There is a video of the Argentinian President Javier Milei demonstrating his plans for government by ripping the names of ministries from a board, punctuating each with ‘!Afuera’ – Out! On his first day in government, Milei halved the number of departments, cutting 18 ministries down to 9. America has watched Argentina with interest. It has yet to be seen whether Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is anything more than a meme, but it purports to follow the Argentine example.
One place not taking notes is the United Kingdom. It would take an incoming libertarian Prime Minister longer than a TikTok to read out the names of the UK’s 44 departments, let alone tear them off a whiteboard. Luckily, there is an obvious place to start: one government department stands almost in a league of its own.
The average NHS waiting time is 14 weeks. This is a national scandal that hardly leaves the news. Last year the waiting time for a driving test was 15 weeks. I am neither a driving examiner nor a doctor, however I am reasonably convinced that medicine is more complex than checking whether teenagers can parallel park. As this largely affects young people, years of abject failure to deliver a vital service hardly makes the headlines.
Availability of driving tests is vital. If you live outside of a major city, getting anywhere without a car leaves you hoping for unreliable bus services. For young people to contribute to the ‘growth’ the government likes talking about we need to be driving, yet getting a license takes much longer than it should do.
Privatising parts of the DVSA has been suggested as a solution, I think getting rid of the whole thing and starting again would work better. The private sector has demonstrated in the last decade that it has improved road safety significantly, while the DVSA fails to run a website booking system or pick up a telephone.
The requirements of insurance companies over the last few years have already made our roads significantly safer. Between 2011 and 2021 the number of fatal accidents involving teenage drivers dropped by 35%. There are probably a number of factors here but one is that a significant proportion of young drivers are now monitored by insurance company telematics devices. This is not just an emerging trend. Having a black box is just part of driving as a young person now. I have friends with the same insurer as me and we compare our scores.
If the DVSA were told to reduce young driver accidents by 35% over a decade I imagine that it would raise the driving age to 25. The private sector has managed to do it in a way that benefits the consumer by bringing down insurance prices.
Imagine a UK without the DVSA. To anyone who has ever tried to phone them, this must sound like sunlit uplands. It has been a requirement for nearly a century that drivers of motor vehicles are insured. This should do away with the need for a state-issued drivers’ license: No insurance company would insure someone without a driving qualification, so you’d need to pass some sort of exam. The government could set stringent minimum requirements for these through Ofqual. This only sounds like insanity because we have collectively forgotten that a drivers’ license is a qualification not a piece of ID.
With several exam boards issuing driving tests to (at least) the minimum standard, and the practicality that no insurer will let you drive without having passed one, things will get more interesting. The competition element comes in. If the test set by Company A was significantly harder to pass than the test set by Company B, then the cost of insurance would likely be lower for those with a Company A license. This, in turn, would incentivise people to take harder tests or gain further qualifications, and the overall quality of driving might even increase.
What I am suggesting is not a lawless wild west of cheap, dodgy private drivers’ licenses, but a market system where a license is viewed as what it really is: a qualification proving that that you have met a minimum standard, rather than a piece of state identification. The main problem I can see is that no eighteen-year-old likes showing their passport to the Wetherspoons bouncer, but the government already issues Proof of Age cards. Perhaps the only role for the DVSA is to print everyone a card with a hologram on that states who your license was issued by.
