- We once sat in on a speed awareness course: 21 Drivers, about £62 a head, one four-hour morning in one hired room.
- Today around 1.84 million Drivers a year take these courses, at £80 to £100 each — nine courses for every speeding conviction in Court.
- And when we totted up what that one room actually cost to run, the number at the bottom of the page took some believing.
Back around 2011, when the speed awareness scheme was still new, we went and sat in on a course to see it for ourselves.
A friend of DriveProtect™ — we’ll call her Amy — had been caught doing 36mph in a 30 zone. Marginal speeding, so instead of three points she was offered a course. We tagged along and took a seat at the back.
The first surprise was the tone. The trainer was a perfectly nice bloke, but the delivery felt systematically patronising — 21 grown adults greeted like naughty schoolchildren who’d been kept behind after class.
The second surprise was who was running it: not the police, not the council, but a private company — AA DriveTech, the training arm of the AA.
And the third surprise was the one we couldn’t stop thinking about. While the room was being told off, we did the maths on the room — and 21 attendees at about £62 a head came to £1,302 for a single morning.
The Sums on the Back of the Handout
So what did that morning cost to put on?
The catering stretched to six jugs of water and a round of coffees in disposable cups — call it £10. There were no biscuits.
The hired room, perhaps £100 for the four hours. The trainer, say another £100.
Put the costs at a generous £210, and that one room, on one morning, cleared something in the region of £860.
Afterwards we asked the trainer how often these courses run. Every day, he said — and three separate courses were running in that county alone that very day.
One room. One morning. And rooms like it filling up all over the country, every day of the week.
From One Hired Room to a National Industry
That was the scheme in its infancy — it had only launched nationally in 2008.
Fast-forward to today and the scale is on another level entirely. In 2024, around 1.84 million Drivers attended a speed awareness course — a rise of 139 per cent on 2011.
Set that against roughly 205,000 speeding convictions in Court the same year, and you get about nine courses for every conviction.
The fee has climbed too: typically £80 to £100 now, set by the provider. To be fair, the scheme says those fees cover the cost of delivering the courses, with any surplus passed to a road safety charity’s grant fund — but on 1.84 million attendances a year, well over £150 million is flowing through that system annually.
Not bad for an industry whose customers are sent to it by the police — and whose hospitality, in our experience, runs to water and coffee.
They still owe us a biscuit.
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The Decision Hiding Inside the Course Offer
Here’s what matters for you as a Driver. If a NIP arrives and a course is dangled as the easy way out, that offer is still part of a prosecution process — and it deserves the same scrutiny as any other part of one.
You’re only eligible within strict speed thresholds, only once every three years, and accepting means paying the provider and giving up a day. Accept a course on the back of a flawed case — wrong details on the NIP, unenforceable signage, paperwork out of time — and you’ve paid for something you might never have needed.
Whether to take the course, take the fixed penalty, or contest the case is a genuine legal decision, not a box-ticking exercise.
DriveProtect Members don’t make it alone. The moment a NIP arrives, Members get direct access to a specialist Speeding Solicitor who reviews the case and advises them exactly what to respond, for a fraction of the normal cost of legal help.
As for Amy? She went on to become a DriveProtect Member.
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