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24,000 UK lorry drivers a month look up their training hours. The government shows the number, then leaves them stuck.

Driver-first CPC tracking, all in one app

Score: 7.75/10

Executive Summary

In a nutshell

A driver-first compliance app for the UK's ~600,000 HGV and PSV professional drivers. It pulls remaining Driver CPC hours from the gov.uk Periodic Training service, tags every module as National (post 3 December 2024 reforms, UK-only) or International (full 35hr, EU-and-UK), surfaces affordable training providers across the country with price, location, and dates for outstanding hours, fires renewal reminders 6/3/1 months pre-expiry, and walks drivers through the £25 DVSA card replacement workflow. Free for individual drivers (with affiliate income from the £15 to £40 per booking the training providers already pay for new sign-ups), £4.99/mo Driver Pro, £19/mo Fleet Lite (1 to 10 drivers), £49/mo Fleet Pro (11 to 50). Combined seed-keyword search volume is 23,890/mo with average competition under 0.10. The Q1 2026 search volume on "driver cpc check" is up 49% on Q1 2025. Fleet platforms like FleetCheck handle CPC inside enterprise compliance suites, but no driver-first product owns the space.

The Story

Meet the user

Illustration for 24,000 UK lorry drivers a month look up their training hours. The government shows the number, then leaves them stuck.

Sean has been driving a 44-tonner for twenty-three years. He's parked at Donington services on a Friday night, scrolling through a gov.uk page on his phone. It tells him he has 21 hours of Driver CPC banked. It does not tell him when his card expires, whether those 21 hours count as National or International (he's been doing UK runs all year but his last course was booked before the December 2024 split), where to do the missing 14 hours cheaply, or what happens if he loses the card his wife found in a jacket pocket last week looking suspiciously bent. His old boss used to chase this. His new boss tells him it's his problem and his bill. Last winter a mate of his got pulled at Dover and discovered his card had quietly expired four months earlier; £900 in fines, two days off the road.

Sean has tried three training providers' websites. Each one wants £30 to £45 per module, none of them tell him whether he's booking National or International, and none of them know how many hours he's already done. He puts his phone down, finishes his coffee, and Googles "check cpc hours" for the fourth time this year. Then someone in the cab park mentions an app. You log in once with your driving licence, it shows your hours, your expiry, your National/International split, the cheapest seven-hour module within fifty miles for next Saturday, and it pings you six months before your card runs out. He downloads it before he pulls out of the services.

Scores

How does this idea stack up?

7.8/10

medium confidence
🎯Opportunity
8/10

~600k DQC holders, 23,890/mo combined seed search volume, no driver-first product owns the SERP.

🔥Pain
9/10

Multiple Parliament petitions ("unjust tax", "abolish the CPC"), 100+ Trucknet threads, drivers self-funding since 2025, £900+ fines for missed renewals, £25 plus admin for lost cards.

🔧Feasibility
7/10

Standard SaaS stack, but gov.uk has no public API for hours data so user-paste or screen-scrape is required. Provider data needs partnerships or scraping.

Timing
9/10

3 December 2024 split created a brand new tagging problem every driver now has, training scheme axed in 2025 puts cost back on drivers, search volume up clearly year on year.

🕰️Durability
7/10

5-year renewal cycle is structural. Even a future CPC reform leaves hours-tracking, expiry reminders, and provider comparison intact. Petitions to scrap it exist but have not succeeded in 15 years.

🏋️Effort to Build
4/10

Solo-buildable, standard stack, low capital. The data-source friction (no public DVSA API) and the provider directory grind are the only meaningful drags.

Strongest

Pain

Two parliament petitions in active circulation, an entire forum subculture (Trucknet UK has dedicated CPC threads with thousands of posts), and drivers now paying out of their own pockets after the 2025 funding cut.

Watch out

Feasibility

The whole product hinges on getting at the driver's hours data. If DVSA ever closes the gov.uk hours-check page or changes the markup, the scrape breaks. Mitigate with a manual-entry fallback from day one and OAuth via licence number where possible.

Pain Point

The problem

The Driver CPC is a totally unjust tax on HGV drivers. The government does not value us for the essential service we perform; instead they view us as a revenue generator who has to constantly pour money into keeping our right to work.

Paraphrased from Parliament petition 68241, "Driver CPC is an unjust tax on drivers", and echoed across Trucknet UK CPC threads

Visibility. The gov.uk Periodic Training service tells a driver how many hours they have. It does not tell them when their card expires, the National/International split, or what they need to do next. Search volume on "driver cpc check" alone is 9,900/mo with peaks of 14,800 in August 2025.

The reform tax. Since 3 December 2024 every CPC course is tagged National (UK-only, more flexible, e-learning allowed) or International (full 35hr in 7-hour blocks for EU work). Drivers, employers, and providers are still confused about which they need. "driver cpc national international" pulls dozens of Q&A pages but no canonical tracker.

Cost and choice. With the centralised training-funding scheme axed in 2025, drivers pay £150 to £350 for the full 35 hours themselves. Online modules range from £23.75 (Enterprise Transport Training) to £45+ (mainstream providers). No one compares prices side-by-side, by location, or by remaining hours needed.

The DQC card workflow. A lost or expired card costs £25 plus a 7 to 10 working day wait. The DVSA process is two-channel (online plus phone) and badly documented. "driver cpc card lost" (320/mo, £6.71 CPC) is a high-intent panic search.

The HGV industry has roughly 100,000 unfilled vacancies on aggressive estimates and a workforce with an average age of 55. Bus and coach driver shortages run at 3.4% and 12.4% respectively. CPC is repeatedly cited in industry analysis as a contributor to drivers leaving the profession.

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