There’s a BBC show called Don’t Get Done Get Dom. Dom fights for consumers’ rights after they write in to him.
Red Driving School Logo
On this latest episode – shown today, and available on iPlayer for a limited time – he looked into the situation facing two people who had signed up to do training with Red Driving School .
One of the people was unhappy about how quickly he was getting training. The other one had suffered two heart attacks and his doctor had told him he shouldn’t teach people to drive. They had been unable to get their agreements cancelled through their own efforts, so Dom stepped in and got it sorted out.
Before the programme was aired, some of the forums were in meltdown with the usual learned opinions from the usual learned crowd. The reality was always going to be that Dom was fighting for two people who had been unable to get their agreements cancelled (even though only one of them had a cast iron reason, the other one was a little bit grey and was based on alleged promises and admittedly hard-to-get training slots). But the learned crowd – as usual – speculated that the industry was going to be turned on its head and Red would be forced to close down!
It’s worth noting that the “agreement” I refer to is that the training course costs several thousand pounds and can be paid for with a loan. The loan has an APR of around 30%, so you end up paying back almost double the original loan amount. The argument is that the first 12 months of the loan are interest free, and you pay it back out of your first year’s earnings. This is how the advertising goes.
The reality isn’t always the same as the advertising, though. It is a massive subject, but some people don’t qualify as quickly as they’d like (or in the shortest time mentioned by the advertising). Some never qualify at all (the pass rate is very low). Some decide it is too hard and give up. Undoubtedly, Red is unable to provide lessons in some cases – but by no means in all of them. And so on.
Dom and the two people he was representing referred to the number of complaints on the Internet about Red. What they didn’t make fully clear – though Dom hinted at it – is that the vast majority of those complaints are about issues which do not justify cancellation of the agreement those people signed. However, you do get situations where someone has a real and genuine claim, but it is lost in the noise made by those others, and it was two of these that Dom was dealing with.
It was also interesting that right at the end they said that Red was under new ownership and had said that it was intending to address some areas where there were problems.
I’ll tell you what, though. I’d love to be able to sit in on some of those sales meetings and listen to what really gets said. Everyone who wants to get out of their agreement – usually the day before they have to start paying it back – claims they were promised absolutely that they would pass within six weeks and be earning £30,000 within 6 months. Such claims are always dubious when you consider that anyone with an ounce of sense, and who had looked into this even a little bit, would realise that failure at the first, second, and even third attempts (Part 2 and 3) is easily possible, and that exam lead times can be several months. Add to that the people who state categorically that Red’s advertising says things it clearly doesn’t (they ignore key words like “could” and “up to”), and you just know that something is amiss.
I don’t doubt some sales reps go too far, especially if they are on commission. But not all of them.
As an aside, since the programme was shown this morning the blog is getting a lot of hits on terms like “has red gone bust”. It worries me slightly that people who are currently in training with Red or who are already involved in the industry as ADIs don’t know what has happened. I even edited the posts about Red because it was clear people were finding the earliest post (” Red HAS Gone Bust “) and not moving on to the almost immediate update ( ” Red Is Saved “).