REVEALED: Hampshire test centre with only a four-week wait is the joint-second quickest location to get a driving test in England

Young drivers in Hampshire can count themselves lucky after learning that a test centre in the county provides one of the shortest waits to get a driving test across England.
In spite of tighter booking restrictions, a record 1.9 million tests taken last year, and an effort to recruit more driving examiners, the average driving test wait time in Britain is now almost 22 weeks.
The Government has banned third-party resellers from buying up slots and introducing rules that allow learners to only book a test in one of their three nearest test centres. And that’s great news for a chunk of future drivers in Hampshire who will be able to access the location with the smallest backlog.
The waiting time at Basingstoke is only four weeks making it the joint-second quickest location to get a driving test in England. The shortest wait to take a practical exam is in Hinckley, Leicestershire, where the delay is only two weeks.
The positive news was discovered by Adrian Flux, the UK’s largest specialist motor insurance broker. It first analysed wait times in October 2022 and has been keeping an eye on the topic ever since with their latest report painting a fairly miserable picture. The current wait across Britain is almost eight weeks higher than when the company first analysed the data almost four years ago.
Further analysis of the findings around delays in Hampshire showed that the four other test centres in the county – Lee On The Solent, Portsmouth, Southampton (Maybush) and Winchester – have the maximum wait time of 24 weeks.
Gerry Bucke, general manager of Adrian Flux, said: “The misery shows no signs of easing but at least there’s some serious respite if you live in and around Basingstoke and can choose it as one of your test centres.
“Drivers being made to wait are keeping sharp by learning to drive in their parents or grandparents cars and bolting on short-term insurance cover to their own policies. There’s ways around the problem and we’re here to help but it must be deeply frustrating. Getting on the road is a rite of passage and so many people are waiting longer than ever to be able to do that.”
The Government has already missed its first two targets for reducing backlogs to seven weeks. Hopes of meeting their deadline in December 2025 and then this summer have now been pushed back until autumn next year.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs there are now almost 150 more examiners in the 12 months to May but conceded “demand is still very high” and there was still a lot of work to do.
The Adrian Flux average wait time in Britain has been calculated by finding the average mean value in order to take into account all values, including the extremes. The Government released data on this issue late last week, in which they have calculated the median wait time for each test centre, and will be updating this data on a monthly basis.

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