With less than a month until the deadline, 25,000 MOT testers are yet to complete their Annual Assessment and risk being suspended from testing.

The warning comes from the Institute of the Motor Industry (IMI), which applauds the sector as a whole for prioritising the Annual Assessment this year, with the number of compliant testers significantly greater than at the same time last year.

To offer assistance to MOT testers completing the Annual Assessment in the countdown to the deadline, the IMI is extending its operating hours on March 30-31 to an 8am start and 7pm close.

Steve Scofield, head of business development at the IMI, said: “Unlike many other industries, where Continuing Professional Development (CPD) might be a mere tick-box exercise, correct training and assessment of technicians is critical to the safety of motoring on UK roads. It’s hugely reassuring to see how many MOT testers prioritised the Annual Assessment this year, completing it well ahead of the deadline.

“However, those MOT testers who fail to meet the deadline of March 31 will not be able to legally conduct any MOT work until their training and assessment has been completed. They will also lose the convenience of taking the Annual Assessment remotely. Instead they will have to competently demonstrate to a DVSA representative face-to-face, in their place of work, their ability to carry out an MOT assessment on a vehicle. In short, failing to complete the assessment in time could have serious consequences both for garage income and road safety.”

To ease the administrative process of meeting the March deadline, the IMI’s MOT Training and Assessment package offers a three-hour e-Learning training module that can be completed in bite-size chunks.

Almost 700 MoT testers have been disqualified in the last two years (2020/21 and 2021/22), a rise of 49% compared to the previous two years.

Data obtained from the DVSA by BookMyGarage has shown there were 687 disqualifications in the past two financial years, with more than 1,000 warnings issued to MoT testers during the same timeframe.

Tester disqualifications have risen steadily in recent years, with the DVSA banning nearly 3.5 times the number of testers in 2020/21 compared to 2015/16.