Tabitha and Olly Symonds have spent £5,660 helping their 17-year-old daughter, Poppy, learn how to drive, and she hasn’t even passed her test yet.
Lessons are £40 each; the theory and practical tests will be £85 altogether; a provisional driving licence costs £34; an eight-year-old Hyundai i10 with 60,000 miles on the clock was £4,800, the insurance was £300 and provisional driving insurance for Poppy (she can’t be the main policy holder until she passes her test) was another £360.
The Symonds are already bracing themselves to have to pay out again when their younger daughter, Meg, 14, learns to drive, which she is likely to need to do because public transport is patchy where they live in Witney, Oxfordshire.
“When I passed my test in 1993, nothing was this expensive. I bought a clapped-out old Ford Fiesta from a neighbour,” said Tabitha, 48. “I want to be able to help the girls, but this is stretching my finances.”
The cost of 45 hours of lessons, as recommended by the Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), and theory and practical driving tests has gone up 53 per cent from £1,083 in January 2013 to £1,660, far outstripping the 36 per cent Consumer Prices Index measure of inflation over that time.
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The cost of buying a car has gone up hugely too. A 10 to 15-year-old Volkswagen Polo — a typical first car — has gone from £1,748 to £5,547, according to the car marketplace AutoTrader.
And once they have passed their test, the average cost of comprehensive insurance for a 17 to 24-year-old driver is now £2,009 a year, the consumer site Compare the Market said, up from £1,365 in January last year.
This means that the average cost of buying and insuring a used car and learning to drive is now £9,216. This assumes that you pass the tests first time. The pass rate for the £23 driving theory test fell to an all-time low of 44.2 per cent in 2022-23, according to the DVSA, and the pass rate for the £62 practical test was 48 per cent.
And so it seems that many young people are being priced off the road. The number of 17 to 20-year-olds who held a full licence fell from 820,000 in 2013 (31 per cent) to 710,000 in 2022 (27 per cent), according to the Department for Transport.
The most common age for people to take their driving test was up to 18 in 2021-22, from 17 in 2012-13, the DVSA said.
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A survey of nondrivers by the transport department in 2021 suggested that 24 per cent of the 17 to 20-year-olds it asked were not learning to drive because they couldn’t afford to.
Young people in rural areas are at greater disadvantages if they cannot drive. Analysis of the jobs site Adzuna by the RAC Foundation, a charity, found that 17.4 per cent of the more than a million job adverts in the first week of October required a driving licence.
Sam Egan from Salford is 18 and started learning to drive in January last year. He has spent about £1,000, with his parents paying some and the rest from his job at Asda. He had to take his theory test eight times, but passed his practical test a week ago at the first attempt.
Egan was then shocked to find out how much he would have to pay for car insurance. Some quotes for the type of small car he is looking to buy were for as much as £10,000 a year.
“We were getting some stupid quotes,” he said. “We would go and look at cars, my dad and I would take a picture of the registration and send it to my mum and she would check the price of insurance. If it was too expensive we’d just leave.”
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In the end they found a 2013 Kia Picanto with 103,000 miles on it for £2,895 on AutoTrader and insurance for £2,200. He is paying his parents the cost back in monthly instalments.
“I don’t know how any young person is supposed to afford that without help,” he said. “Before I was relying on my friends to come and pick me up. There’s so much more freedom now that I can drive. I can leave the house and go whenever I want to.”
Louise Thomas from the comparison site Confused said: “Getting on the road is becoming a very worrying challenge for young people. Many may be lucky enough to get financial support from parents or family, but this is still a heavy cost for anyone to cover.”
Why is driving so expensive?
Inflation has pushed up costs for all drivers. Used car prices have increased 43.8 per cent since February 2020, according to the car marketplace AutoTrader. The average cost of a second-hand car is now £16,868. The ten cheapest cars available on the site this week ranged from £275 to £390 — how roadworthy they are is, however, worth questioning.
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The increase in car prices, along with the rising costs of parts and labour, has had a knock-on effect on insurance. Compare the Market said the average comprehensive policy for a 17 to 24-year-old is 41 per cent higher now than in January 2020.
Young drivers are involved in more crashes and personal injury claims than other drivers, which is partly why their insurance costs are higher. The Association of British Insurers said the average claim for a 17 to 20-year-old driver was £6,651 in 2022, compared with £4,000 in 2015. The average claim for a driver aged 46-50 in 2022 was £3,815, compared with £2,498 in 2015.
Driving instructors say that their prices are up because of the increased costs of insurance and petrol and because of high demand. Lessons now cost an average of £35 an hour, up from £22 in January 2013. Petrol has gone up from 133p a litre to 141p over that time.
Even if you can afford lessons, you may struggle to find an instructor. Some said they were booked up for six months. Seb Goldin, the head of RED Driver Training, said the company was still working through a backlog from the pandemic with “unprecedented demand for lessons from students”.
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The average waiting time for a practical driving test hit 20.6 weeks in August, and is now 15.1 weeks. Before the pandemic the average waiting time was six weeks.
The demand is so great that the DVSA said there had been problems with companies or instructors booking up test slots and then reselling them for a profit.
The DVSA said it has been recruiting examiners to create 40,000 extra test slots a month and there were a record 152,474 practical tests in December — 32 per cent higher than the number in December 2022.
How to cut costs
Save money on lessons by taking your child out for driving practice. You need to have held a full driving licence for at least three years to supervise someone with a provisional licence, and they will need to be on the insurance.
Driving test slots are cheaper on weekdays (£62) than in evenings, weekends or bank holidays (£75) andthere are free practice apps you can download to help someone pass their theory test first time. They can choose a test area for the practical driving test so consider driving them around it so they know it well.
New drivers can get cheaper insurance if they agree to have a telematics device monitor their driving. These “black box” policies may include certain restrictions, such as not being able to drive late at night. Last year the average fully comprehensive car insurance policy for a driver aged between 17 and 20 was £4,384 a year, compared with an average of £3,102 for a telematics policy, according to the comparison site MoneySuperMarket.
Once your child gets a car, you may find that their insurance will be cheaper if they add you as a named driver on the policy. This is because insurers consider a car driven part of the time by a more experienced driver to be less of a risk.
Have you or someone you know been put off learning to drive by the cost? Let us know in the comments
