…and They are Powerless to Trap Roadhogs From Abroad

Mail On Sunday, May 22, 2005
By Martin Delgado

Foreign motorists are avoiding millions of pounds in speeding fines because the police are powerless to prosecute them.

The shocking extent of the scandal is highlighted today in a survey by The Mail On Sunday of all 38 camera partnerships in England and Wales.

While Britons caught speeding on the continent are forced to pay up on the spot or risk having their cars impounded, foreigners in the UK can easily escape punishment.

Britain's rapidly growing reliance on electronic policing of speed limits means motorists are unlikely to be stopped by a patrol car. If they are snapped by speed cameras, the system used to administer fines in the Britain is unable to trace foreign plates. In the rare event of a summons being issued, the offender is unlikely to turn up in court.

We asked each partnership: How many foreign-registered vehicles were caught by your cameras last year? Astonishingly, some said they didn't know because they had destroyed the evidence.

The 16 partnerships that do keep track of such cases recorded a total of 30,000 speeding offences by foreign-registered vehicles, which technically should generate £1.8million in £60 fixed penalty fines. Then there were the 22 partnerships that said they kept no figures. But all agreed that attempting to bring prosecutions in such cases was a useless exercise. In Kent – where 1148 foreign vehicles were caught on speed cameras last year – there have been 35 fatal and 29 serious injury crashes since January, nearly a quarter involving vehicles with overseas number plates.

Lincolnshire, with ports serving the North Sea, last year snapped 4,000 foreign speeders – ten per cent of the county's total.

The Road Safety Bill, outlined in last week's Queen's Speech, will give police the power to issue fixed penalty notices to overseas motorists who commit offences. But it makes no provision for prosecuting those caught on camera.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: “We are trying to push the European Commission into looking at a shared database.”