Driving test touts offer instructors £250 monthly kickbacks

Driving instructors are being offered kickbacks of up to £250 a month to sell their official test-booking login details to touts, a BBC investigation has found.

Touts use these login details to book driving tests in bulk and sell them to learners on WhatsApp and Facebook, charging as much as £500 for tests that should cost no more than £75. This makes it harder for learners to book through legitimate routes and adds to already lengthy waiting times.

The BBC has also uncovered evidence that the outgoing head of the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), Loveday Ryder, was told about these operations in February - yet some sellers reported to the DVSA are still operating. In response, the DVSA said it does not comment on specific complaints but has zero tolerance for those exploiting learner drivers.

We have identified touts operating in London, Birmingham, Manchester and the Home Counties. Posing as driving instructors, we approached them on WhatsApp and were offered monthly payments in exchange for login details to the DVSA's system, where instructors can book tests.

One tout boasted he worked with more than 1,000 instructors - while another, Anil Ahmed, who goes by the name "Ahadeen", said he signed up two instructors every week. We could not independently verify either of these claims. When we later confronted Mr Ahmed in person he denied any involvement, but we have found significant evidence implicating him.

The BBC has not been able to identify specific driving instructors selling their details but our conversations with these touts, the sheer volume of tests they are selling, and images of test-booking systems shared on WhatsApp suggest hundreds of rogue instructors might be involved.

Separately, 30 instructors we spoke to across Great Britain - England, Scotland and Wales - said they had heard of test slots being sold at huge mark-ups. Ten of them told us they had been approached by touts or had spoken to other instructors who had been.

At the end of October, 642,000 learners in Great Britain were waiting to take a test, with an average wait time of 21 weeks, DVSA data shows. There is a separate system in Northern Ireland.

Waits can be as long as six months, according to learners we spoke to - some say they are turning to touts out of desperation. A recent DVSA survey suggested about one in three learners had used "third parties" to book their driving tests.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander recently announced plans to change driving test rules, which it is hoped will stop touts and reduce the backlog. From the spring, only learners - not instructors - will be able to book test slots.

Instructors we spoke to welcomed the Department of Transport's (DfT) proposals, but also said they had been raising these issues for some time and now want to know whether the government will root out rogue teachers. Tests have been bulk-booked and resold for profit for years, but these instructors say it is now getting much worse.


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