This is Lincolnshire
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County method of funding speed cameras to be introduced by another police force
County method of funding speed cameras to be introduced by another police force
A NOVEL way of funding speed cameras in Lincolnshire is being copied down south to switch a camera network back on.
Police continued to monitor speed in Oxfordshire after cameras were deactivated in August last year, following Government cuts. Speeds and casualties increased.
Now, Thames Valley Police will resume operating 72 fixed cameras and 89 mobile sites using revenue from speed awareness courses.
As reported in the Echo, Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership won praise from independent experts for its funding arrangement.
Low-end speeders are offered places on courses where they look at the appropriate use of speed.
Eligible first-time speeders pay £65 rather than a £60 fine plus three points. Excessively high speeders will always be prosecuted.
The idea was to raise £800,000 in course fees to help meet the cost of maintaining Lincolnshire's network of 52 speed cameras.
Road safety partnership spokesman John Siddle said: "Under the Government spending review, it was obvious we were not going to have a road safety grant any more.
"Our position is now in line with the Government's policy of education before enforcement.
"What we were always worried about here is that, if cameras were turned off, fatalities would increase.
"If that's happened in Oxfordshire, then that's right down the path of what we have been saying.
"We know that speed is a contributory factor in collisions.
"At fixed camera sites in Lincolnshire, there has been a 93 per cent reduction in speeding occurrences."
The partnership has set aside £600,000 for a digital upgrade of speed cameras, as part of its proposed £1.4 million road safety budget.
Last summer, the road safety partnership offered a glimpse as to what might happen if all Lincolnshire's cameras were decommissioned.
At one site where vandals put the speed camera out of action – the A57 at Newton on Trent, near Lincoln – the average number of motorists breaking the 60mph limit went from 333 to 766 per day within two weeks of the camera being damaged.
Keith Peat, a retired traffic police officer who lives in Lincolnshire, and founder of the Drivers' Protest Union, questioned the effectiveness of speed awareness courses.
"The courses are an appalling coercion for perfectly safe drivers to spend money with camera partnership schemes and finance them," he said.
There is a fundamental problem with funding camera through courses. We need people to learn before they commit errors, so more carrots, the self financing that become profitable and give a carte blanc to those companies to enforce as they see fit and has nothing to do with any genuine Road Safety benefit.
Is it also right to charge people to receive motoring education, when so little has been publicly promoted ? I think not. You also only 'educate' (and there is a vast difference in courses and more seem to be planned), a certain selection .... surely all motorists and all road users can benefit from more education? No one seems to be controlling the course content whatsoever.
Then there is the problem of biased information potentially delivered badly and then the psychology problems of teaching while 'punishing'. People often attend just to get through ad then carry on as before they don't want to and don't listen to any of the information either.
It will be interesting to see the individual camera figures too as they ought to produce those although I dare say they will delay that as much as they can. They fail to consider the damage to the public police relationship, very sad.
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