Royston Smith – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Royston Smith on 2016-06-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency training programme in increasing availability of motorcycle assessors.

Andrew Jones

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) evaluates the effectiveness of its examiner training programme by monitoring the waiting times for both modules of the motorcycle practical test. This enables the agency to balance the demand for tests with the number of motorcycle examiners, which directly affects the availability of motorcycle test appointments. This is measured against the agency’s commitment to maintain or improve upon a six-week annual average waiting time for practical motorcycle tests.

In addition, the progress against this commitment, the demand for tests and the examiner training programme are discussed in a wider forum at a monthly Service Management Group for Vocational and Motorcycle testing. Specific issues are escalated in this forum as necessary.

Waiting times for last year and the first two months of this year are shown in the table below, it should be noted that motorcycle testing is affected by seasonal variation and waiting times inevitably rise in the summer months when demand is higher.