It's L out there: why learner drivers have never had it so tough

The post-Covid driving test backlog means it's getting harder than ever to ditch the L-plates. Charlie Martin shares some trade secrets in his quest to pass the test

- Charlie Martin

Even at the best of times, learning to drive can be a difficult - and expensive - undertaking. But during the Covid pandemic, it became impossible: the on-off staccato of lockdowns prevented tests from taking place for seven months and created a huge backlog. The media's reporting on this was almost as extensive as the wait itself, with attention-grabbing headlines such as the BBC's I've been turned away by 50 instructors'.

Less frequently reported was the spike in lesson prices I noticed during my own search for an instructor. I left for university in 2018; by the time I returned, just before the November 2020 lockdown, costs had risen from £28 per hour to £40 per hour. The notion of learning to drive was abandoned; I'll sort it when I get a proper job, I thought. Yet two years on and having landed myself a place on the Autocar team, my licence still bears the fat red 'L' of shame and lessons are as expensive as ever.

"It's not a great time for a learner driver," agrees Mark Born, head of the AA's Driving Instructor Training Academy. The root of the price hike, in his view, is that the driving test backlog means driving instructors have lots of students on their books needing 'top-up' lessons while they wait for one of the coveted test slots to become available.