Driving test been cancelled

Just drive a dinger for now 🤙🏽

This a joke. Cancelled for the second time. Was cancelled in April and has now been cancelled for the 3rd of August. Literally why. That’s in more than a month like why are they cancelling it when it’s gonna be perfectly fine to do your test in August

Tbh given the lack of information; piss poor response overall to COVID-19 and the fact that staff are working from home in their droves, I think we've got to give DVSA at least some credit for trying to get the ball rolling again.

Ring them up and ask. This could be a result of so many things down to the test centre. If it's a small/far out test centre it's probably more likely to get cancelled than it is at a bigger one like Exeter for example.

Patience is a virtue

I have been patient, but for some people they need to be driving by a certain time, like I need to be driving by September before I go back to school because I have no buses running from my house to my school. It’s awful. I should have done my test, passed and had a car by now. I am being patient, but it just seems patience isn’t bringing any rewards

When the world (almost) came to an end at the end of March, DVSA will have had a 3 month backlog of tests in their diary which all needed to be postponed.

Imagine you're a secretary handling ten thousand client appointments on a diary system. A crisis happens and your CEO tells you to shut down, go home and cease operations for three months. What do you do with all those appointments? They have to be put somewhere. Each client needs to be told something, but you don't know what to tell them. Given that the 3 month date (back then) would take us into June, most people would stop taking on new appointments and shift the existing backlog to some "placeholder" date in the future. So let's bung the cancelled March appointments into end of June, April's into July, May's into August etc. for now.

Then along comes June and still nobody knows what's happening with the crisis or when lockdown is going to end, whether all at once or in stages. What do you do with these appointments then? Make up another placeholder date for... I don't know... September? What if things are back to normal before then and things need to be moved back? This is the problem every big organisation is facing, and all the while irate customers are phoning, emailing, bashing them on social media for not having a crystal ball....

Meanwhile, there is the conundrum of fairness: A person who had their April date moved to August gets lucky as their test can take place after lockdown is over, but hang on a minute.. the learner in front of them in the queue had their test booked for March! That got changed to June, but lockdown hadn't finished so they weren't allowed to keep that appointment.. so they got bumped to October! Is that fair? Imagine the twitter uproar on that one...

Also, some people's priorities have changed since March. Some people need a test more urgently, some people less so, some need more time to prepare, some can't afford it at all now as they've lost their job and just took the refund, some people are stepping back gracefully to let key workers take the appointments, some learners with an pre-Covid appointment may no longer be alive. The fairest thing to do now is to start afresh. This means that they just cancel all appointments, and open up an empty diary from the date we have certainty, which we now know to be July 22nd (except in Leicester, sorry folks!). That way everybody with a pre-existing appointment can just scramble for dates like sun-loungers by the pool. Your money is safe.

So would you have handled things any differently if you were arranging all those appointments?

im in the same boat as you, don't worry. mine was due for 20th april, then deferred to 7th july, now cancelled again. it's just the way it is, i know it sucks