How can my VPN connection be faster than my standard connection?

This was to do with the OpenVPN server's compression feature, meaning that more data can be sent at once.

This, therefore, meant the connection was faster. To confirm this, I disabled the compression feature and had this speed:

...whereas with compression enabled, consequently had this speed:

It seems that had I used a standard VPN other than OpenVPN I wouldn't have seen this significant speed burst.