Metro, Monday 3 August 2026
The AA is calling for drivers who passed their test in an automatic car to be allowed to drive a manual after completing a one-hour conversion lesson through a driving school, rather than sitting a full manual test. AA president Edmund King says it "doesn't make sense" for automatic-licence holders to wait months for a manual test slot when the reverse restriction doesn't apply, and argues government approval of a short conversion course would let people drive manuals legally. The average wait for a manual test slot was nearly 22 weeks in May, up from five weeks before the pandemic. A record 29.4 per cent of driving tests were taken in automatics last year, up from around 4 per cent in 2007/08. The Department for Transport said anyone wishing to drive a manual car must pass a manual driving test, "for the safety of all road users," and has no plans to change this.
The Department for Transport's justification names the thing the rule is supposedly protecting, safety, without connecting the restriction to any specific hazard a one-hour conversion lesson would fail to address. That gap is the whole of this story.
A driver who has passed a test proving they can read the road, judge distance, anticipate hazards, and control a vehicle at speed is being told that operating a clutch and gearstick, a mechanical skill with no bearing on hazard perception, requires starting the entire testing process again rather than a supervised top-up. The rule treats gear-changing as equivalent in risk to the competencies the original test was designed to certify. Nothing in the DfT's statement explains why that equivalence holds.
Meanwhile the practical effect of the current threshold is a 22-week wait, more than four times the pre-pandemic figure, for a test slot that exists to certify a skill increasingly few people will use in daily driving: automatic vehicles now account for close to a third of tests taken, up from roughly one in twenty-five two decades ago. The category the rule protects is shrinking. The queue enforcing it is lengthening. The rule was not written with either fact in mind, and the department defending it has not been asked, in the reporting, to reconcile the two.
This is a small, mechanical example next to the cases this project usually covers, and it carries no injustice on the scale of a conviction or a deportation. What it shares with them is the structure: a rule stated in terms of a stated purpose, a body responsible for the rule repeating the purpose rather than demonstrating it, and a queue of people absorbing the cost of a threshold nobody currently defending it can explain in terms of the harm it prevents.
This entry shows a written rule defended on safety grounds by the body enforcing it, and a road safety organisation stating on the record that the current threshold does not correspond to any safety difference it can identify.