Drivers taken off the road after faulty visual fields tests

Hundreds of motorists have been wrongly taken off the road by the DVLA after the government agency admitted that the equipment used produced incorrect results.

It related to more than 600 motorists who failed to pass drivers’ medical tests between 2010 and 2015. The DVLA blamed a faulty piece of software in the visual fields testing equipment, which caused lights to illuminate less brightly than they should. A variety of visual fields-testing equipment is found in practices, and several are able to run the Esterman driving program, most typically the Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer, but also later models of the Henson, Medmont and the Dicon machines.