To manage demand during the restart process, DVSA has granted exemptions to commercial vehicles. Those exemptions will affect vehicles due for test until March 2021.
Most exemptions are for a period of three months – roughly the amount of time that there were no inspections – but in some cases deemed by DVSA to be particularly low-risk, they can extend to 12 months. Those cases are for vehicles (trucks, buses, coaches, trailers) that are: less than two years old; run by an Earned Recognition operator; run by an operator with a green OCRS score (you must have 50 or more events, and a calculated base score of 1.3 or less on 27 July 2020). (For more information, see a new DVSA blog post: https://is.gd/dugipu).
Now, DVSA has published a few different means for operators to manage this information digitally.
First, the Transport Operator Portal Service, which contains information about all the vehicles and trailers on an operator licence, now includes MOT test expiry dates. See more information on https://is.gd/joseme
Second, it has provided means for operators of large fleets to compare their electronic vehicle and trailer records against DVSA’s records, through an API, application programming interface. More technical information and a link to a mandatory application form is available via https://is.gd/beroha
Third, it has provided a list of 805,000 HGVs, PSVs and trailers with test dates, in the form of a 20Mb downloadable electronic spreadsheet file: http://assets/dft.gov.uk/dvsa/datasets/heavy-vehicle-mot-expiry-dates.csv.
Finally, DVSA reports that its ‘find a test centre’ service, available via https://is.gd/obuhav, now includes information about whether test slots are available.
UPDATED 12:20 30 November, to correct the last weblink.