Agnew’s director Brian Robinson on navigating Northern Ireland's car repair challenges

While wage pressures make it hard to find and retain skilled workers throughout the industry, Northern Ireland's dealerships also have to grapple with some very particular physical car repair capacity constraints which look likely to hinder growth for some time to come.

Northern Ireland’s population growth and the increasing number of cars on the road were all identifiable trends pre-COVID. Then came January 2020, when the authorities announced serious safety issues with ramp equipment at the state-run MOT test centres which they warned would most likely cause the backlog to worsen.

Signs of cracking on lifts were first discovered during an inspection of Larne MOT centre in November 2019 but it was not until an independent report in January 2020 that revealed faults were found on 48 out of 55 lifts in NI test centres.