The General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) has a problem with waiting lists to obtain a driving license. As La Vanguardia published last March, the delay in taking the practical test in the province of Barcelona can be up to two or three months, since there are more applicants than places available. As Alejandro Requena, a member of the Barcelona Driving Schools Federation (FAB), explained to this medium, “There is not enough staff to examine the students for the practical exam.” For this reason, many people who want to obtain the permit more quickly decide to do so in cities like Cuenca or Albacete, where the process is more agile.
To alleviate this collapse, the DGT will expand the workforce of examiners. This was announced yesterday by the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, in the control session in the Congress of Deputies, when the ERC deputy Inés Granollers asked him about the “inaction” of the Government regarding the waiting lists for take a driver’s license exam in Catalonia.
Marlaska assured that the DGT currently has 761 traffic examiners and that “in the coming weeks” it plans to incorporate another 50 by free competition, 40 interim due to vacancy and 4 for internal promotion. “We will have 855 examiners, the highest number in the last 12 years,” she said, before specifying that 23 of the 50 open competition examiners will be assigned to Catalonia. Granollers considered this figure insufficient to be able to provide quick service to all the people who are waiting to take the practical test.
It will be necessary to see if the deployment of this new staff manages to prevent some students from going to other Spanish provinces to obtain a driving license more quickly. At least not imminently. The director of the Servei Català del Trànsit (SCT), Ramon Lamiel, has warned that with the 23 new examiners announced for Catalonia, it will take almost half a year to end the waiting lists for the practical exams.
According to their calculations, assuming that the 131 examiners currently in Catalonia are working at full capacity, the new 23 officials would be the ones who would have to reduce the waiting lists of 32,000 people, so that they would have about 1,300 applicants each. . Taking into account that each examiner can do 12 tests a day, they would need 116 working days to meet their quota of 1,300 people, which would mean a period of five or six months to reduce waiting lists.
Faced with this situation, Lamiel has described this reinforcement promised by Marlaska as “insufficient” and has insisted that the only solution is to transfer these powers to the Generalitat. In this sense, he explained that when the DGT fills positions in Catalonia with new officials, it is “very easy” for these examiners to move to other parts of Spain after a short time, which causes there to always be a deficit of professionals and that many Catalans have to go to take their tests in other places, such as Cuenca: “it is between sad and regrettable, not to say unacceptable.”
On the contrary, according to Lamiel, if this competence were transferred to the Generalitat, it would be the regional administration that would call for the new civil servant positions within a Catalan work framework, which would guarantee greater permanence in Catalonia.
Lamiel has also regretted that the reinforcements that have been deployed in Catalonia since 2018 have been provisional, with interim personnel, or with a specific increase in overtime, which has not worked, according to the Generalitat.
For this reason, according to Lamiel, the optimal thing would be for 50 new examiners to be urgently assigned to Catalonia while the transfer of powers to the Generalitat is not effective.
Lamiel recalled that they proposed to the DGT, although without success, that the Generalitat could provide its own personnel to carry out exams, through a mixed model in which driving school teachers would be empowered to carry out these tests, although they now believe that the The only solution is through the transfer.
