More than 800 deaths and serious injuries in road crashes have been prevented by speed cameras in the past three years, the Government will claim today.
Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, will tell the House of Commons that the fall in casualties justifies the huge increase in camera fines. More than three million people will receive penalties this year compared with 260,000 in 1996.
Mr Darling will reveal that deaths and serious injuries have fallen by 40 per cent on stretches of road near cameras compared with the three years before the speed traps were installed.
The independent report was commissioned by the Road Safety Division of the Department for Transport and produced by University College London and PA Consulting Group.
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Separate police forces have issued figures confirming the reduction in deaths where speed cameras have been installed. At sites in North Wales there was a reduction of 68 per cent in the number of people killed or seriously injured.
The percentage reductions in personal injury collisions per area per year at camera sites varied from just 11 per cent in Leicestershire to 72 per cent in West Yorkshire.
But he will also announce that a small number of Britain’s 5,000 cameras have failed to have any impact on casualty rates. These tend to be cameras installed in the 1990s before the Department for Transport set criteria on where they can be located.
The criteria include the requirement that 85 per cent of cameras in any police force area must be at sites where at least four deaths and serious injuries have occurred in the previous three years.
Mr Darling said this morning that the fall in deaths is proof that speed cameras work and they are not just a revenue raising device as some motorists have alleged.
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Speaking on BBC One’s Breakfast programme today, Mr Darling said the cameras were not replacing traffic police and that there was room for both cameras and traffic police.
He went on: “I understand the controversy. People do feel resentful about these things from time to time. But we want cars to slow down.”
Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, welcomed the findings but he disputed Mr Darling’s contention that speed cameras were not replacing traffic police.
He added: “The massive increase in the use of speed cameras in recent years does not by any means justify the correlating decline in traffic police numbers.
“The increasing focus on speed cameras and decline in traffic police means that offences such as drug-driving and careless driving could be going unchecked.”
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The Association of British Drivers (ABD) said that the findings were just the “latest report in a long line claiming success for cameras”.
The association went on: “The trouble is, the overall number of deaths isn’t falling.
“Britain has the worst record in the EU at reducing road deaths since cameras became widespread, with deaths down just 4 per cent from their 1994-8 average, compared with France down 12.6 per cent, Germany down 22.9 per cent and Portugal down 35.5 per cent.
“In the counties where cameras are most aggressively used, road deaths have tended to increase.
“In Lincolnshire, Essex and Thames Valley, deaths have increased dramatically since the ‘cash for cameras’ schemes started.
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“Northamptonshire showed an initial improvement, but has posted two of the three worst years in the last 10 since being blanketed with cameras. In North Wales deaths were up last year.”
The ABD said it had examples of local authorities fixing the figures to justify speed reduction measures - choosing “before” periods carefully, presumably to include as many accidents as possible, or even comparing different time periods or different stretches of road.