27 August 2015

A statement from Neil Barlow, DVSA Head of MOT Modernisation:

“The early days of the new MOT testing service haven’t gone as well as planned and we apologise for that. We’ve been as disappointed as you about the way the service has started and want to explain that we’re doing everything we can to make things better and take things forward.

We’ve had some problems moving data between MOT Comp and the new service which has affected things like issuing duplicates and carrying out retests. We’re now starting to see this data move over to the new service which should resolve these issues.

In the early days, we also had some performance issues around printing and last week had substantial problems with our hosting provider.

It seems other parts of government experienced similar issues so this was not unique to DVSA and the new service.

To prevent this from happening again, we made the decision to move to another hosting supplier last weekend. However, it seems our initial hosting issues masked some other underlying problems which we’ve now solved by working throughout the night every day this week.

The service has now become stable and fully functional and, as a result, Friday was our busiest day so far with normal levels of transactions recorded on the service.

Despite the recent problems, we’ve already registered over 1.6 million tests on the service and we’d like to stress to garages that they shouldn’t turn away customers if they can’t access the service because they can use contingency testing to issue certificates and carry out tests instead.

To support this process (and to help everyone catch up on entering contingency tests) we’re temporarily allowing another tester to enter a contingency test on behalf of a fellow tester who works at the same VTS.

We’ve also been working with Post Offices to make sure they accept any contingency certificates presented to them by customers wanting to tax their car. So, as you can see, we’re doing all we can to make things work.

Until further notice, we’ll continue to make contingency testing codes and documents available on the GOV.UK website and email out the codes each day to make sure all garages can continue testing and issue certificates.

We’ll be making further improvements to the service over the coming weeks in line with the feedback we’re getting from the MOT trade.

We’d like to thank those garages who’ve been affected by the recent issues for their patience over the past couple of weeks.”