I’ve mentioned several times the furore over the DSA’s plans to close the Workington Theory Test Centre, and how the government was sticking its nose in.

Well, at the end of the day sensible logic lost, and the junior transport minister, Mike Penning, has forced the game result. Although the test centre only does about 3,000 tests a year – it’s capacity is 15,000 tests (so it’s running at only 20% capacity) - this idiotic coalition we are suffering has decided that in spite of all the cuts being made, this is one that shouldn’t be!

Penning has said:

I am clear there should not be a gap in theory test provision in Workington.

If a suitable alternative facility is not in place by September 1, I have arranged for a mobile test centre (bus) to be temporarily placed in the area to ensure continuity.

Can you believe this idiot? The DSA was closing it because it wasn’t cost effective.

And Tony Cunningham, the Workington MP who chose this as his cause célèbre, has wasted no time adding a few noughts to his previous tag line about people having to travel miles to Carlisle (the proposed alternative). It’s now “hundreds of miles” they would have had to travel – if this had dragged on any longer, no doubt it would have risen to “thousands”.

Just to remind Mr Cunningham that Carlisle is 32 miles from Workington.  So the worst that could have happened is that people would have had to travel an extra 32 miles. I don’t think that classifies as “hundreds” – except in Mr Cunningham’s strange world.

Meanwhile, the rest of us – even those who DO live “hundreds of miles” away – are going to have to pay for the three staff who are only 20% occupied.

I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people looking for driving test centre pass rates.

The DSA used to publish them alongside the details for each test centre, but you could never be sure how reliable they were or even if they even were being kept up to date. I suspect keeping them updated was the reason they stopped doing it – it must be very labour intensive to do.

However, DSA does log the data, so they are available. They recently made the data for the period April 2010 to February 2011 available – split between gender.

As I say on that page, pass rates are not a probability of passing your test. How good a driver you are controls that.

…then no knowledge whatsoever must be lethal!

This is Plymouth (link long since dead) reports on a press release concerning test centre pass rates. Basically, 152 out of 340 test centres have pass rates of 50% or more. No one seems to have bothered to calculate that this is 45% of test centres – so you could say that about half of all test centres have pass rates of 50% or more, and half have pass rate of less.

It’s a bit like saying that when you toss a coin there is a 50% chance of getting heads, and then getting all upset by it as if it’s a problem or something!

This is Plymouth is worried that the Plymouth test centre has a failure rate of 60%, whereas other Devon centres have failure rates of 49%, 45%, and 42%. Why assume that the 60% one is wrong? What about the one at 42%?

The highest failure rate was as Hermon Hill, Wanstead – 72% out of 4,826 first time tests.

The lowest failure rates are in remote Scottish communities – with tiny populations:

Examiners in places such as Mallaig, Inveraray, Islay and the Isle of Skye test barely 200 candidates between them a year.

Mallaig saw 14 first-time candidates last year and failed only 21% – or three – of them. Again, no one seems to have bothered to calculate that if they’d have failed a fourth then the failure rate would have leapt up to 29%. Fail a fifth and it’s a humongous 36%.

In Wanstead, you’d have to fail another 50 to increase the failure rate by just 1%!

It’s pretty obvious that driving around Mallaig is not the same as driving around Wanstead – except to the media. And Wanstead hardly has the same sort of clientele as Mallaig. So why the big deal?

There’s got to be more to this than meets the eye, but any two-bit rag which can’t find anything better to do than use the freedom of information (FOI) act to stir up the dirt and wave away anything it doesn’t know for certain won’t be worried about that!

Apparently, the oldest driver to take their test in Sussex last year was 91. More than 500 over 50 took it (big deal), and 13 of these were over the age of 71.

No further information is known – where they lived or if they passed or not (though it is obvious The Argus asked this, as the DSA refused to provide the information under data protection laws).

This non-story is made even more laughable by the revelation that the same number of people over 71 took tests in the preceding three years. This makes it all the more difficult to work out precisely what point the rag is making.

There’s some idle speculation from a driving instructor that the motivation must have come from having been driven around by someone else (what?), and the usual “contact scumbag@rag.co.uk if you know the silver learner driver” at the end – I’m sure these local newspapers use templates instead of writing for themselves: this is identical across at least four or them over the last couple of months. Even the morons who leave comments seem to come from the same herd.

Back to the topic: I seem to be the only one who is honest enough to admit that he shudders when he thinks of a 91-year old being allowed loose on the roads.