Because most people don't think about how systems can be abused and if you're interfacing with public agencies, you do it less. If it's not explicitly in the requirements, it's not worked on. It's wild how often simple things get overlooked because "nobody asked."
Not to mention the fact its not dealt with in high school as a compulsory credit (where all the knowledge, physical, and beaureaucratic resources are provided rather than the private hell the system has become) is suggestive of how big a scam and an intentionally weaponized social determinant it is.
It is actually quite difficult and hard to ensure one can successfully move through it once you have to pay for everything and you're "on your own" procedurally. You may never actually get yourself out of that infinite loop and it severely limits consequent job and economic outcomes that feeds right back in to that compunding the stickiness of the entire state.
Kinda like SMTP in the early internet. No one had really thought about spam and bad actors. Pretty much no one had IP restrictions and relay rules. Then eternal September happened.
This said, abuse production generally comes with pretty heavy costs and sometimes systems are never stressed in a way they get abused, so there are trade offs.
We really need to start taking a game-theory[?] attitude to any public service that involves money exchange, to prevent "viral capitalism" from piggybacking on the underlying necessity.
Pretty soon, everything will require a proof of identity, either administered by Apple/Google via their mobile device or, ideally, a government provided API that is baked into law as an inalienable right.
In the specific case of booking a UK driving test, you must already have a photocard 'provisional driving license' and you must be willing to provide it, for it to be exchanged for a full driving license.
So although mandatory proof of identity is problematic in many contexts, it's not a problem here.
Then of course the solution is to simply limit it to 1 appointment per person (or license number) at any given time. And not allow name changes. Seems like a fix that can be done in a couple hours at most.
> A provisional licence number and candidate name is required to book a test but this can be changed once the slot is sold at a profit. Some of the brokers use business accounts that are intended for instructors to book multiple slots for students.
"must already have a photocard 'provisional driving license' "
No, one can also use a paper (green) provisional license, and then you have to take a passport to the practical test. These are the only non-photocard licenses which are still valid (in provisional or full variants).
After passing, one would end up with a photocard full license.
Excellent work. Now ask yourself this question. If it's that easy to solve why hasn't it been solved?
I'll get you started, it's either not that easy to solve or it's not an easy change to implement.
Just because your can imagine what a code patch might look like doesn't mean it's an easy fix. For a start, the release process for a public body can be a little clunky.
It would be trivially easy to remove the field from the website, but it is probably there for a reason, people do change their names, and may in some cases have a changed licence number so they are covering some edge cases.
It's lazy requirements gathering and taking shortcuts that gave them this. Or: and I will use bad language here, some idiot developer stores this in a document DB and has a field for name & license number. Or: GDPR doesn't allow devs or makes them too scared to capture PII information on account sign-up.
We had this exact same crap in South Africa when the government went out on a tender and awarded a DEI company the project to do a license renewal booking system.
Driving Schools block-booking tests has been a problem for at least a decade - when I took my own test. I wrote a basic screen-scraper to alert me when there was a cancellation, and when I mentioned this to my instructor he explained that the problem, at least then, was that driving schools could book as many slots as they wanted and get a full refund for cancelled slots. So as long as they had the capital to pay up-front, they could then offer their students the best pick of test slots, which became a reason to use those driving schools.
At the time I'd half considered wrapping the script in a UI and letting my instructor use it with his pupils, but other things took priority. Reading "There are also apps that can be purchased, typically for between £10 and £20, that trawl the government website for cancellations" makes me wish I'd made the effort!
We had a similar problem in Sweden when trying to renew passports. A black market developed as covid eased. Everyone was trying at the same time. Some one made a browser extension which repeatedly tried to book appointments. The government implemented a governement ID system before making any bookings. The problem disappeared!
We still have a similar problem trying to get a driving test time. The driving schools book every slot for months ahead. They are commonly referred to as a mafia. You basically cannot get your license without paying a driving school a ton of money.
Sweden is nowadays a low-trust society living in the shell of a former high-trust society. So many processes that are not adapted to the times we live in.
I think social media and the democratization of the hustle culture that was for a time limited to the US and at most a few big EU cities.
The number of scams, scammy behaviors like dropshipping, scammy advertising like those 'health pills and supplements' (shootout to Logan Paul and Joe Rogan, but we have those in France now) and how becoming rich on the back of trusting people skyrocketed. I think responsability is diluted enough, and this new mentality of "hey, it's not my fault you felt for it, gotta think more, I did and I'm fine, I merit what I got, and you merit to be scammed" makes people less trustworthy.
In many places the system has no flexibility to keep up with demand, especially seasonal demand and supply. In my country (Romania) we have problems with ID, passport or license renewal in the summer when many people (a few millions) working abroad return in vacations and the demand triples for a month or two; also the workers in these government agencies are in vacation, so supply is reduced. This imbalance is temporarily and not corrupt, but it has an impact too.
When I took an extra category on my license it took 6 months to get a slot because motorcycle exams were not programmed from October to March, every year. When my brother did the same, but in the summer, it took 6 weeks to get scheduled. For comparison, for regular driver license (car) it takes usually a week or two.
Romania implements a similar system as described in the article for appointments outside of the country (for example in consulates or embassies). Scalpers book the appointments en-masse and then sell them for 50-200 euros.
There, you can book an appointment and then simply cancel it and it becomes free. So, they have two browsers, in one they cancel the appointment and in the other they book it immediately for the person they're selling to. Or another way is to just send the person to the consulate to say that the the person who booked isn't coming anymore and asked them to take their place.
Yeah I just booked a license test here in Australia and it requires payment at booking time as well as the name of the person taking the test.
I imagine if the person who shows up for the test has a different name to the name given during the booking they won't be allowed to take the test. A license is an ID document too so other forms of ID have to be provided to acquire the license.
Wow, I can't believe no one though about this when the system was created. Here in Poland if one wants a driver's license (or an extra endorsement) one registers a "candidate profile". You then use that candidate profile in a number of ways. For example to register in a driving school, then once they mark your profile as "having done enough hours of driving" you can use it to book the test. You can only book 1 test at a time, then if you fail, you can book another and so on. There is no way to give your slot to someone else. You can cancel of course and rebook providing you do it 24h before, if you're too late they charge you an exam fee anyway.
I always thought this was a needlessly complex and bureaucratic system, but having read this I'm not so sure any more.
I've got my drivers licence over 2 decades ago. Back then the system was exactly the same, but paper based. ~2 years ago I decided to add a (big) motorcycle endorsement. This was right after covid and at the very beginning of the season (they don't do motorcycle tests in winter). I waited about 2 weeks for the test which I considered acceptable. However this was in a fairly small town, perhaps in a huge city this would be very different.
Massachusetts is even worse. The RMV works with companies to screw people over. It gives out most slots to driving schools to begin with.
If you want to get a road test the wait time is over 3 months now. But if you pay a driving school $200 they will schedule you a test in 2 weeks. They do nothing for that money, just schedule you. You also separately pay the RMV the fees for the road test.
All of this for a pro forma 5 minute road test because the testers are now unionized and capped the length of the tests in their contracts. You don't even go on a highway ever or drive on a normal busy city street. If they run behind they just skip even the most basic moves and just have you drive around the block quickly.
I saw some really scary people get a license my day there.
I got my license in Virginia in 1985. No unionization involved and my driving test was 5 minutes driving around the block.
These days in Virginia most people don't take a driving test. Your driving instructor certifies to the state that you have demonstrated the skills required and the state issues a license.
I probably benefitted from this. When I took my test, the driving school booked the exam for me. I failed the first time, and expected to need to wait a month for the next available exam (according to the website) but the school arranged one the following week.
There was no additional cost, so I expect another student wasn't ready and they changed the name to mine.
That's a legitimate reason to allow swapping the name, although it would be fairer if they were forced to cancel the appointment.
What's legitimate about that? That it saves the inefficiency of leaving an empty slot? I'd have thought a system that offers both the same legitimacy and more fairness too would have test bookings arranged in a stack, where cancelled slots get offered to whoever is booked into the proceeding one should they wish to move it forward, or if they don't, then whoever had the next slot booked after that, and so on. So any holes that come up in the schedule get closed pretty quickly, and nobody gets preferential treatment simply because their driving school happened to own the other slots
It doesn't help that the hyphen in "block-book" disappeared somewhere along the line in submission. That is somewhat idiomatic British english.
And there's another British idiom here ("learner drivers").
But this (problem X as pattern Y) is a common British newspaper headline construction (pattern Y is suggested to be responsible for the context in which problem X is occurring).
It is at least a mostly full sentence, though (if in note-form). US headline constructions often feel weird to us because they aren't.
I imagine the US form of this headline might read something like:
"Brokers dominate driving test bookings, applicants driven to black market"
> companies are booking new tests as soon as they're released because they have no choice
Companies don't need driving tests, individuals need the driving tests. Companies have no business taking them all off the market, leading to the condition that the individuals cannot get any. That isn't how this works, that isn't how any of this works.
Companies don't take tests. There is no reason for a company to book a test. There would be much less pressure on the system if it was only the people taking tests that were booking. I'd bet many of these high price re-sold tests go un-sold because of their price, but still take up the time.
An arbitrarily restricted resource leads to a failure of the market.
The solution is to have enough slots. How hard can it be, everybody gets an education and exams, why is this suddenly difficult if it involves pricy driving tests?
That’s just not true, because it implies a lot of slots go unused and those would then be paid for by the resellers. The solution is to create more slots to meet demand until the resellers can’t pay those costs anymore.
However you do have to accept that then again some slots will go unused and the cost of those will be borne by the party that runs the exams.
But that isn’t a whole lot of cost really because it’s just a small proportion of a room that exists regardless and an attendant that is handsomely paid by the fees.
As a government service, certifying drivers, the goal shouldn't be to earn money right but instead to maximize the number of humans who end up certified.
And then just complain how it’s all a big problem that’s someone else’s fault and can’t be fixed because it’s all so complicated. Right. Sounds like typical government busybody work.
Both driving instruction and tests can be done in the applicant's own vehicle or in the instructor's car, in the UK, so the vehicle isn't the issue.
Examiners were expensive and rare already before 2020, and a hell of a lot of them dropped out in the covid era for health and practicality reasons. Testing and examination was impossible for a period of time and then impractical for a period afterwards which hit the profession.
It caused an enormous backlog of driving tests which I think is not even resolved now.
But also driving instruction and examination is a popular career choice for older people made redundant or "invalided-out" of jobs (particularly in the police or forces). Many of those people did not return when they could, for safety reasons.
