Road accidents way up, so Britain to stop giving road tests in foreign languages. Transport minister Mike Penning told The Daily Telegraph he was working out how to implement a ban on foreign language tests without the new regulations falling foul of anti-discrimination legislation. 'I find it incredible that Labour thought it was a god idea to let people without a basis grasp of English loose on our roads,' he said.
A Department For Transport source said there had recently been a spate of crashes involving Polish-speaking drivers.
Government figures showed that last year around seven per cent of theory tests were taken in a foreign language - almost 19,000 of them were in Urdu, 13,000 in Polish and 298 in Albanian. For the practical tests 452 Romanians, 230 Russians and 21 Bulgarians used translators, while more than 1,500 bus drivers took a theory test in a foreign language.
According to transport officials other European countries do not routinely allow people to sit driving tests in foreign languages.