The Department of Transport has said that it employs a sufficient complement of driver testers and that there is no "specific cap" on the number it can recruit.
It was responding to media reports which suggested that only 11 new driver testers had recently been appointed out of more than 2,000 applicants because of a public service recruitment cap.
In a statement yesterday, the department said that, at full strength, the total number of driver testers was 130. "This level is sufficient to deal with normal, ongoing demand within an acceptable timeframe."
It insisted that there was no "specific cap" on the number of driver testers. Rather, the number of testers was determined by the level of "normal demand".
The department contends that the recent recruitment of 11 testers had returned its total number of testers to full strength.
"The current backlog is temporary in nature and should be eliminated using temporary resources rather than permanent resources with permanent costs," the statement said.
In order to meet its own target of eliminating this backlog within 12 months, a number of temporary measures have been introduced. These include:
the redeployment of seven civil servants from the Department of Agriculture to work as temporary driver testers;
the introduction of a bonus scheme for existing driver testers to carry out additional tests in the evenings and at weekends
the outsourcing of up to 45,000 tests to an outside agency.
"Taken together, these measures are designed to eliminate the driving test backlog by next summer," according to the department. "Once the backlog is eliminated, the total number of 130 driving testers should be sufficient to meet normal demand requirements."
However, while there is no "specific cap" on the number of testers the Department of Transport can recruit, testers - as State employees - are not exempt from the broad Civil Service recruitment cap.
A spokesman for the Department of Finance said that each Government department had an "authorised level of staff that it can employ, up to which it can recruit".
Within that overall limit, the allocation of staff to specific duties was at the discretion of each department, he added.