Clause 2 - Application of surplus income from safety camera enforcement
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
11:30 am
Owen Paterson (Shadow Minister, Transport; North Shropshire, Conservative)
We like the clause, but we think that it could be better. There are real doubts in the public’s mind about the present safety camera regime, and we want to toughen up the clause so that all surpluses have to go towards road safety.
The figures are quite striking. In 2000-01 there were only seven partnerships. They received £10.362 million and spent £8.985 million, leaving a balance of £1.367 million, which went into the Consolidated Fund, which, to be blunt, is the black hole presided over by the Chancellor. That balance was 13 per cent. of the funds in 2001. What is fascinating is that there has been a spectacular increase in income and in the number of partnerships—we are now up to about 35 partnerships. In 2003-04 there were receipts of £112.2 million and expenditure of £91.8 million, leaving an astonishing £20.4 million going to the Chancellor. Not only have receipts increased approximately tenfold, but the balance going to the Chancellor as a percentage of total receipts has increased from 13 to 18 per cent. That means that a very substantial sum is not going towards road safety.
The issue has caused controversy in my own patch. In the autumn, the Minister kindly answered some parliamentary questions of mine. In West Mercia, £4.897 million was spent on speed camera running costs, but fixed penalty fines totalled £6.182 million, so more than £1.2 million from my area went to the Consolidated Fund. That is bitterly resented. The regime has to change. We have gone from about 200,000 speeding fines imposed about 10 years ago to about 2 million today, and very large amounts of the money raised are not being spent on safety. There are worse cases: six road safety partnerships have each made a profit of more than £1 million, with money going on to Whitehall. The biggest profit—£1.7 million—was made by the Northumbria safety camera partnership, with motorists in the county stumping up more than £4 million in fines.
The Secretary of State has announced that he will overhaul the programme and that the surpluses—about £110 million a year—will go to a new national road safety fund. That has to be done. There is an interesting quote from Edmund King, the executive director of the RAC Foundation:
“These figures show that there is a lot that can be spent on wider road safety improvements. Some cameras are money-making enterprises, some are not. I have seen a document from a road safety partnership warning that it was in danger of not breaking even and suggesting two options. One was to place cameras where they would catch more motorists and the other was to lower the speed threshold for prosecution.”
That is exactly what we should not be doing. That really is not the way to get the collaboration of the 34 million drivers whom I mentioned on Second Reading and touched on briefly in the debate on the programme motion. I believe strongly that we cannot coerce those drivers—we cannot just use a stick. The vast majority of drivers are hard-working, law-abiding people going about their daily lives and trying to get from A to B in safety and on time. Unfortunately, the way in which the safety camera regime has been set up has caused real alienation.
A case close to me, although not on my patch, has caused real controversy locally. I had a note from the Association of British Drivers about one of the earliest cameras. I have not had time to go into the details, but the association claims that a local council and a local camera partnership provided different detailed information on a camera at a location called Bennetts bank. The association says:
“When the information was analysed, it showed that not only did the camera partnership and the local council provide different data, but the partnership’s analyses of the figures were highly dubious and, quite clearly, there had been no accidents at the point where the camera was installed.”
The association claims that the camera was installed without the statutory number of accidents—at the time, four fatal accidents in a three-year period, I think—having occurred.
Last night, I received an e-mail from a Mr. John Evans, who wrote that Bennetts bank
“was an obvious place to trap drivers coming down from the M54 or coming from Wellington back up to Ketly Roundabout on a normally safe straight piece of road, spacious and walled on both sides except for some terraced houses at the top end.
An employee of the council seconded to the partnership agreed with me off record and admitted that the main reason for the placement was that it was a good place to catch the 7000 vehicles per day flow. It was necessary to kick start the abominable partnership in this way as this was the first such camera in Shropshire ... I assure you that I have no great interest in cars but hate it when both my intelligence and my pocket is abused. It is probable that tens of thousands of fines have been collected at this site alone. I know that countless people have been up in arms about this cynical ploy based on the narrowest interpretation of the law to meet the Exchequer’s requirements.”
We have to face the political reality that such opinions are out there and they are very damaging to the idea of collaboration. It is vital to implement speed limits that are respected and accord with drivers’ behaviour. In this case, there was a straight piece of road, where fatal accidents had not occurred. In fact, last night, a senior member of the Telford community told me that there were other places in Telford that really would have benefited from the installation of speed cameras.Vicky Cann, the assistant director of Transport 2000, said that
“the very high casualty criteria are a major obstacle to greater use of cameras along roads considered dangerous. It is unacceptable that where people have already died or been seriously injured in speed-related crashes further tragedies must occur before effective speed limit enforcement is undertaken”.
The current regime is being attacked from two angles. There is a strong belief that cameras are being placed unnecessarily, rather as the Bourbon tax farmers had free rein to raise taxes and to take a slice of the revenue themselves. To put it bluntly, the more a safety camera organisation can expand its operations, the more money it can raise and the more it can fund itself and pay its employees. That is quite wrong. We must get away from the concept that speed cameras are not helpful. We need to get back to the idea, promoted by Vicky Cann, that there are areas where a speed camera in the right place could reduce accidents.
I have referred several times to the example in Telford because it caused such bad feeling in the local area. A speed camera was installed on what is regarded a straight, safe road, where, according to those who have discussed the case with me, it is probably safe to travel at 40 mph. It is vital that we return to the idea that speed cameras are associated with road safety. They should be placed in areas where there are real dangers of very unpleasant and possibly fatal accidents. I received a very good letter from Roger Geffen, the campaigns and policy manager of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. He said that
“to kill off the criticism of safety cameras as “cash cows”, two principles must be followed:
1) The purposes of cameras must be transparently linked to road safety objectives and
2) That there is no risk that the Government might use camera revenue to replace other “mainstream” road safety funding, as delivered through the Local Transport Plan (LTP) process”.
Those principles are wholly admirable. We would begin to claw back some public confidence in speed cameras if people knew that all the money raised went toward road safety. That is black and white statement. We should be able to tell all motorists and road safety campaigners that every bit of the surplus will be ploughed back into road safety. Such an approach might begin to win back some public confidence. The Minister might comment on that in his response.
As it stands, clause 2 states that some of the money may be spent on relevant
“local transport facilities or related environmental improvements, including road safety measures”.
Can the Minister elaborate on what the Government have in mind? I ask because the Committee received an interesting note from RBS Insurance, pointing out that
“One area ripe for action is the framework for inspecting the quality of road repair work undertaken. At present local authorities only have a duty/right to inspect 30% of road works to make sure that their companies are meeting appropriate standards, a level that is surely inefficient”.
On what objectives is the money to be targeted?
Clause 2 would be improved greatly if amendments Nos. 18 and 19 were agreed to. The word “may” is wishy-washy—it allows the Government to park the issue for a year or two. The word “shall” should be used. It should be clear that all surplus revenue raised from the installation of speed cameras must be spent on road safety schemes. I am very interested to hear the Minister’s comments on that suggestion.