Almost everyone in road safety would agree that the licence points system has been valuable in identifying risky drivers. Those who accumulated 12 penalty points would receive an automatic six-month disqualification and anyone with points would pay a higher insurance premium. Licence points would affect the ability to hire cars or take driving jobs.

Recently, something momentous happened. Swinton Insurance announced that it would no longer use licence points to load insurance premiums.

Clearly insurance companies are in the “risk” business. If they get their risk calculations right, they can make a profit, but if they get them wrong they make a loss. They work from a vast bulk of data and have detailed crash histories for all their customers. The government data includes only crashes involving injury, but the insurance industry data includes a much larger number of damage-only crashes.

So, underlying the Swinton announcement is an admission that driving licence points no longer correctly identify risky drivers. The number of fines given to ordinary, safe and responsible drivers has clearly become so large that risky drivers are now lost in the ocean of licence points pouring out of the speed-camera system.

About 85 per cent of all driving offences are speeding detected by camera, at present running at about 2.2 million per annum. This Swinton announcement effectively tells us that these fines are being handed out to safe and dangerous drivers alike, because the crash risk of drivers with points can no longer be distinguished from the crash risk of drivers without.

This has two tragic implications. First, the road safety benefits of identifying risky drivers from their licence points no longer works.

Risky drivers will pay lower insurance, be able to hire powerful cars and to get employment in driving jobs. Secondly, the totting-up scheme for banning those who accumulated 12 points will no longer be banning hazardous drivers, but drivers with average crash risks.

It should be obvious by now that this situation has arisen only because of speed cameras. I would say that loss of confidence in driving licence points is a negative side-effect of speed-camera policy. Unfortunately, it is not alone – the Safe Speed campaign recently published a report listing 40 negative side-effects.

Many of those have the potential to negate the national benefit of speed cameras. A careful read of the latest Department for Transport report into effectivenesss reveals that the national system of 6,500 speed cameras is said to save 25 lives per annum. It would be a brave or stupid person who claimed that the system of licence points was not saving 25 lives per year. So on this one side-effect of camera policy alone, we are already into net loss of life.

No wonder we are demanding the scrapping of the failed speed-camera policy and no wonder that 24,000 people have signed our petition to scrap speed cameras

Paul Smith is the founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign.