An explanation of the fees charged to drivers and riders who choose to accept the offer of a course:

Course fees are paid to the organisation delivering the training and are made up of three parts.

First, there is the fee to cover the cost of providing the course to the driver or rider. Police forces can choose to deliver the courses themselves, or can award delivery contracts to specialist training organisations. The cost of providing courses varies and depends on several factors:

• cost of booking systems and registration of people attending the course
• cost of on-line virtual classrooms and IT support
• cost of the staff providing the training
• cost of venue hire
• number of people attending/ratio of participants to trainers
• course duration
• cost of training staff
• cost of quality control and compliance
• VAT where applicable

Second, there is the fixed ‘Central Police Cost Recovery’ component (currently £45), a fee paid to the originating police force. The fee is set in compliance with the HM Treasury guidance ‘Managing Public Money’. The fee reimburses the cost of the administration work caused to a police force by the additional numbers of offenders who are detected and then offered a course, including:

• contact with registered keepers, transport managers, lease companies and hire companies to identify the driver responsible for the offence
• checking the eligibility of the offender for the offer of a course
• sending the offer to the driver
• monitoring compliance with the scheme offer
• monitoring offender attendance
• final disposal of the offence

This fee is paid over by the training organisation to UKROEd, who in turn remit it to the originating police force. Working this way means that the courses pay for themselves rather than receiving funding, which would be diverted from other much-needed services. The cost recovery does not include the actual act of detection of the offences or the cost of the equipment used.

The third part, also fixed (currently £4), goes to UKROEd to cover the costs of administering the scheme on behalf of the police.  Those costs include the operating costs of developing and maintaining the secure database systems used to process offender data, as well as generating the content of the courses, ensuring the quality of delivery of the courses and monitoring the effectiveness of the courses. The fee is paid over by the training organisation to UKROEd.  UKROEd is constituted as a not-for-profit organisation, with any surplus arising from its operations donated to the Road Safety Trust. In the financial year 2019/20 this amounted to £0.9 million. In that year, the Road Safety Trust awarded six grants totalling £837,900 to road safety research and interventions, as well as six initiatives totalling £120,000 through the Trust’s new Small Grants Programme.