Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats)
Link to this: Individually | In context

232. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport to provide an update on the action plan to reduce driving test wait times to ten weeks nationally; the actions his Department has taken to reduce times; the breakdown of waiting test times, per centre; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [66966/25]

Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context

Under the Road Safety Authority Act 2006, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) has statutory responsibility for the National Driver Testing Service. As such, some of the information requested is held by the Authority. I have therefore referred the Deputy's question to the RSA for direct response. Please contact my office if a reply is not received within ten days.

Pending this response, the Deputy will be aware that reducing overall driving test wait times has been one of my key priorities since taking office. To that end, in May I directed the RSA to produce and publish a service recovery plan to meet the 10-week average national waiting time target by September, which was achieved. The reduction in the average wait times represents a significant improvement on the 27 average wait time at the end of April.

The latest information made available to me from the RSA is that the average national waiting time for a driving test was 11.5 weeks at the end of October. This slight increase above target is a short-term impact as a result of merging the test and re-test lists to ensure that all customers have the same experience when utilising the self service system. The Authority anticipates that this issue will be resolved in the coming weeks and that the 10-week SLA will be reinstated by the end of November.

The Deputy may wish to note that the RSA publish detailed 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. This information is available at the following link: .