Those of you who do not get The Bolton News may not have seen the article at the beginning of January titled “’L’ of a result as driving test pass rate ‘very high’”. Why am I mentioning this? Has the Group started teaching learners to drive? Of course not, but the majority of the article was an interview with our vice chairman!
The article tells us that 58.6 per cent of driving tests in Bolton in 2024 ended in a pass compared to 54.6 per cent in 2023. Blackburn with Darwen had a pass rate of 48.4 per cent and Bury a rate of 37.7 per cent. The average for the UK as a whole was 48.5 per cent.
Naturally the journalist was looking for reasons for the high pass rate in Bolton. Whilst expressing surprise at the results Steve doesn’t believe that the route around Bolton is easy because it has a mix of dual carriageways, busy urban roads and country lanes. Steve made the very good point that, people get their driving style from their parents. If these role models have done an advanced course, they will statistically be 70 per cent less likely to have an accident that’s their fault, and this will rub off on their kids’ driving. To see the article
https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/24837068.driving-test-pass-rate-very-high-across-bolton-borough/
A week later The Daily Telegraph reported on the pass rates of individual examiners around the country. The centres with the biggest gaps in pass rates between examiners are shown in the Table below.
Table 1. Biggest gaps in examiner pass rates at test centres over two three-month periods in 2023 and 2024
|
Test Centre
|
Lowest pass rate (%)
|
Highest pass rate (%)
|
Difference (%)
|
|
Erith (London)
|
16.7
|
78.6
|
61.9
|
|
Bletchley
|
30.1
|
90.5
|
60.4
|
|
Nottingham
|
28.9
|
88.9
|
60.0
|
|
Peebles
|
32.5
|
92.3
|
59.8
|
|
Wrexham
|
16.7
|
76.2
|
59.5
|
|
Bredbury
|
8.0
|
66.7
|
58.7
|
The results show that learner drivers are 15 times more likely to be failed by some examiners than others, making the driving test, according to this newspaper, a postcode lottery. While the national pass rate was around 50 per cent, a candidate could be 15 times more likely to pass at Ashfield in Nottinghamshire than at Scunthorpe. The examiner with the highest pass rate in the country in 2003, 91.7 per cent, was in Ashfield. In Scunthorpe one examiner passed only 6.3 per cent of candidates. An examiner in Basildon passed 7.7 per cent and one in Hartlepool 10 per cent. In Newport, Gwent, an examiner passed 93.3 per cent compared with another in Bredbury who passed 8.0 per cent.
Nevertheless a DVSA spokesman insisted that “all candidates are assessed to the same standard”. However, Ruth Cadbury, the Labour Chair of the Commons Transport Committee said that she would encourage the Department for Transport to take a keen interest in examining the reasons for these variations which seem too great to simply be anomalies.
In these days when it is relatively easy to record what goes on both inside and outside a car, it would surely be simple for an independent assessor to rate individual examiners from such recordings. This would hopefully be enough to satisfy potential driving test candidates that standards are applied consistently across the UK. Gary Whittle