This took me by surprise. An email alert from DVSA announces that Clifton Test Centre will cease operating on 25 January 2017. It is not relocating, which means Nottingham will have three test centres instead of four going forward (pending any further announcements, of course).
I’m sure there will be those who will find fault with this. Clifton doesn’t request a bay park manoeuvre (it has no bays), and while DVSA is already trying its hardest to dumb the test down so that all you have to do to pass is to be able open the car door in less than three tries, there are already plenty of instructors working towards a similar goal in their own way by avoiding having to teach the bay park manoeuvre wherever possible.
Note that there is no suggestion that Nottingham will be conducting fewer tests – another likely conclusion that will be drawn by some. The examiners at Clifton rotate anyway, and they’ll just work out of the main centres.
Someone found the blog on the search term “cars not suitable for dvsa driving test”. The rules for this are actually quite simple and are given on the GOV.UK website.
You definitely can’t use a BMW Mini convertible, a Ford KA convertible, a Toyota iQ, or a VW Beetle convertible. You are advised to contact DVSA if you plan to use ANY convertible or ANY panel van (and I would assume that includes those semi-estate cars without side windows you often see BT engineers or technical reps driving).
There’s no point turning up in a car DVSA won’t accept, and arguing with them if you do is likely to get you arrested – plus you’ll lose your money.
Instructors’ favourite whinge at the moment is test waiting times. In Nottingham, a test booked anytime now (August) would be in mid-December, and the same story repeats across the country.
In Nelson, near Burnley, they still have one of those silly little test centres. It has three parking bays and DVSA has recently upped the number of examiners there to six to try and improve waiting time. They’re apparently not too smart in Nelson, and so it is important to point out that six is a bigger number than three. Furthermore, the office there is crumbling, and the ladies’ toilets are often out of order. As everyone is no doubt aware, having the gents lavatory out of order is one thing, but the ladies’… that’s almost punishable by death. Therefore, DVSA is looking at closing down the current Nelson test centre and relocating to a better place.
Heaven forbid that the new test centre location should be 6km (4 miles) away in Burnley – somewhere big enough to have been heard of. Or which includes driving on big roads or the bay park exercise.
DVSA hasn’t said anything about a new location yet, but if this story is anything to go by, the local ADIs and Andrew Stephenson, MP for Pendle are already kicking up a fuss over it. Stephenson fears it will be “moved out of Pendle” – which obviously means “to Burnley”. If you look it up, Pendle is a district just north of Burnley, the northern reaches of which are three times more distant from Nelson than Burnley is! In fact, many Pendle learners most probably go to Skipton for their tests, because it’s nearer.
DVSA has no logical reason to specifically maintain a centre in Nelson with Burnley being so close. It has every reason to want a bigger location which can conduct more tests and all the manoeuvres, and which may or may not be in Nelson.
It’s just strikes me as funny that ADIs want shorter waiting times, but oppose anything which might achieve that depending on which head they’ve got on.
I’ve just opened this month’s copy of Intelligent Instructor and one of the feature stories concerns the public consultation on proposed changes to the driving test.
One highlighted comment caught my eye. It comes from David Davies of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS). He says:
No one gets killed making a three-point turn in a cul-de-sac
What an idiot! He – and all of his colleagues who are hell bent on feminising and dumbing down the driving test in order to get a higher pass rate – seem incapable of understanding that the skills needed to do a three-point turn (or turn in the road as it is officially known) are critical for avoiding situations where one does stand a higher risk of “being killed”.
To start with, attitude is the number one factor in most accidents, closely followed by inexperience. When 17-year old Wayne overshoots his turn for McDonalds at 1am on a Saturday night as he, Kyle, Jack, and Liam decide to go and stock up on some litter to strew all over the local retail park, he is going to want to turn around. I can assure you that if I was anywhere within a 2-mile radius of Wayne at that point, I would rather that he at least knew how to turn around properly – and that my life wasn’t being traded solely against his attitude.
Do you get that, David Davies? It’s the difference between some juvenile delinquent having the right skills and the wrong attitude versus him having no skills at all and the wrong attitude. Your job is to uphold the skills part-not to get rid of it so you can pretend you upped the test pass rate by not asking them to do something they find hard.
Removing manoeuvres from the existing driving test and replacing them with baby-exercises is going to lead to more deaths – if it has any discernible effect at all. It is certainly not going to cut deaths.
I mentioned back in June that Beeston Test Centre was moving away from the Beeston Business Park. Good riddance to the place, and that stupid cow in reception who made sure that DVSA and ADIs were made as unwelcome as possible. I’ll miss the couple who run the cafe and the friendly black cat in the security building (security staff were OK, too), but that’s all.
Tests are now being conducted out of The Village Hotel in Chilwell, and after less than a week there are already problems.
Referring to my earlier report, DVSA noted:
…access to ‘The Village Hotel Nottingham’ venue is only available to those candidates attending for test; you won’t be allowed to use this site for practice either during or outside of working hours (including weekends)
My comment in the same article was:
I can guarantee that there will be some arseholes who ignore that and try to practice bay park in there.
I have it on good authority that The Village is already unhappy due to the number of complaints from its patrons about driving school cars blocking the car parks at all hours of the day, and that there is a very real risk that DVSA will get kicked out before a permanent relocation can be secured.
Let’s make no mistake here. The Village has always been a snobbish place (trust me, I used to go in there as a guest not long after it was first built) and like most gyms and health clubs it attracts chavs (albeit ones with aspirations to being middle class) who would complain about anything. But just as The Village has its sizable clutch of Village Idiots ready to exaggerate matters, I think I have made it abundantly clear over the years that the driving instruction industry – I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it a “profession” – is literally bursting at the seams with people who are capable of providing more than enough inconvenience to the public for complaints to be raised. I saw several the last time I was at The Village, just driving around after all the tests had gone out, and the only reason they didn’t try bay parking there and then was that you can’t find more than two adjacent bays free at a time during the day, and no ADI I’ve ever seen parks next to anyone. Oh dear no.
DVSA itself is partly to blame for this. It began at Colwick a few years ago, when ADIs were turning up to practice bay parking while tests were starting and ending and getting in everybody’s way. Sometimes, there were more halfwits practising bay parking than there were candidates on test, and that is no exaggeration. It was getting beyond a joke, so the centre manager put signs up telling people to stay away – a futile gesture, since most ADIs can’t read anyway, and it had little effect. The last straw for me came when one of my pupils picked up a serious fault during the bay park exercise for being too close to a parked car, which just happened to be one of these dickheads. I made an official complaint that these people were demonstrably influencing some test scores, and it was taken seriously at test centre level.
It was referred higher within DVSA, and then the bombshell was dropped by the idiot of an area manageress, who decreed that she couldn’t stop people coming into the test centre car park since it was a public facility (or some such description). The test centre was ordered to remove the notices telling people to keep out, and ever since then these inadequate ADIs who cannot teach properly anywhere else have been allowed to come and go as they please.
So, DVSA created a problem in not setting boundaries for ADIs. The situation is analogous to keeping a cobra as a pet – no matter how long you have it, how much you feed it, it will still bite you if you try to get friendly with it. ADIs are DVSA’s own pet cobra – and DVSA still insists on trying to get chummy with it rather than treat as the dumb and dangerous animal it is. The upshot is that whatever DVSA says ADIs should or shouldn’t do, many of them will deliberately – with malice aforethought – do exactly the opposite. And DVSA is stupid enough to let them get away with it.
Anyone who has driven into The Village car park with a pupil who is not on test is an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to remain on The Register. Their actions are a gnat’s whisker away from having tests anywhere near Beeston suspended until a permanent site is found.
An email from DVSA reports that the lease at the Beeston Business Park “has been terminated”, and the last test there will be on Tuesday 26 July, 2016. My first – and absolutely sincere – reaction was: thank God for that!
From 1 August, tests will be conducted from The Village Hotel in Chilwell. This is a temporary arrangement, though they don’t say for how long. However, there is a McDonalds and a Costa next door, and I will put money on it that McDonalds and Costa don’t start sticking up stupid notes everywhere forbidding instructors from leaving the waiting room or holding the front door open for more than 10 seconds “because it messes up the air conditioning”, as if none of the other residents ever do so.
Apart from the very pleasant couple who run the cafe in the Beeston Business Centre, who I will miss, everyone else who works there detests the presence of DVSA and driving instructors. If anything goes wrong (blocked toilets), it is blamed on ADIs, and although all those pathetic notes are in the Centre Manager’s name, it is the stupid bitch in reception who is responsible. The manager is just too spineless to stand up to her.
But back to Chilwell. The arrangement is similar to that at Clifton – instructors are to wait in their cars and the examiners will come out to them. There is no waiting room, and no toilet facilities – though as I have already said, there is a McDonalds and a Costa just across the road. Furthermore, McDonalds and Costa are open from early in the morning until after tests conclude, and they are open weekends (at Beeston, the place is shut on weekends). I also note that there is a Starbucks in The Village, and I am assuming this is accessible to the public without them having to be members (I don’t like Starbucks and won’t be using it).
DVSA adds the note:
…access to ‘The Village Hotel Nottingham’ venue is only available to those candidates attending for test; you won’t be allowed to use this site for practice either during or outside of working hours (including weekends)
I can guarantee that there will be some arseholes who ignore that and try to practice bay park in there.
DVSA notes also that they have a long-term solution in the pipeline, and are working towards securing a lease for the site they have in mind. They have wisely not identified the site this time – when they did that with the current Beeston location, it was quickly gridlocked by the aforementioned arsehole instructors.
As far as I’m concerned, moving away from that Beeston Business Park is the best thing that’s happened in a long time. Good riddance to it.
An email alert from DVSA notes that there will be a local meeting at Beeston on 22 June 2016 providing more information about the relocation.
Complaints by residents concerning learners are usually dealt with by sticking up a notice in the test centre waiting room. However, DVSA has taken this unusual step of sending out an email alert regarding certain areas around the Alvaston Test Centre in Derby.
We’ve recently received correspondence from residents living in the area, particularly around Sevenlands Drive, Colwell Drive and Mountfield Way.
I often see notices in my local test centres but they invariably refer to places I don’t use myself (I sometimes have to look them up to find out where they are). In areas I do use, I make sure I don’t get in the residents’ way – I would rather terminate a manoeuvre and start again when it is clear than try to work around someone waiting for us. But I am in a minority on that even in Nottingham.
I can’t really comment on the Alvaston situation. It’s either idiot residents making a mountain out of a molehill – or idiot instructors making a molehill into a mountain.
NOTE: This is an old article and much of what is said is no longer relevant. It was at the time… but the River of Time flows ever on…
Apologies for this crappy link. The Nottingham Post website is an unfortunate collection of annoying and intrusive adverts with poorly written and alarmist news stories secreted amongst them. However, one of my pupils told me that Colwick Test Centre was closing when she arrived for her lesson the other day, but after further investigation it appears that the story she’d read concerned Watnall test centre, and not Colwick. And it isn’t anywhere near as clear-cut as she’d been led to believe.
Updated image (2022)
The title of the Post’s piece is misleading, since the “closure” being referred to is neither confirmed, nor is it connected with the totally separate matter of test waiting times which the Post covered in a similarly unbalanced way a week or two previously, and so brought into this story unnecessarily. The simple truth of the matter is that Watnall testing station is – and has always been – primarily for HGV and public services drivers. Over the years, car tests have been carried out there “in secret” (it didn’t show up as an option when you booked, but you could ask if you booked by phone), temporarily (when Chalfont Drive first closed down), or officially up until the present time (after Clarendon Street closed down). With much HGV testing going private these days, DVSA is considering the future viability of the Watnall site – which is huge (the yellow area in the photo), and must cost a fortune to maintain. Car testing is a very small part of it (the red areas – and I might be wrong about the size and precise location of the parking bit, as I haven’t used Watnall myself during its most recent incarnation as a car testing centre).
My first reaction when I read the article, and extracted the simple facts from the complex cipher used by the Post’s amateur writers, was “if they close it, where will they move car tests to this time?” However, many other ADIs’ initial reaction is along the lines of “we must start a petition… fight them in the air, in the sea, and on the beaches… because test waiting times are already 17 weeks… we can’t afford to lose a test centre while it is like that… the only option if Watnall closes is Lincoln… Purple monkey dishwasher.” The Post quotes some of these comedians.
The simple truth is this: Watnall as a car test centre IS NOT closing. The future of the site is under review, but DVSA has made it clear that if the site closes, then provision will be made for car driving tests to be conducted from an alternative location. The alternative location WILL NOT be 50 miles away in Lincoln, as some of those ADIs are suggesting! Tests around Watnall may move, but they won’t stop. Christ! Even Derby is closer than Lincoln. And Sutton-in-Ashfield, Melton Mowbray, Loughborough, Leicester, and Burton on Trent. Not to mention the other THREE Nottingham test centres. I mean, what kind of idiot do you have to be to start rattling on about Lincoln?
About six years ago, Nottingham had three test centres (Chalfont Drive, West Bridgford, and Gedling), with Watnall always hanging around as a do-they-don’t-they venue. West Bridgford and Gedling were tiny places with little or no parking, and the Labour government’s push to open multi-purpose test centres (MPTCs) saw these closed down and amalgamated into Colwick MPTC (great idea, by the way). All hell broke loose at the time, with ADIs boycotting Colwick and migrating their pupils to Chalfont Drive whether they wanted to go there or not. Many instructors were terrified of having to teach bay parking for the first time in Nottingham (that’s a fact, by the way).
Later, the lease ran out on Chalfont Drive, and DVSA waited until then before even starting to look for alternative venues. Tests were subsequently and variously conducted from DVLA Offices (now closed), Watnall, and finally Clarendon Street. Clarendon was part of a Coalition drive to move tests out of test centres and “into the community” (stupid idea), and Clifton also opened for tests for this reason at the same time. Clifton and Clarendon were experimental and were originally only going to be operated for a limited period. Eventually, Beeston officially replaced Chalfont as the main test centre on the west side of Nottingham, and tests operating out of DVLA Offices and Watnall moved over there.
Finally, and most recently, Clarendon Street (which was also in a stupid location) was closed, though Clifton (which isn’t too bad) is still operating, and Clarendon’s operations moved once and for all to Watnall. At no point during any of this did DVSA (or DSA, as it then was) “close” any test centre without providing alternative venues. In fact, in some cases the number of test slots available increased with the changes.
As far as test capacities go, Clifton only has two tests going out at any time, and I don’t think it operates for the same number of hours as the main centres. It has (or had) the lowest pass rate of all the Nottingham test centres, and I am convinced that this was largely down to the horrendous road works when the A453 was being widened, and the fact that the A453 is one of the busiest roads in the country. Instructors can pontificate as much as they like about how learners “should be able to drive anywhere”, but the simple fact is that any new driver going for their test is statistically much more likely to make a mistake – and for it to be deemed “serious” – around heavy traffic and variable road restrictions than they are on a semi-deserted industrial estate, or running around virtually the same route every test (as was the case with Beeston during the gridlock created by tram works, which resulted in its pass rate being the highest by a huge margin until someone noticed the blip and set things right). I’m not sure how many tests are conducted at a time out of Watnall, but I am certain it is a lot less than the 6-8 maximum at Colwick and Beeston at the time of writing.
One area where I’m not so quick to defend DVSA is on the matter of test waiting times. Not the waiting time per se, but how they think they can reduce it with only a couple of new examiners. Even now, with a capacity for up to 20 tests per time slot (or 100-120 tests per day) throughout Nottingham, the waiting time is going up by approximately one week per month. Simple arithmetic shows that the only way this can ever be brought down – bar a sudden and catastrophic collapse in the numbers of people wanting tests – is to significantly increase the number of tests conducted. An extra 10 tests a day from a couple of new examiners is a drop in the ocean, and it needs ten times that to make a dent in the arrears.
And this is where it gets potentially very messy. From what I understand, DVSA wants its staff to be able to conduct one extra test per working day, and a little more simple arithmetic shows that this would definitely provide the necessary increase in the total number of tests conducted. A time and motion study has been conducted which is looking into that, and it will come as no surprise to discover that examiners are not particularly happy about this. They say it will mean that the latest tests in winter will come back in the dark, which is both dangerous and unfair. Furthermore – and this is one reason I would never want to be an examiner – they already have only a short time between tests to fill in their paperwork, and this will be reduced still further. Tests returning late (not uncommon due to Nottingham’s incompetently managed road works) would cut that time back even further. This extra test will almost certainly add fuel to the already burning fire over civil service pensions and working conditions (i.e. more strikes).
If you try to book a test now (start of May 2016), the first free dates (not including cancellations) turn up in mid- to late-August for all Nottingham test centres – except Watnall. Watnall is completely booked for the entire availability window that DVSA’s booking system allows. All those whingeing ADIs could easily book tests elsewhere and get much better test dates than they are suggesting is possible, and I wonder why they don’t.
DVSA is wholly responsible for not dealing with the test waiting time problem MUCH sooner, and MUCH more effectively than it has done. It has taken them almost two years to do almost nothing, and the problem continues to worsen by the day. It’s got nothing to do with candidates “not being trained properly” and failing their tests, because pass rates are roughly the same as they have always been – 47% every year since 2011, with a 1% increase each year from 44% in 2007. In other words, it has stayed virtually the same for at least a decade (if you ignore the fact that Beeston was passing too many people during the tram works due to the piss-easy test route it was using).
And finally, just a repeat reminder for the stupid ones out there: Watnall isn’t closing. Even if the site does, tests will still be conducted from somewhere fairly close by. You won’t have to go to Lincoln unless you are VERY stupid. Even now, if you drove more than an extra mile or two with your pupils, you could get MUCH better test dates if you were prepared to cover the other test centres (I will do tests at all of them, though Watnall has never appeared on my radar, probably because it is permanently fully booked).
Update: As of 2018, the three test centres in Nottingham are Chilwell, Watnall, and Colwick. Lead times at all of them are at least 6 weeks (not including cancellation dates and sudden Saturday overtime slots). Since I wrote this article, I have started using Watnall quite a lot (and the parking is not quite in the location I gave in the image now).
I have said before, and make no apologies for saying it again, but not all examiners are stupid enough to be in the union, and of those that are, not all of those are stupid enough to go on strike. Even DVSA is pretty much saying this in its emails.
DVSA is doing all it can to make sure that tests go ahead as planned. Not all examiners are union members, and many test centres are expected to be operating as normal.
You should turn up for your test no matter what – if you don’t, you might not be able to claim expenses. Keep your fingers crossed, especially if you live north of Sheffield or in London. That’s where the stupidity seems to be concentrated.
