Although speeding offences are generally on the decline, the revamped and increased penalties (from April 2017) could see you being fined as much as £1,000 for an offence on a single or dual carriageway, and as much as £2,500 for a similar offence on a motorway. Regardless of road type, you could also be faced with 6 penalty points and anything up to a ban for serious breach of the speed limit.

Challenging a ticket issued as the result of a safety camera is almost impossible, and contrary to popular belief, minor details being wrong (such as the colour of the car) isn’t a defence that will stand up in court. The only ‘get out’ clause you could possibly use is if the Notice of Intended Prosecution (NIP) hasn’t been issued in time – it should be issued within 14 days of the offence.

With that said, you may not necessarily receive the NIP within that time, but providing it has been sent to the registered keeper, the prosecution will go ahead.

There is never really a defence for speeding, and although police numbers are on the decline, the rise of technology means that prosecutions for driving offences are on the increase – it’s estimated that 1 in 3 motorists are fined every year, and that the police forces are raking in around £25,000,000 each year from fixed penalty notices.

If you feel that a speeding conviction has been unfairly issued, there is still hope – around 1 in 10 speeding fines are cancelled each year, although between 2016 – 17, Greater Manchester Police raised that cancellation figure to almost 28%, a total of 33,893 speeding convictions were withdrawn.

A lecturer in criminology at Liverpool Hope University found that 241,165 fines were scrapped in the same period, and calls for the ‘zero tolerance’ approach have been dismissed as unworkable, thanks to the mistakes being made.