Reasons for refunded or re-scheduled driving tests in the last 12 months
Published 19 May 2014
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
© Crown copyright 2014
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This is Freedom of Information request ia0033613
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act I would like to be provided with detail of cases in the last 12 months where the DSA has either refunded or re-scheduled a driving test and the broad reason as to the circumstances.
Response
Between 1 June 2012 and 1 June 2013 we have received 979 pieces of correspondence where a candidate has tried to cancel their test within the 3 day notice period then requested a refund or retest free of charge. This information is based on cases that have been coded on our correspondence system as either ‘Medical waiver request’ or ‘non medical waiver request.’ Of these, the outcome 520 of these cases was recorded centrally on our system; 45 were upheld and 475 were not upheld. Of the remaining 459 cases the outcome was not recorded on our system. Of these, 224 cases have been manually reviewed and 24 were upheld, 199 were not upheld and one was recorded incorrectly on the system and was not a ‘Medical waiver request’ or ‘non medical waiver request.’
To date 23 hours and 56 minutes has been spent locating, retrieving and exacting this information. It has been estimated that to manually check and provide information about the remaining 235 cases would take approximately 5 minutes per case and take an additional 19.5 hours. This information is exempt from release under section 12 (1) (cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit) of the FoIA. A full breakdown of this exemption can be found at Annex A.
The appropriate limit, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, is £600 for Central Government and £450 for other public authorities, with staff costs calculated at a rate of £25 per hour. When calculating whether the appropriate limit is exceeded, authorities can take account of the costs of determining whether the information is held, locating and retrieving the information, and extracting the information from other documents. They cannot take account of the costs involved with considering whether information is exempt under the Act. Attached at Annex B is a broad summary of the circumstances of 69 cases that were upheld.