In this month’s episode of the PMM Podcast, host Kieran Nee sat down with MOT Juice’s training content creator, Dave Long, to follow up on a recent news story we ran on photo evidence coming to the MOT.
Hi Dave, could you tell us a bit about the trial?
“Essentially the DVSA are trialling taking photos of every vehicle before it’s MOT tested to make sure that the vehicles are actually on site when they’re being tested.
It’s really easy to do. When they officially announced it we thought it was going to be really hard for me, but essentially before every MOT test when you log the vehicle in for an MOT the DVSA adds an extra screen which asks you to take a picture of a QR code that will ask for access to your camera. So it’s a live photo. It’s actually accessing your camera roll, you take a photo of the pit, take a photo of the vehicle when it’s there. You click upload and when you log back onto your MOT there’s a picture of the vehicle there.
And it needs to be a smartphone or tablet?
Yes. You can use your personal one or most businesses are coming away from paperwork so it’s more on tablets and stuff like that anyway. As long as it’s got internet access and a camera.
So Dave, how did you get involved in this trial?
The DVSA announced the trial and asked for anyone that wanted to be part of it and we did and luckily we were one of the people that got picked for it.
Do you have a close relationship with the DVSA?
We do speak to them quite a lot with what we do at MOT Juice providing training for MOT testers and stations. We’re constantly asking them questions about this, that and the other and anything that comes out we’re very interested in doing it.
How many MOTs do you see through an average month?
So this station that we’ve got here is pretty much stacked out every day so each ramp will be doing eight MOTs each, two ramps times five times the rest of the month so you’re probably looking at around about 200-250 MOTs a month.
And you’ve been adding the photos to every single one of those MOTs?
Yes we have. I mean there is a button there for if you can’t upload it and I think there’s only one MOT that we couldn’t do and that was just an issue on the first or second day where one of the technicians got a little bit confused but we’ve never had one since then.
Have you had any feedback yet from DVSA on the trial?
No, we’ve just had a little bit of feedback to say everyone’s doing it, it’s all going well and it’s keeping on going. What is interesting is, technicians may not know this, but anyone that runs a VTS will. You get your test logs at the end of the month and there’s now an extra filter to say if you’ve uploaded an image, which is new, and you can use that to govern how you’re managing your workshop. So apart from that, it’s going okay.
Why is the government going through this rigmarole of adding photos to what was a relatively simple test before?
Essentially, fraud – ghost MOTs are a massive, massive issue within the industry. Someone just sending all their details to an MOT tester, then quickly logging it on and then charging whoever it is £150 and they get an MOT out of it, which is not good for road safety and is not good for the DVSA scheme and the MOT testing scheme as a whole so they’re really trying to crack down on that and I think this system will probably work. At the moment I think there’s only one thing that I can think of that you can do to get around it. I don’t really want to give anyone ideas, but you could in theory take a picture of a picture. But especially with AI technology that they could potentially use at the DVSA they could say okay that is a picture of a picture that isn’t at that location.
I’m pretty sure the DVSA have already got a good idea of who they think is a bit dodgy. So they’ll probably target them most and actually ask them “why are you not uploading pictures? Why are these pictures all looking a bit funny?” And then once they’ve got the majority of those people out of the way, then they’ll start going on to everyone else.
Do you worry that there might come a situation though where perfectly legitimate testers are being penalised because the photo is out of focus or they’ve left out the left tyre out or something like that?
It’ll probably come up on the tester’s TQI actually, so every month the tester gets their information about their failures on brake wipers, suspension, that type of things. So it might just be an extra box on there, saying for instance “you did 50 MOTs, you only uploaded 47 pictures.”
Are there any other measures that the DVSA should be looking at putting in place?
The only thing I probably would say is more employment within the DVSA to go out and do more site visits. They’ve already put out this thing recently where they’re going to be doing over the phone site audits which kind of gets all the office stuff out the way and when a VE comes in they’re not spending a lot of time in offices digging through paperwork. They’re actually spending time in the workshops, understanding the testers, understanding the processes and the pitfalls that they’re coming up against and the issues that they’re dealing with and trying to sort those out, which is again, another good thing that’s currently coming out from the DVSA.
