“We felt as a community that it was only a matter of time until somebody got hurt.”

Those are the words of the people giving up their time to make their area safer, this volunteers' week and every week.

On Monday we met with the Froggatt community speed watch group which when it was first launched, had some of the highest speeders reported.

They explained, “This road used to be a B road but was recently upgraded to an A road. With that, we’ve seen much more traffic and speeding drivers. We struggle to get out of our driveways and felt as a community that it was only a matter of time until somebody got hurt.

“We’re known to stand on this road now at different times, so in expectation of seeing us, traffic is generally going slower.”

Like Froggatt, we’ve seen areas such as Sawley where traffic has indeed got slower since the introduction of community speed watch. The intelligence gained from these groups also supports our officers in improving road safety across the entire county.

Earlier this year a vehicle was seen to be travelling at extremely high speed, the volunteers passed these details to our roads policing unit who stopped the driver and found that not only were they speeding, but were also committing a number of other offences.

When we mention community speed watch, we tend to get comments asking why these volunteers “don’t get proper jobs” or “why are they just trying to get money”. Comments we heard in person on Monday by drivers who were upset by the idea of doing the speed limit.

But these volunteers all give their time for the same reason – to make the roads in their area safer for children, the elderly and everyone else living or travelling through their community.

A lot of our volunteers do have jobs and give their time outside of their careers because they want to maintain safety, and as you’ve probably guessed… no paid fines are given.

In addition to this, the volunteers choose their locations in response to what their local communities raise as a priority. Speeding negatively effects a lot of residents, so the community speed watch groups are happy to give their time to stop this.

The groups gather data to get realistic figures around speeding in their area, information which is passed to us for us to send out letters or look into other methods needed to keep those roads safe.

In 2022, 303 people died on UK roads because drivers were travelling above the speed limit. All those people have family, friends and loved ones left behind due to drivers choosing to go above the limit.

Our volunteers are doing what they can to bring down these statistics. Currently we have 98 active community speed watch groups across the county, with over 800 trained volunteers taking part.

As many groups as possible came together on Monday to run speed watch sessions in unison. Some of these groups had a visit from our roads policing team, who shared their frustrations with speeding drivers.

The work our volunteers do really does make a difference, and we are grateful for the time and support they give to both us, and their community.