It is difficult to separate these companies. They all use similar names, though some display their exceedingly poor command of English in the names they choose. But having noted that, it appears that the second company involved in the stories above is at it again – and once more the ASA has found them in breach of just about every rule going.
Waqar Ashraf has already been identified as a liar and thief in the earlier article, where the small print for his “pass protection guarantee” revealed that it only applied if you failed the theory test by one mark. Fail by two and you were screwed. It would be like your car insurance putting in the small print that you were only covered in the event of an accident if you were wearing turquoise socks!
Bearing in mind that the scumbag didn’t even reply to the ASA when it sought his defence arguments, this time he has been pulled up for lying about providing instant booking confirmations, pretending to be an official DSA site, and lying about the cost.
Due to his lack of response, the affair has been referred to the CAP Compliance Team. Hopefully, they can work with the authorities to put this parasite away for good. He is just lying and stealing and laughing as he does.
I’ve updated this article, which was originally written 3 years ago (September 2010). The subject is going through one of its periodic revivals among the ignorati across various web forums.
At the time I wrote the original, there was a story doing the rounds on these forums concerning someone who called himself Jim Kerr. He claimed he had been an examiner for 23 years, and he said:
I HAVE JUST BEEN SACKED BY THE D.S.A.. WHY? I HEAR YOU ASK.
BECAUSE, ACCORDING TO D.S.A.’S NEW “CHI” SYSTEM OF COLLECTING PASS RATES FOR EXAMINERS AT EACH TEST CENTRE, MY PASS RATE WAS HIGHER THAN THE OTHER EXAMINERS AT [named test centre] AND SO I MUST BE DOING IT WRONG.
There was much more, but that was the essence of his letter. Apparently, he’d put it into leaflet form and was handing it to people turning up for their tests outside the test centre he’d been sacked from. This act alone said a lot about the kind of person he must have been, and about the kind of person his employer had to put up with.
Anyway, when the story broke there was the deafening sound of several thousand colostomy bags all popping at the same time as ADIs logged on to the internet for their weekly surf and saw the story! You see, many in this industry sincerely believe that driving tests are rigged, and a story like this is guaranteed to get them hyperventilating. But let’s just do a reality check for a moment.
No company the size of the DSA (now known as DVSA) sacks someone on the spot for the sort of thing Kerr was claiming. They know bloody well that people like Kerr are “union” through and through, and they will only act if they’ve jumped through all the right hoops – or if they are sure of gross misconduct having been committed. What usually happens in a situation like the one Kerr is claiming is that retraining is given first of all. If that fails there will be further retraining. If that also fails then you’re into verbal warnings, written warnings, and final warnings. If there are still issues once all that has been done then dismissal is likely to follow. Companies who want to dismiss staff need a cast iron case and – except in the case of gross misconduct – a properly constructed paper trail.
Judging from the geographic location of the test centre in question, I’d be very surprised if Kerr hadn’t been in the union – and even if he wasn’t, if his claims came even close to being true he’d have been awarded a knighthood for wrongful dismissal at any tribunal! He certainly didn’t need to behave like a complete arsehole and picket the test centre to get justice.
But what about his claims? Is there any truth in them? Well, when I qualified my supervising examiner (also a test centre manager) told me this:
You’ll hear a lot of stories about quotas. They aren’t true.
What I do is monitor all my examiners, and if one of them has a significantly higher or lower variance than the rest I look into it. If we identify a problem then this is dealt with.
I am a scientist by training, and I understand maths and statistics. What my supervising examiner told me can therefore be summarised as follows (note that in this updated version I refer to a variance of 5% instead of the 10% that was being used at the time I wrote the original article):
over a period of time, with hundreds of tests conducted, you would expect every examiner to have roughly the same pass rate, give or take a few percent variance
the national average pass rate is around 45%, so over time you would expect the average pass rate for each individual examiner to be around the same figure, plus or minus a variance
if one examiner had a pass rate of say 40% and another had 45%, then it wouldn’t matter because they both fall within an acceptable band either side of the mean (i.e. ±5% variance)
if one examiner had a pass rate of, say, 20% or 60%, or if their variance was always skewed high or low, then this would point to a possible problem with the way they were conducting tests
if the anomalous pass rate continued across several monitoring periods of, say, 3 months each, then a genuine issue with the examiner’s test performance would be confirmed
Most people don’t understand maths and statistics, and they cannot accept that a single examiner consistently having a grossly different pass rate to everyone else proves that there is a problem with that examiner. Kerr appears to be one of these ignorant people, believing his distorted understanding to be some sort of epiphany. As I say, I’ve known what happens since I qualified as an instructor and it is no big deal.
Kerr obviously couldn’t understand that his higher pass rate pointed to him doing his job differently to everyone else. The update to this story shows clearly that Kerr was being a little creative with the truth, and that he had been spoken to on several occasions. He simply refused to change, believing that he – as a minority of one – was right, and that all the other examiners out there were wrong.
There is one aspect of the system the DSA uses which has always worried me, though – and it isn’t the DSA’s fault. Not directly, anyway. Imagine this perfect world scenario:
over a typical monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average for his test centre
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager, but over the next monitoring period nothing changes
the DSA uses its internal procedure to re-train the examiner, as he is clearly passing some candidates who ought to be failing (obviously, the situation would be the same if the examiner’s pass rate was 15% below the average for the test centre, and he was failing people who ought to be passing)
That last part is totally beyond the comprehension of many ADIs (and examiners like Kerr). However, it is absolutely correct and proper: if the pass rate for the test centre in question is 45%, and if everyone else is passing/failing at around the same rate (±5% variance), then someone who is consistently passing/failing at a much higher/lower rate must doing their job wrong. It’s a simple fact.Now imagine a real world scenario to see where the trouble potentially starts:
over a monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager
the examiner fears losing his job and decides to take matters into his own hands
the examiner keeps a tally of his passes and fails, and randomly fails a few people for minor (driver) faults if he needs to bring his variance down to acceptable levels (i.e. within the ±5% acceptable variance)
There is absolutely no way that this isn’t happening somewhere out there. However, the issue is not that it is happening – but rather that there is no way to stop it. No matter what system the DSA used it would still happen in one form or another between unscrupulous examiners eager to conceal their own incompetence. Ironically, if they did their jobs properly in the first place there’d be no problem for them to try and hide, and they’d all be within the ±5% variance. In spite of all that, it is vital to understand that those examiners fiddling their results are in a tiny minority, and this in no way supports claims of “quotas” or fixed results from ADIs and disgruntled learners. Of all the many hundreds of tests my own pupils have sat, there are perhaps just two that sound a little fishy – and since I do not sit in on most tests I am only going on what the pupil has told me. There is no way that the examiners in Nottingham are unique in their overall consistency, and people like Kerr are the exception rather than the rule.
But back to Kerr’s claims. As you can imagine, this Revelation in The Gospel According To Jim Kerr is Manna From Heaven for some ADIs. One one forum alone someone opines:
I guess the reason the DSA doesnt [sic] want the contents of the leaflet published is that, they dont [sic] want us to know about their ‘variances’ or the new “chi” sytem [sic] of making sure the DE’s have to work within a certain amount of passes/fails, and how the DE’s have to comply with them. Although many ADI’s have known about it for a long time.
It’s hard to get this many contradictions and misunderstandings into two sentences… unless you’re so excited your fingers and brain are not in proper sync!
A variance is something that happens – not something you apply. If the DSA has decided that a variance of greater than ±5% indicates a problem, then that is the system being used as a quality control check. As I have already explained, if the variance is consistently outside ±5% then there is a definite problem. They can call their system whatever they like: Harriet, Tarquin… or chi. The name doesn’t alter what it is.
Do driving examiners fail people deliberately?
The short answer is NO. They do not. They are not told to fail people as part of any quota, and this applies to the vast majority of examiners throughout the UK. However, there are corrupt people in all walks of life, and as I explained above, it is possible that some examiners – a tiny percentage – will attempt fiddle their pass rates in order to avoid being “told off” by their managers.
What is the 5% variance that examiners have to keep to?
There isn’t one. The ±5% variance is something that is measured – not applied. Examiners are not told to “keep” to anything, though they are expected to perform within certain limits as a quality control measure. If any examiner is misinterpreting this and deliberately fixing their results, then they are simply being dishonest.
Are examiners told to keep their pass rates within ±5%?
No. That ±5% is a range within which each examiner’s pass rate is expected to fall, and if they’re doing their job properly in the first place then their pass rate will fall within that range. If an examiner’s pass rate consistently falls outside of the ±5% range then the DSA has internal systems which it uses to apply retraining because that examiner is not performing to an acceptable standard. Retraining is a minor issue, but less informed examiners might see it as a threat to their job security and therefore they might attempt to force the pass rate. This would be entirely the decision of the individual examiner. It is not a DSA policy.
Do quotas exist?
No. The idea of quotas is promulgated mainly by poorly educated ADIs and learners anxious to defend their poor performances on test.
What is the best day of the week to take your driving test?
There isn’t one as such. If you can drive, it doesn’t matter if you take your test on Monday morning or Friday afternoon. The idea that by Friday all the quota has been “used up” is nonsense. I’ve had lots of passes on Friday afternoons – just as I have on all other days.
I’ve mentioned in various article recently about FOI requests, and how they are able to bring the average hack at local newspapers to orgasm in five seconds flat.
That is statistical noise, and is meaningless. It’s even inside the 5% variance that the DSA uses to make sure its examiners are doing their jobs properly. But that doesn’t stop a driving instructor from saying:
Some other areas are definitely a lot easier, but I think it’s a very good thing to drive here. If you can drive in Blackburn you can drive anywhere.
Someone else who doesn’t realise that a 4% difference is meaningless, or that 47% and 51% do not constitute “easy” and “hard”.
You often hear ADIs going on about only teaching people the bare minimum of skills required to pass the driving test instead of teaching them how to drive properly. The DSA’s strapline is “Safe Driving for Life”. So it beggars belief when you see a story like this.
On the surface, it’s just another FOI request blown out of proportion by some local hacks. But the really frightening part is the case studies they’ve dug up.
The article reports that Failsworth test centre has the lowest pass rate in Manchester, at 39.2% (bolstered by a really funny (not) reference to the name). It points out that Hyde test centre is 16% higher than this, at about 55%. As I mentioned recently, no one is ever prepared to refer to the population demographics in the areas they are comparing. Failsworth (marked as “A” on the map), being much closer to the centre of Manchester (and virtually part of Oldham), has a much higher proportion of non-UK national citizens. Hyde (marked as “B”) is out in the sticks, even though it is still part of Greater Manchester. Indeed, it is only about 6 miles from Glossop – which is so rural not everyone has electricity there yet! The article also says that Buxton – 25 miles out into the countryside – has a pass rate of 61.4%. Obviously, higher pass rates are the story editors’ only focus – but it does illustrate my point.
But here’s the best part. They give several examples. Firstly, someone called Kate Emmott failed at Failsworth, and is now planning on taking her test at an “easier” test centre. She says that she got a “major” fault (marked as “serious” on the test sheet) for not driving in a bus lane. She says:
It was coming up to 10am and I was worried about it. I think I had a really strict tester to be honest.
If Manchester’s bus lanes are anything like the ones around here, their morning hours of operation are 7.30-9.30. Being “nearly” 10am is not the same as 9.30am, and failing to realise this is not the result of a “strict” examiner. It’s the result of being a bad driver.
Then there is the case of Emily Bleackley, who failed her test four times in Failsworth, and then passed “weeks later” in Hyde. The report says:
…her second fail last December was for ‘getting lost’, while her third attempt was scuppered when she slowed down to let a car pass. Her fourth attempt was down to bad ‘filtering’ with other traffic, she says.
So here’s someone else who cannot equate bad driving with failing your test. You don’t fail for “getting lost” – unless you get lost and then make bad mistakes. Slowing down to let people pass – probably on a busy road, since we’re talking almost the centre of Manchester – is dangerous and the sign of a frightened rabbit! And “bad filtering” almost certainly means not being aware of what others are doing, and changing lanes without proper safety checks. In spite of this, Ms Bleackley says:
…[my] instructor could not understand [my] fails either… She said she couldn’t believe I’d failed because my driving was completely up to standard. I was in tears after my tests at Failsworth.
I’m sorry, Emily, but you listed at least three good reasons why your fails were totally justified, and it is shocking that your instructor thought you were “up to standard” if you were so obviously unable to cope with other traffic. You weren’t up to standard – that’s why you failed, and for reasons which are absolutely clear. And it is worrying that you subsequently passed at a test centre where you’re shortcomings perhaps weren’t challenged. Are you going to drive exactly the way you did on those failed tests now you’ve got your licence? Like not driving in bus lanes, slowing to a crawl when you get scared, and weaving from lane to lane without checking first?
The DSA is quoted as saying:
Pass rates can be influenced by various factors. Some people may take more lessons and be better prepared for the test. Statistical factors can also play a part as the number of tests conducted at different test centres varies significantly.
However, every driving test is conducted to the same strict requirements. We train examiners to a high standard and closely monitor their work to ensure that all tests are assessed consistently across the country.
But nothing can hide the fact that some test centres – and their routes – are inevitably going to be easier, and this is always going to result in some people passing their tests when they have underlying issues with their driving. Although it isn’t the DSA’s fault, the two examples above provide clear evidence that two very substandard new drivers have been put on the roads by the system – and it is therefore the system which is at fault. Unfortunately, the system is too complex to be able to reliably identify every single variable involved, and it is left to people like Ms Bleackley and her driving instructor to open their mouths and provide the necessary pointers to where some of the faults with it might lie.
Another news story adds weight to this, and I’ll put an article about that together shortly.
It also quotes similar figures for the theory test:
70 had taken the test more than 20 times
165 took it 15-19 times
780 took it 10-14 times
It also says – without explaining the significance of the detail – that the figures cover the period 2004 to 2013. Almost a decade! So hardly the end-of-the-world scenario being implied. Furthermore, The Birmingham Mail makes the familiar mistake of behaving as if the world begins and ends with its readership. If it had done even a small amount of research it would have found this almost identical article in the Spenborough Guardian (in Yorkshire, if anyone was wondering).
The Spenborough story seems ecstatic over the fact that:
¼ of the worst drivers in the country were tested at Heckmondwike
five women made 158 attempts between them at that test centre
one learner took 34 attempts
2 women each took 32 attempts
two more took 30 attempts
Again, these data cover almost a decade, and the Spenborough Guardian also refers to the fact that Bradford saw two people take 30 1nd 31 tests, and Leeds saw someone take 32 attempts. And it also points out that as far as the theory test is concerned, two men in Leeds took 55 and 56 attempts to pass (apparently, someone in Southwark, London took 110 tries). So it might come as a bit of a surprise to the Birmingham Mail to learn that their fame only extends a few miles after all.
Both stories draw on the “expertise” of third parties to add comment. In the Birmingham story, they quote Nigel Humphries of The Alliance of British Drivers (ABD). He says:
It would be slightly worrying to be on the road with someone who has failed their driving test 20 times and only passed on the 21st.
Of course tests can be a lottery and people can get unlucky a number of times. But it is also true that some people are definitely not suited to driving but keep on taking their test.
Well, if it were that simple then I’d agree. But no mention is made of the ethnic diversity in Birmingham, a city which is traditionally seen as having a high immigrant population. As I’ve pointed out in several previous articles, non-UK drivers tend to have a desire to go to test before they are ready. As unpalatable as this may be to some people, it is just a fact of life – and one I have witnessed myself many times.
However, once you get into the realms of whether or not people are suited to driving you’re on very dangerous ground. To begin with, who is going to tell them? I don’t mean who wants to – there are plenty of very seedy people who would fit that bill. I mean who has the right or the expertise to condemn them outright? After all, on what basis do you draw an absolute conclusion about someone’s mental abilities over something that is likely to affect the entire course of their life? And you surely wouldn’t do it based solely on their country of origin? If you did, where would it stop? The last guy who tried it died in a German bunker in 1945.
Over the years I have had quite a number of pupils who privately I had hoped would just give up. A couple did – with me, at least – but others were determined to pass, and pass they did. The “worst” one I ever had who kept at it (160 hours of lessons, and the most mechanical driver you could ever wish to meet as the result of an accident when he was younger) passed on only his third attempt. I’d tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to switch to an automatic somewhere in the middle of his lessons, and I despaired of ever getting him through his test. But I was totally wrong, and I know he’s happily driving around just like any other normal person. On the other hand, I’ve had superb drivers who have had as many as nine attempts at the test before passing. One recent one I’ve mentioned previously was eventually diagnosed with adult ADHD, and he passed first time with me, though he’d failed a handful of times before I took him on. Then there was a girl several years ago who was so badly affected by nerves on test days that she was physically sick – we actually had to stop on one pre-test warm-up for her to go and be sick, and other times she was sick before she came out. She passed on her 4th attempt with me, but had previously failed five times. And then there was a Polish lad who was a great driver, but who found something different to fail on each test until he passed on something like his 7th attempt. None of those were any less deserving of their licences.
I’ve only had two who were so bad I was surprised they could even walk, let alone expect to be able to drive, and I suspect that both of them went with other instructors after they stopped lessons with me (no doubt with a bucket full of stories about how it was all my fault).
But back to the topic here, the Spenborough article quotes a local instructor.who I have to say inadvertently shows another area where the problems might be coming from. He rightly points out that the places in question have high populations of people whose first language isn’t English. But he then goes on to blame the routes and independent driving – apparently, following signs or directions is hard for non-English speakers. He finishes by saying:
It is a difficult test centre but it’s not impossible. If you do everything right on the day you should pass.
You can’t help but get the impression that he believes passing is down to chance. However, returning to the main point of the articles, the most obvious fact which everyone seems to be missing is that if people are genuinely ready for their tests then most will pass within a handful of tries. Those who are genuinely not suited to driving are in a very small minority.
I mentioned in an article in January about how certain websites are purposely making themselves look like the official DSA site in order to snare learners when they book their tests. The same company was also pulled up again in May for other claims deliberately designed to mislead candidates. More recently, another company was also telling carefully crafted tall tales and was prosecuted and heavily fined (in that one, a “pass protection guarantee” was only valid if you scored 42/50 (the pass mark is 43 – anything else and you fell foul of the small print).
It seems that Northern Ireland is encountering similar problems – and not just where driving tests are concerned. A European Health Insurance Card is free from the NHS, yet people are inadvertently paying for them from these scam sites. Trading standards acknowledges that these sites aren’t strictly illegal, but that they do deliberately mislead and deceive.
Damien Doherty of Trading Standards in Northern Ireland said: “While the majority of these sites are legal, they are highly cynical.”
Too right they are. He adds:
It is important that companies are clear about the service they are offering, and do not trick people into paying for something that they can get for free or much cheaper on government websites.
Personally, I don’t think they should be offering any sort of service under these circumstances. It should be illegal, and driving test scam sites are a prime example. The top-dog, highest level company which actually carries out the tests (DSA, or DVA in NI) offers them at a fixed price and anyone charging more than that is a lying scammer, no matter how “clear” they make it in the small print that they’re charging a premium.
All the details are in that link, but in a nutshell, Bushra Chughtai (55) and Andrew Cursley (46) took bribes and passed test candidates who either didn’t show up or who drove so badly that the examiners had to take control of the car. In one case a candidate actually hit another car, but the test continued and they still passed.
Investigators were on to them and they were caught. Chugtai was jailed for 3 years, Cursley for 18 months, and an accomplice/fixer – Mahomed Ibrahim (47), who appears to have been an ADI from other reports – for 15 months.
There is a funny side, too. Chugtai apparently made £6,000 out of it. Cursley made about £3,600. It isn’t made clear, but Ibrahim may have made significantly more, though he doesn’t sound like the sort of person you could trust and probably no one will ever know. You can’t help wonder at the sort of mentality that puts such small sums of money higher up the list of priorities than prison and a future with almost no job prospects when they get out. Absolute idiots.
I get a lot of hits from people asking various questions about using a translator for their tests. It always strikes me as odd that anyone who can search in English and find an English language blog should find themselves in urgent need of a translator for whichever driving test they are taking.
A Chinese translator, Peter Hui, has been jailed for giving people the answers as he translated the theory test for them. Police estimate Hui scammed around £50,000 in 2012, with another £25,000 worth of bookings before he was caught. He is believed to have made money from the scam in 2011 as well.
It makes you wonder how it is possible for people to be so stupid – and I’m referring to the idiots who pay people like Hui to do this sort of thing for them. It works out that Hui was earning the equivalent of about £1,000 a week out of this. The story doesn’t say how many translations he was doing per week, but even if it was 5 per day, he was obviously charging at least £40 a time – and the candidates would have had the £31 test to pay on top of that, and they still had to do the Hazard Perception part on their own, with the risk of failure that goes with it.
The Theory Test isn’t hard. All you have to do is read up a little on the subject. If it’s too hard for you after that then you really shouldn’t be let out alone.
The report also notes a separate issue where an Urdu translator believed to have been helping bus and HGV drivers cheat has been bailed until September. Of course, this begs the question: why the hell was someone who can’t speak English being allowed anywhere near a bus driving job in the first place?
I wrote recently about how Book Your Practical Test Online Ltd. had been found in breach of various advertising codes of practice by the ASA. It was the second time that same company had been found in breach in six months – the first was when they had deliberately used the old Directgov livery on their site to make themselves look exactly like the then official DSA booking site.
Ashraf gave a “pass protection guarantee”, where you were guaranteed a free re-test if you failed. But the small print said you only got that if you scored 42 out of 50 (the pass mark is 43/50). Any other score made you ineligible. But Ashraf also used 0905 premium rate numbers, and as well as the basic £31 for the test people were paying around £52 on phone calls. One person was charged £95 on calls alone.
It was that phone line scam that Ashraf was fined for by the premium rate phone line regulator PhonepayPlus. Several of those who complained also stated that they thought they were phoning the DSA. As well as the £85,000 fine, Ashraf has been ordered to refund all the complainants in full within 28 days.
According to the Mirror a second company, Book Your Theory Test Limited – owned by Farhan Reham (Rehman) – had also been slated for charging an additional £28.50 for “unlimited re-tests”, but its small print also made the same 42/50 proviso as Ashraf. The business address Reham/Rehman uses for that scam is the same one Ashraf has been using. A third scam site – book-your-driving test – is also listed as operating from that same address. As the Mirror says:
It’s a bogus address, none of them have offices there.
It’s a bogus address, and a bogus operation. A complete scam. All of these sites are. The only place anyone should go is the official DSA website, where the test costs £31 and a test date is available instantly at the time of booking (though it might be a few weeks away).
Use the QR codes above by scanning them using your smartphone to book your theory or practical tests. Alternatively:
On the surface, it’s just another FOI request blown out of proportion by some local hacks. But the really frightening part is the case studies they’ve dug up.
second time that same company had been found in breach in six months – the first was when they had deliberately used the old Directgov livery on their site to make themselves look exactly like the then official DSA booking site.
It was that phone line scam that Ashraf was fined for by the premium rate phone line regulator PhonepayPlus. Several of those who complained also stated that they thought they were phoning the DSA. As well as the £85,000 fine, Ashraf has been ordered to refund all the complainants in full within 28 days.