Jerry Buttimer (Cork South-Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim mo bhuíochas leis an Teachta Ó Dálaigh as an rún seo a chur os ár gcomhair agus gabhaim buíochas freisin le gach Ball a thacaigh agus a labhair ar an tairiscint seo. I commend Deputy Daly on tabling the motion. Members will be aware the Government is not opposing the motion. All of us on all sides of the House share the frustration and annoyance around the difficulties being experienced by people in our constituencies, neighbours, family members and friends. I thank Members for their contributions to the debate.

I am conscious of the disparity in test delays. Deputy Daly will appreciate my next comment. My late mother was a recipient of the Sylvester Barrett licensing, which we heard of earlier. It is unacceptable that we have a situation where people are experiencing inordinate delays. We cannot go back to those days where we handed out driver's licences.

The depth of feeling on this issue is one I understand fully. I have people in my own office about it every day of the week. All of us are in agreement that we need to deliver decisively on the issue of service provision and on the long-standing issue of making a reliable high-quality driver testing service available in our State regardless of where someone lives.

Not only is achieving the ten-week target time important for the learner driver's experience of the service, it is also a vital component of delivering on our road safety strategy and the ambition to halve road deaths and serious injuries this decade. Ensuring that all of our drivers are well trained and equipped for the challenges of modern driving makes us all feel safer on the roads.

As the Minister outlined in his opening remarks, the population of our country has increased significantly. This has placed additional demand on the driver testing service with a record number of applications received last year. While the operation of the services is the statutory remit of the RSA, the Government has sought to support them in meeting this demand through a number of staffing sanctions in recent years, most recently the 70 additional driver testers sanctioned on a permanent basis last autumn. There is a sanctioned headcount of 200 today. The doubling of the staffing sanction in just over two years reflects our commitment to addressing this issue. Prior to this, as Members will be aware, the RSA requested sanction for 75 testers on a temporary basis, which was approved by the then Minister in March 2023.

As already outlined by the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, this temporary sanction was the correct decision at the time, ensuring that permanent staffing decisions were not taken while the service was experiencing a post-pandemic distortion and that capacity to deal with immediate demand was created while a longer term assessment of capacity requirements was conducted. Under this temporary sanction, significant progress was made between August 2023 and April 2024, with wait times halving from 30 weeks to 15 weeks.

Progress that was made under the previous sanction before the loss of testing capacity gives us confidence and hope that the additional capacity now entering the service on a permanent basis will deliver improved waiting times for everyone on a sustained basis going forward, which is the key point. The RSA is confident that the permanent positions now on offer will attract and retain more testers than was the case for the temporary sanction. That the sanction will remain in place permanently will allow the RSA to fill vacancies as they arise, and in response to demand, up to the ceiling of 200 on an ongoing basis.

I hope Members will be impressed by the fact that interest in the recent competition was quite high, with 1,400 people applying at the initial stage and over 300 making it through to the final driving assessment stage. I am informed by the RSA that it intends to commence training of the first tranche of new recruits in early March, with onboarding to continue with additional trainees over the coming months. I hope and expect that we will see sustained progress towards the ten-week wait time target in the months ahead. The RSA has been required to put a plan in place to achieve that target as soon as possible.

The additional capacity will help address the systemic mismatch between supply and demand that has developed in recent years as our population has grown. However, it is also important to acknowledge the steps taken by the RSA and efforts by individual testers to mitigate the impact on people to the greatest extent possible while the current recruitment campaign is ongoing. There was extensive voluntary working of overtime by driver testers last year to help meet demand during 2024, including at weekends, and this is continuing. I thank and commend them. To support this, the RSA ran an incentivisation programme for overtime during 2024 and a similar offering is under consideration for 2025.

Deputy O'Flynn raised the issue of no-shows. The RSA has introduced IT system improvements to maximise the number of test slots utilised and reduce the amount of tests lost to cancellations and no-shows. Once a person has been invited to book a test, he or she can now book slots released at short notice following a cancellation on the MyRoadSafety portal. Such slots are added every day. The new system has seen the overall percentage of testing slots utilised increase from 95% to over 98%.

Deputies may wish to know that the RSA has transparently published monthly information on the driver testing service on the CSO website, including the breakdown of waiting times and distribution of testing capacity by test centre.

Members made reference to the RSA. There is a final element of the Opposition motion that I would like to address, namely, the call for the Government to conduct an urgent review of the capacity of the RSA to deliver the driver testing service. I commend Ms Anne Graham, the new RSA chairperson, and wish her well. As Members are aware, such a review was commissioned at the beginning of 2024 and presented to the Government last November. The core recommendation emerging from that review was that the RSA be split into two separate and independent bodies responsible for, respectively, the provision of customer services, such as driver testing, and the delivery of wider public interest work, such as road safety campaigns and education. This reform will take time to deliver but detailed work on how it will be implemented is under way and will be presented to the Government by the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, at the appropriate juncture. In the long term, this radical restructuring of the organisation will help ensure a singular focus on delivering high-quality public services within the responsible body while allowing the public interest body to focus on public interest work. This is why the motion is important. The restructuring will mark a transformation in how road safety interventions have been delivered over the past decade and can make a significant contribution to the achievement of our 2030 targets under the road safety strategy in the coming years.

The Government recognises the significant impact that long waiting times for drive tests are having on people across our country, particularly those residing in rural areas, as we have heard in the debate, where public transport may be limited. It is important, however, that we not compromise testing standards and that we instead ensure that recruitment delivers sufficient testing capacity of an appropriate standard to support safe road use. As the current recruitment campaign is well advanced, additional capacity will enter the system in the coming months and we expect to see wait times progressively reduce towards the target level of at least ten weeks. As the Minister outlined, seeing tangible progress on this issue, which is impacting on all of our constituents, is a foremost priority for him and the Department.

I thank the Deputy Daly for tabling this motion and for the contribution of all Members during the debate. Mar fhocal scoir, as a practising constituency public representative, I understand fully the annoyance and frustration at delays and the consequences of that. As his party's Members know, the Government is not opposing this motion. Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach.

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