Reaching a 10-week waiting time for a driving test “will not be possible” unless the recruitment of more driving testers is approved, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) has told Government.
In a letter to the Department of Transport seeking approval to hire more driving testers, the authority said waiting times for tens of thousands of applicants will worsen before they improve.
The authority has previously said waiting times for a driving test were at 25 weeks late last year and some 180,000 applicants were spread across the driver theory and driving test process.
In the letter, released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act, the RSA said as of March 9th, there were about 100,000 applicants for a driving test, just 6,068 of whom were booked in with a date for a test.
A further 62,193 were waiting for a date, while some 31,272 were deemed ineligible, generally because they had not completed a course of Essential Driver Training with an approved instructor.
Essential Driver Training was suspended during Level 5 lockdown for all but essential workers.
The figures were separate to a further 80,000 applicants for the Driver Theory Test, which brought the total number in the pipeline for a driving test, to 180,000.
The department previously sanctioned the recruitment by the RSA of 40 additional testers who were said to be undergoing training in April.
But in the letter to the department in March the RSA said even before those 40 driving testers were deployed, it calculated that a second tranche of 40 testers would need to be recruited to get waiting times down to 10 weeks.
The letter noted that, following a request from the Oireachtas Committee on Transport, the RSA had also calculated that it would need a total of an additional 80 testers – meaning three batches of 40 testers in total – to get waiting times down to two weeks.
In the absence of additional recruits the RSA told the department “the best we can hope for is that by end of 2021 we will have an 18-week waiting time and, without further intervention, this will steadily deteriorate throughout 2022”.
In order to achieve a 10-week waiting time in the shortest possible timeframe the official said, “an additional 40 driver testers, over and above the 40 testers that were recently sanctioned, are required and based on certain scenarios this would see us meet a 10-week wait time in November 2021”
He said the Oireachtas Committee on Transport’s ambition to achieve a two-week waiting time for a driving test would be possible “with 80 additional testers (over and above the 40 currently sanctioned) needed” over a period of time.
The RSA concluded it was “important that the department and the Minister is aware that an additional 40 testers are needed if we are to meet the 10 week target this year”.
