Speeding: A Good Topic for CPC Courses?

The main impetus for implementing the Driver CPC requirements was the desire to make European roads safer by ensuring HGV and PCV drivers are routinely trained about safety and workplace issues. If road safety is not improved as a result, implementation of the programme will have been in vain. This leads us to ask the question: is speeding a good topic for CPC courses offered by companies like ours?

Our question is the result of recent data showing that speeding is still a problem among both professional and non-professional drivers alike. Even as we have made great strides in reducing insurance-related offences, drink driving, and excise duty and registration-related offences, little headway has been made on the speeding issue. And, unfortunately, this applies to drivers of all kinds.

HGV UK spoke to consultant collision analyst Andrew Drewary for his take on the speeding issue. He summed it up very nicely by saying, “speeding is a very serious issue but unfortunately a lot of drivers and companies do not see it this way.”

Drewary went on to say that companies with employees who drive as part of their jobs do not take speeding seriously enough until after it is too late. He said that far too many do not have an established and documented policy outlining the company’s position and the consequences of being caught speeding. He believes more needs to be done to develop comprehensive policies that adequately address the issue.

While official policies are good, we do not believe they go far enough. This leads us to our suggestion of speeding being a topic for CPC courses.

The Difference Between Policy and Training

Official company policies certainly have their place. But such policies are rather ineffective if they remain nothing more than ink on paper. Making them real to drivers is a matter of training. Not one-off training that spends 10 minutes talking about speeding and then never addresses the question again; what we are talking about is ongoing training that is a regular part of the driver’s routine. This is where CPC courses come in handy.

Driver CPC regulations require all commercial drivers to undergo a total of 35 hours of additional training every five years. A training programme that includes a comprehensive look at speeding can be part of the training regimen. Yet companies do not have to limit that training just to the five-year CPC cycle. In addition to CPC courses, companies can engage in remedial training on a monthly or bimonthly basis until we see a significant reduction in speeding offences.

The government’s THINK! campaign says that more than 3,000 people died in 2013 as a result of crashes involving speeding. Drewary says that there has been a 20% increase in speeding offence convictions just in the last 12 months alone. The numbers are clear: speeding is still an issue in the UK. If making speeding a topic of CPC courses can help, perhaps it’s time to think about it.