A sideways look at economics
It’s a well-established fact that most road users consider themselves to be better-than-average drivers. I am not like most people. I consider myself to be a distinctly average driver. I’m probably better than average at some things and definitely worse than average at others. (Seriously, never ask me to parallel park in a hurry.) In short, I’m very glad that I don’t have a driving test anytime soon. But it turns out that skill might not be the biggest barrier to passing the test…
When I passed my test back in 2018, the average wait time to book a driving test was just a little over a month. The latest data suggest that this wait time has extended to around 5 months. In theory the problem can’t get much worse, as current regulations state that booking centres aren’t actually able to open up driving test slots more than 24 weeks in advance. According to a recent report by the National Audit Office, around 70% of test sites were operating at this maximum threshold as of September 2025. But it’s also worth noting that, for the test centres with 24-week limits, new appointments can be snapped up as soon as they become available, meaning that the wait could in principle be longer.
Now, given that most people take a few months to learn to drive, it might be tempting to just shrug your shoulders and say that this isn’t a major problem. But what about the people who, like myself, failed at their first attempt? (A little over 50% of people find themselves in this position.) Imagine discovering that there’s now a five-month wait until your next shot at the test. I was talking to a colleague the other day and they told me that the going rate for a driving lesson is about £40 per hour and that they are typically booked in two-hour slots. For those without the option to ask a friend/relative for ‘free sessions’, it seems reasonable to assume that someone seeking to retake their test might book one of these sessions per week until their test date in order to maintain their skills. The cost of this? More than £1,700! Surely people aren’t paying that money…
It turns out they’re not (or at least, many aren’t). The chronic shortage of tests has led to a booming secondary market for driving test spots. In exactly the same way that ticket touts buy up concert tickets the moment they go on sale, third parties are apparently buying up driving test slots and re-selling them to desperate aspiring drivers. According to a brief online search, the going market rate for these third-party services seems to be around £200, but the National Audit Office claims the figure can be as high as £500.
The chart below plots the time savings that third-party providers offer versus the implied reservation price of the aspiring drivers (derived from the opportunity cost of either weekly or fortnightly lessons). For context, paying the lower fee of £200 would make sense if it saves you more than two to three weeks. For the higher fee, paying for the service would make sense if it saved you more than seven weeks if you preferred weekly lessons, or more than eleven weeks if you preferred fortnightly lessons. Of course, given that the average wait time is more than 20 weeks, the current fees imposed by third-party providers are perhaps not as high as might be expected, suggesting that competition between providers might at least be keeping things somewhat in check.
So maybe this isn’t such a bad thing? Indeed, there’s an argument that says that we should let this happen. People have found a clever way to make money, and to allocate a finite resource according to those willing/able to pay the most for it. Of course, it does seem odd that private individuals and even registered companies are skimming profit off the top of a service that’s originally provided by the public sector, thus imposing a hidden surcharge that could be as high as £500 per test. On a personal level, this all feels uncomfortable to me — given that the average learner is young (and therefore often very reliant on parental wealth, which isn’t equally distributed), the fees associated with the current set-up appear to run in contradiction to the principle of equal opportunity for all.
But it’s equally hard to see a short-term alternative for this. Demand for tests remains higher than normal (astonishingly, the government still links this to a backlog that arose when test centres shut during COVID-19 lockdowns). In the end, it’s just Econ 1.01 — we are talking about high levels of demand for a service which has a fixed supply constraint. The government’s solution (correctly) is to try to increase the number of test slots available, but only by 10,000 per month, roughly equivalent to a 6% increase. At that rate, they only expect to clear the backlog by late 2027. Given that the government claims this problem has its origins in the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems to speak to a lack of ambition.
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