Ex-police chief ’s f irm in mystery of ‘missing’ speed course millions
MILLIONS of pounds of public cash meant to fund road- safety schemes is unaccounted for at a private company run by ex-police officers, it is alleged.
Huge sums went into the coffers of the firm from motorists caught speeding but who avoided prosecution by paying to go on driver awareness courses.
The company – NDORS Ltd, set up by ex-Chief Constable Meredydd Hughes – was paid a proportion of the fees collected to cover the cost of administering the scheme and was meant to return any surplus cash to police forces to spend on improving road safety.
But crime tsars who looked into the arrangement have not been able to establish where all the money has gone – and NDORS Ltd has refused to provide full accounts.
Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) believe up to £10 million could be missing, and in a lastditch attempt to trace it have asked Justice Secretary Liz Truss to designate the firm a public authority.
That would make it subject to the Freedom of Information Act and allow the PCCs to request detailed spending figures.
In a letter seen by The Mail on Sunday, Staffordshire PCC Matthew Ellis wrote: ‘ Advice from accountants suggests it is impossible to ascertain how and where the l arge revenues have been used… and what payments have been made to individual directors. I have exhausted every avenue to seek this information.’
As this newspaper first revealed, NDORS Ltd was set up to administer speed awareness courses a decade ago by South Yorkshire police chief Mr Hughes and another former officer, Trevor Hall, who has 26 years’ experience in roads policing. Separate firms run the courses and get most of the £90 course fee, with the police forces whose cameras caught the speeding motorist getting £15, while a further £5 ‘administration fee’ goes to NDORS Ltd.
The company’s last accounts show that two million people completed courses in the 18 months to September 2015, paying £80 million in fees. The surplus money made by not- for- profit NDORS Ltd was meant to be spent on transport improvements, and NDORS’s published accounts show that in 2014 and 2015 it gave £ 2 million to a charity and a new company that manages the surplus, the Road Safety Trust and UK ROEd Ltd.
The PCCs now want to trace NDORS’s spending from previous years – believing it could amount to about £10 million – and called in accountants to help.
The PCCs had studied a highly critical separate review by accountants which found that there was never a legal contract obliging NDORS to contribute to transport improvements, merely an understanding that it would, meaning that the cash legally belonged to the company directors. The PCCs say the directors refused to show them their full accounts on grounds of commercial sensitivity, prompting them to seek legal advice and then to turn to Ministers to help.
The Ministry of Justice has not yet responded to their request.
Dorset PCC Martyn Underhill said yesterday: ‘There must be absolute transparency on where that public money goes. Sadly, I have been unable to obtain that clarity in relation to payments made before 2015. Public money needs public scrutiny.’
Last night, a spokesman for NDORS Ltd said: ‘Given that we took part in a full due diligence process with UK ROEd Ltd, we felt that additional requests for supplementary information after the event were unnecessary and unwarranted. As far as we are concerned, the matter is at an end and has been for some time now.’
The spokesman said it was ‘absolutely incorrect’ to suggest any money was unaccounted for. He said: ‘All surplus was used for road safety and charitable initiatives.’
A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman said: ‘On transfer to the Road Safety Trust, an accountant was employed to undertake due diligence on the information available by law. Police and Crime Commissioners would like to see the full accounts and have approached the Secretary of State.
‘Police forces do not profit from courses and the financial model provides for cost-recovery only.’
‘We need transparency on where money goes’