1.3 By the mid-1990s, DVTA's vehicle testing equipment was outdated and increasingly prone to breakdown. Several other factors posed significant risks to the integrity of its vehicle testing processes, and the effective delivery of services to the public, including:
• a significant, and ongoing, increase in demand for vehicle tests;
• considerable health and safety issues for staff related to the testing equipment and facilities;
• capacity restrictions at many test centres, expected to lead increasingly to the use of expensive working practices, such as overtime and extended-day working1;
• the need to meet increasingly challenging key performance targets for vehicle testing waiting times; and
• the need to improve the consistency and objectivity of vehicle testing, in the interests of road safety.
1.4 In addition, the imminent introduction of EU requirements requiring testing of additional items, such as smoke tests (diesel vehicles) and catalytic converter tests (petrol vehicles), would increase the time taken to carry out vehicle tests and place further pressure on capacity. This would result in significant costs being incurred through the need to construct additional test lanes at most of DVTA's centres.
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1. Extended-day working involves the operation of two teams each working three days of twelve and a half hours. While this enables DVTA to double its vehicle testing capacity and reduces the need for overtime, it is, nevertheless, more expensive than standard working practices.