Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

He would have given me more time but I am sure he will address the salient points in the argument.

There is a gross disparity resulting from the outsourcing of driver testing to private companies. The list of centres on the on-line driving application form on the Road Safety Authority, RSA, website does not include every centre to which drivers may apply. I know of people who waited months for their test only to be informed by telephone that it had been outsourced to a private company at a test centre other than the one to which they had applied. They received no notification of this change in writing.

Applicants who move to live in another part of the country encounter serious difficulties in transferring their application to test centres at their new location. I know a man who applied for a driving test in Tallaght where he was living but who later moved permanently to Mallow. He sought in writing to do his test at the Mallow test centre. Since then he has received two test dates from SGS in Tallaght. He has received no correspondence acknowledging his request to change test centres. SGS management told him it had nothing to do with the contract for testing in Cork. He will soon have to move to his third provisional licence before receiving a driving test date.

The testing system is farcical and until this is sorted out, the rate of fully qualified drivers will increase only marginally, not at the rate the Government and the RSA anticipate, certainly not in the ten week timescale determined by the Minister or, as he put it, "on demand".

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