Making the Driving Test Harder

Are they really making the driving test more difficult?

Transport Minister Stephen Ladyman has recently made the news with suggestions that the UK Driving Test should be ‘expanded significantly and made much more thorough’. Currently this is only in the realms of speculation, and anyone in the driver training business knows that these things will take some time in implementation, so don’t worry right now.

However, there is a point to all of this – young drivers are significantly more likely to be killed or seriously injured behind the wheel of a car than more experienced drivers. Any changes to the driving test will be aimed at changing these statistics.

The suggestions seem to be in 3 main areas:

Making the Driving Test longer and harder

Making professional driving tuition compulsory for a certain amount of hours (a legal minimum of 120 hours driving has been suggested?! Maybe not all with an instructor.)

Including night driving and motorway experience

Unfortunately, we can see no real benefits from the first of these suggestions. Someone who has passed the UK driving test (already one of the most stringent in the world) has proved that they CAN drive well. The problem occurs with people’s attitude that they are taught to pass a test, and then they learn how to drive in their own way. This means that peoples technical standard of driving drops, and bad practises start to appear due to incorrect attitude – people who CAN drive well CHOOSE not to. Making a single test harder or longer will not change people’s attitudes towards driving.

The second proposal – to have a certain amount of mandatory tuition from a professional instructor (ADI) has some benefits, but we feel is unnecessary. Why should someone whose parent is an excellent driver (maybe police or ambulance driver) not teach their own child to drive? Many people do this extremely well, and then they will ask ADIs like ourselves to brush up on anything they may not have polished off, often needed only a handful of hours tuition before they pass their test and become excellent drivers. These people have seen good driving all of their lives, and because of this they continue to uphold these values.

There will also be the problem of dodgy driving schools ‘signing off’ the hours tuition taken for back hand payments – anecdotally this is already happening with Pass Plus to help people get insurance discounts. Unfortunately the people who do this are the most likely to have the worst attitudes on the road due to their flagrant disregard for the rules.

Including night and motorway driving on the test itself may be problematic, but needing to be signed off may help with gaining experience, lack of which is the main contributing factor to many road accidents involving young people. This may need to be done before the test (though learners are currently not allowed on motorways – needing a change to current laws), or it may be that Pass Plus will become compulsory – this would be useful.

The main thing which could really change attitudes would be to re-test drivers on a regular basis. This would mean that bad habits would be kept in check, and with as little as an hour of training a year drivers attitudes could be changed. Implementing this for a government would be a vote loser though, so this will never be a government led solution.

A 2 stage test would solve some of these problems, with the initial driving test allowing people to drive on the roads using ‘P’ plates for a period of around 6 months, then a test based on the Pass Plus modules could be conduted prior to removal of the ‘P’ plates.

From here, maybe the insurance industry could pick up the baton, rewarding drivers who take regular training and assessments with lower insurance premiums.

Would you take a driving assessment every year costing maybe £40 if it kept your premiums down by the same amount or a bit more? This seems that it could be financially viable for insurers and for young drivers certainly for the first 3-5 years of their driving, when premiums are at their highest, and at a time of their driving career when they are most at risk.

We’ll keep you posted with whatever is decided!