximum permitted wait of 24 weeks. Anyone booking a test now, or thinking about switching instructor or test centre, needs to understand both what is changing and what still is not.

A System Built Around the People Who Use It Every Day

The new platform is being built by Kainos, the Belfast headquartered technology firm brought onto the project last September. Rather than starting with code, the team spent months talking to the people who rely on the current system most: learner drivers hunting for available slots, the DVSA deployment team who has to make sure examiners are in the right place on the right day, and the customer service staff who field daily calls from learners struggling to book or manage a test.

That research has to translate into a system that still does everything the current one does behind the scenes. The new platform has to check a learner’s entitlement with the DVLA, confirm they have passed their theory test, take payment, send the booking details to the examiner’s iPad ahead of the test, and, once someone passes, notify the DVLA so a full licence can be issued. Getting all of that to work together reliably is, in the DVSA’s own words, no mean feat.

Rather than switch every learner over in one move, the agency is testing the system in the smallest possible slice first: a single day, a single examiner, one test centre. Durham was chosen for the first run, with DVSA staff contacting local approved driving instructors to find pupils who were ready to take their test and willing to take part. Further small scale trials are planned before the end of the year, each one designed to catch problems while they affect a handful of people rather than thousands.

Why Booking a Test Has Become Such a Fight

The frustration prompting this overhaul goes back years. From February 2021 to now, the DVSA has added just 83 driving examiners against an internal target of 400, while examiners have been leaving the agency at roughly double the rate of the wider civil service, with an attrition rate of 14% in 2024 to 2025 blamed in part on uncompetitive pay and safety concerns raised by examiners themselves. The National Audit Office has warned the resulting backlog will not clear until November 2027 without urgent reform.

To chip away at the numbers in the meantime, the government has mobilised 36 Ministry of Defence driving examiners to conduct tests one day a week for 12 months, adding up to 6,500 extra tests to the system. It is a stopgap rather than a fix, and the DVSA has been careful to describe the new booking platform as separate work aimed at the experience of booking a test, not the underlying shortage of examiners delivering them.

The backlog has also created a market for people willing to exploit it. Third party services that scan the booking system around the clock for cancelled slots, then resell them to desperate learners, have operated for years, sometimes charging well above the official fee for what should be a free cancellation. From 12 May 2026, using any unofficial service, including cancellation finder apps and websites, to search for or manage a test booking has broken the DVSA’s terms and conditions, and driving instructors are now barred from making a booking on a learner’s behalf. Anyone caught doing either can have their online booking access suspended for 12 months, locking them out of booking, changing or cancelling a test through the official channel entirely.

What to Do If You Are Learning to Drive Right Now

None of the platform work changes what you need to do today. Tests must still be booked through the official gov.uk service, and the only person who can do that is the learner themselves, not a parent, partner or instructor. The fee is fixed at £62 for a weekday test and £75 for an evening, weekend or bank holiday slot. If you are ever asked to pay more than that to secure a slot, you are dealing with an unofficial reseller rather than the DVSA.

From 9 June 2026, learners have also only been able to move a booked test to one of the three nearest available test centres, rather than searching the whole country for an earlier date. It is designed to stop candidates hoarding multiple bookings across different regions while everyone else waits, but it does mean it pays to be realistic about which centres you can actually reach before you book.

Cancelling also carries more risk than it used to. From April 2025, car test candidates must give 10 full working days’ notice to change or cancel a test without losing the fee, up from the 3 days that still applies to motorcycle, lorry and bus tests. Give less notice than that and you will not automatically get your money back, though a refund could still be possible if you can show illness or injury prevented you from attending. Approved driving instructors can still advise on when a pupil is ready and can flag their own availability so a test does not land on a date they cannot cover, but they cannot make or manage the booking itself. If an instructor offers to “sort the test” for you, ask exactly how: doing it on a learner’s behalf is no longer allowed.

What Happens After the Durham Trial

DVSA has said Durham is the first of several small scale trials planned for the rest of the year. Outcomes from this pilot will be published before the next stage is confirmed, and the agency has committed to updating driving instructors and learners as each stage completes rather than announcing a single big bang switch-over date.

There is no published date for a wider rollout, and the DVSA has repeated that the new system’s job is to make booking fairer and less stressful, not to shorten the underlying wait. For now, the safest way to protect your place in the queue is the one that has not changed: book directly through gov.uk, keep your login details to yourself, give proper notice if your plans change, and treat any site or app promising a faster test than the official service as a warning sign rather than a shortcut.

Sources:

• DVSA, “New driving test booking service: progress report and getting ready for a trial”, Despatch blog, 7 July 2026
• GOV.UK, “Mirror, signal, manoeuvres: Military driving examiners mobilised to cut test backlog”
• GOV.UK, “End of the road for unofficial driving test booking services”
• GOV.UK, “New rule for driving test changes and cancellations to reduce waiting times”
• GOV.UK, “Changes to driving test booking rules in 2026”