Jayne Dowle: Safety argument for speed cameras

The first time it was visiting my husband's aunt in Bedfordshire. I got flashed by a 30mph camera which had suddenly appeared in her village. Five months later, I was caught in Sheffield, and to add insult to injury, a traffic officer was lying in wait round the corner and marched me out of the car.

His people skills made the Gestapo look like a bunch of holiday reps.

All I did was go through the lights a bit fast, but you would have thought I had robbed a bank. It was obvious he took great pleasure in making a hapless driver feel like a major criminal.

I felt like asking if there weren't any boy-racers he could be chasing, or car insurance fraudsters he might be better employed checking out, but I kept my mouth shut in case he clapped on the cuffs and dragged me down the station.

And now we hear that speed cameras are to be switched off, because the Government is slashing the budget for road safety by 40 per cent. Local authorities complain that they simply won't have the money for the upkeep and maintenance of those infamous yellow boxes. Oxfordshire is becoming the first council to put all 161 of its fixed and mobile speed cameras into retirement.

Have I missed the point here? I thought that speed cameras were justified because they made us drive more safely. If one council can decide to get rid of them just like that, and other councils, including Avon and Somerset, are reported to be thinking of doing the same, are we saying that the whole speed camera policy was just a money-making exercise, with no impact on road safety at all?

Sorry if I sound cynical, but I can't help but notice that the only concrete figures anyone seems to have about speed cameras are the financial ones. Speed cameras have raised 100m in fines for the Treasury since being introduced in 1992 – Oxfordshire alone has picked up 1m.

I'm sure there is a cost/benefit saving to be made somewhere by scrapping the maintenance contract, but I'm just hoping that whoever is in charge has done their sums right. A potential 100m in lost revenue if every council scraps its speed cameras sounds like a big hole to fill to me.

Everyone knows what they cost – especially all those motorists filling in their direct debits for the 60 fines – but no-one seems able to say absolutely conclusively whether the country's network of 6,000 cameras has had any long-term effect on reducing accidents and deaths on the roads at all.

Road safety campaigners generally back cameras, but evidence suggests that it depends on the road, safety improvements to modern cars, the existing accident record and all kinds of factors which you can't measure with a little yellow box on a stick.

And it does make you wonder if all that money spent on installing them in the first place might have been better diverted into other road safety measures and campaigns aimed at high-risk accident groups, such as teenagers and elderly motorists.

If you ask me, speed cameras don't make us safer drivers, they make us more obedient ones. They don't teach us to look out for other drivers behaving erratically, or pedestrians emerging from behind parked cars, or small boys chasing footballs into the road. They simply teach us to look out for yellow boxes and police vans with aerials. And every

driver knows that on the list of "dangerous things you can do in a car", screeching down from 50mph to 30mph in a panic for a speed camera is somewhere near the top.

No sensible motorist would wilfully cause an accident. And speed

cameras anger sensible motorists because fundamentally they are an insult, a slap on the wrist from the nanny state, a reminder that big brother is always watching. And when you think about it, they are hardly the way to encourage individual drivers to take responsibility for themselves. I even know some irresponsible drivers (yes, male) who enjoy living dangerously, and take pride in the number of points they have accrued for speeding.

I just hope that if speed cameras do go for good, their demise will give the Government, local authorities and road safety organisations the opportunity to work together and come up with some innovative ways to reduce accidents and death on our roads.

I'm not holding my breath – what should be an issue that unites us all, looks set, inevitably, to turn into a political football. The Road Safety Minister, Mike Penning, says that this about-turn is part of his Government's pledge to "end the war on the motorist".

Will switching street-lights off at night and leaving pot-holes to

fester also help "end the war on the motorist"? If he wants a war, I think he might be about to get one.