Today’s Government announcement on driver licensing support shows little progress on their 2017 election promise and fails to address the growing driver licence wait times, National’s Social Development and Employment spokesperson Louise Upston and Transport spokesperson Simeon Brown say.

“Labour has failed to deliver on their 2017 promise to provide five hours of professional driving lessons, a defensive driving course and free licence testing to senior secondary school students,” Louise Upston says.

“The Government have been consistently told by officials that not having a driver's licence is a major factor in locking out young people from employment opportunities.

“Not only have they not provided the universal support they promised in 2017, but this failure has occurred at a time when young people and job seekers have needed support the most.

“In the four years since Labour’s 2017 promise, 60,000 more people have moved onto the Jobseeker benefit.”

“Today’s announcement also fails to address that waiting times to sit licence tests which have blown out in the last five years,” Simeon Brown says.

“Labour will continue to use Covid as a scapegoat, even though waiting times to sit a driver licence have increased dramatically in 2019 and have only got worse since then.

“This is simply more spin and will fail to deliver tangible results.”

See the average wait times for driver licence tests here