A new conspiracy against motorists is taking shape in the West Midlands where the political boss of the police, Simon Foster, and the mayor, Richard Parker, want to keep more money from speeding fines.
They’ve been whingeing about the money going to the Treasury for some time. What they don’t admit is that the whole system is far more convoluted than it may seem.
The money from speeding fines may go to the Treasury but hundreds of thousands of motorists a year attend speed awareness courses and, financially, these are nice little earners for the police, not the Treasury.
That’s because these courses are managed by a company set up by the police themselves called UKRoED (Road Offender Education Ltd) which enjoyed income of £94 million in the year to March 2024.
Out of that, £86.8 million is accounted as “cost of sales” most of which went back to the police forces who nabbed the motorists because UKRoED guarantees to cover their costs while some forces run courses themselves, another nice little earner.
In the case of the West Midlands Police, they budgeted to pay UkRoED £4.5 million in January this year (apparently this was an accounting provision based on an estimated cost. After a long chat with a very helpful spokesperson, I am none the wiser about what the police get in return though we must assume they end up in profit).
Meanwhile, UKRoED pays its boss, Ruth Purdie, £173,000 (up from £135,000 the previous year). Its directors’ pay totals £459,000 while the wages bill for its 30 staff rose 26 per cent from £1.5 million in 2023 to £1.9 million last year. The company had £5.4 million reserves and 1,650,322 people attended speed awareness courses (other courses are also available).
It gives its profits (£1.6 million last year) to its owner, the Road Safety Trust (also run by Ruth Purdie, once an assistant chief constable in Cheshire).
The Road Safety Trust has doled out £12.2 million in grants to various deserving causes. These include the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (£231,650); Transport Scotland (£313,300); the Bikeability Trust (£231,352); £127,000 lobbying Parliament; and £49,000 to Nottingham Trent University for ‘understanding and explaining the differences between the mental-models of motorcyclists and car drivers for detecting hazards: from theory to training’.
In other words, a multi-million-pound industry has been created on the back of motorists, most of whom get done for driving slightly over arbitrary speed limits imposed by the people who profit from these misdemeanours.
There is a fine line between using speed limits to protect lives and merely as another way of increasing taxes but that line was crossed a long time ago. And it’s not as simple as our glorious leaders in the West Midlands moaning to the Treasury over a couple of million quid.
The last thing they should have is any incentive to exploit motorists any more than they do now. Mr Foster’s claim local speed enforcement schemes face a £2.2 million deficit is just not credible.
No comments:
Post a Comment