[jambutty]

Originally Posted by entwisi

heh, your figures are a bit out, ABI2006 puts number of private car owners as 25 million. It would not be unheard of to improve things that some people feel are too 'hard' .

Even taking this number 25million = 5 M/year across the 370 test centres = 40 tests per day extra. or at 45 mins each 5 extra examiners/centre. Not exactly unachieveable now is it. You would probably save nearly 5 people (traffic plod/nurses/doctors/ambulance/recovery drivers/insurance assessors) each day in reduced accidents etc.

See, think things through and its not that hard to come up with workable solutions.

My figures were conservative so as not to weight my point in favour of it. My original guesstimate was 20 million full driving license holders.

I’m assuming that your figure of 370 test centres is a correct one so 5,000,000 extra re-tests would mean 13,513 per centre. Ignoring Sundays and Bank Holidays that would be about 310 days per year or 44 re-tests per day per centre. Even if a re-test took 45 minutes there would still be some 15 minutes ‘change over’ time. Even examiners are entitled to a break - by law.

However all that apart how long would it take to train 1,850 extra examiners to the required standard? It certainly couldn’t be done in a few months. More like a few years. How much does an examiner earn? Well it is advertised that a driving instructor can earn £30K so taking that as a yardstick it would cost a minimum of over half a billion quid just to provide the extra examiners not forgetting the cost of the test centres expansion to cope with the extra staff. I doubt if you would get much change out of TWO BILLION QUID.

It all sounds nice in theory but the reality of the situation is that it would be too expensive to set up even if the incompetent civil servants could actually do so without cocking things up.

I reckon the government would rather keep on increasing the duty on fuel and Road Fund License and price many drivers off the road that way. Fewer cars, fewer accidents.