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Daily Mail, Wednesday July 13 th 2005
By Ray Massey, Transport Editor
Police officers in one of Britain's speed camera hotspots are raking in £500,000 a year in overtime payments to operate mobile devices.
A pool of around 100 policemen get £5000 each for manning camera vans, often on their days off. The cost is met by the millions raised in the county from fines on speeding motorists.
The revelation has reignited the ‘cash for cameras' row, with one MP criticising the ‘expensive' way the system operated.
It comes as the latest Government figures show that nationally, the amount of money raised by fixed penalty speeding fines has increased nearly sixfold in the last five years, from £17million to nearly £100million.
Accounts for the Essex Safety Camera Partnership show that officers were paid more than £485,000 in overtime in 2004/5, with National Insurance contributions of £44,736 on top.
The partnership – a collaboration between the police, county council and magistrates in Essex – also spent nearly £150,000 training officers to use the cameras, including a trip to where they are made in Holland. Six are used daily on ten-hour shifts, usually on their rest days and at a time-and-a-half rate.
Essex allows only uniformed officers on mobile speed camera patrols, even though civilians are used in other parts of the country.
The county has one of the highest concentration of cameras in Britain, with 96 fixed cameras and six mobile units generating £5million last year.
Just last week, the new Chief Constable of Essex, Roger Baker, pledged a crackdown on ‘real' criminals, saying he would not targets such as motorists.
Tory MP for West Chelmsford, Simon Burns, criticised the exclusive use of officers, saying: “Using police officers on overtime does seem to be an expensive way of operating. I think there is a role for speed cameras at accident blackspots, but I'm opposed to them being used as cash-generating machines.”
And Paul Smith, of the Safe Speed campaign group, condemned the ‘outrageous job-creation scheme,' saying the money could be better spent on proper road safety schemes.
“It's yet another case of greedy speed camera partnerships squandering money to run their businesses,” he added.
But a spokesman for the Essex Safety Camera Partnership defended the payments, saying that hiring full-time civilian staff would be more expensive. “A thorough cost-benefit analysis concluded using police officers on their rest days was the best use of resources,” she said. “It effectively means there are an extra six police officers on the streets.”
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The longest continuous speed trap in the country will be launched tomorrow in Scotland. The time vehicles take to travel along various points of a 26-mile stretch of the A77 between Kilmarnock and Ayr is measured, and their average speed calculated.
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