The short answer
The licensing authority checks your documents, obtains information about any previous licences and entries, and then issues the test instruction to the testing organisation. Only then may you sit the theory test. How long that takes is up to the authority — the clearance does not arrive as a letter to you but as an instruction at TÜV or DEKRA.
For most people the application is a black box: you hand documents in, nothing appears to happen for weeks, and at some point a test date is in the air. In fact a great deal happens in that time, just not to you and not with us.
What gets checked
- Identity and age, from your ID and your photo
- The eyesight certificate and the first aid certificate
- Whether a licence has ever been issued to you, withdrawn from you or refused
- Information from the registers kept on fitness to drive
- For minors, the consent of a parent or guardian as well
That part is why the application cannot be dealt with over the counter: the register enquiry runs through other bodies, and the authority waits for it exactly as you do.
The test instruction
At the end there is no decision addressed to you, but an instruction to the testing organisation. TÜV or DEKRA may only test you once that instruction is in place — it is the actual clearance. Which is why the sentence about the authority not having been in touch is nearly always accurate and still no sign of a problem.
From about the fifth week onwards almost everybody asks whether the authority has been in touch. We go and look rather than wait — and in the vast majority of cases the file is complete and simply sitting in the pile. What does make us uneasy is a different pattern: a document has been requested and the message reached nobody.
What holds it up
- A missing signature, often a parent's
- A name or address spelled differently on two documents
- An earlier licence from abroad that has to be clarified separately
- Holiday periods, when everybody enrols at once
What you can do while waiting
Everything except the theory test. Theory lessons run, driving lessons run, the basic training runs. That is exactly why we lodge the application on the day you enrol rather than once the theory is done — how the overall duration adds up is a post of its own.
Which certificates have to be together beforehand is in applying for your licence. If you want to know where your application stands, ask at the office — we can see more than you can.
What to take away
The application is the one step neither you nor we can speed up — all that is controllable is when it starts. That makes day one the right day, and silence from the authority is, in the normal case, not bad news.