THE safety benefits of speed cameras have been exaggerated, the Government admitted yesterday as it called a halt to their proliferation. Cameras do save lives, but far fewer than have been claimed.

Camera partnerships, which include police and local authorities, will no longer be allowed to use cameras as revenue raising devices. As The Times disclosed last month, recycling camera fines to fund increasing numbers of speed cameras is to be abolished.

Partnerships will receive grants from a central road safety fund, and these can be used to pay for safety measures, including road humps, zebra junctions and new road markings. Cameras will be installed only as a last resort after all other measures have been considered and found to be inadequate.

The Government is also easing the restrictions on positioning of cameras. Under new rules published yesterday, the number of collisions involving death or serious injury needed before a camera can be installed will fall from four to three in a three-year period. Ministers are confident that the number of speed cameras will not rise significantly from the current total of 6,000.

The Department for Transport admitted for the first time yesterday that it had been making false assumptions when calculating the benefits of cameras. It published a study which found that cameras saved only half as many lives as claimed. This undermines the Government’s main justification for increasing speed camera penalties five-fold from 340,000 in 1997 to 1.8 million in 2003.

Safe Speed, the anti-camera campaign, has argued for years that the policy of siting cameras where there have been recent clusters of crashes makes it impossible to attribute any fall in collisions to the presence of a camera. Collisions would be expected to fall anyway as they reverted from the temporary peak to the normal rate.

The department commissioned the Department of Engineering at Liverpool University to study this effect, which is known as “regression to the mean”. The study concluded that most of the fall in crashes could be attributed to regression to the mean. The presence of the camera was responsible for as little as a fifth of the reduction in casualties.

The department put the results of the study close to the bottom of a list of appendices at the back of a 160-page report which claims that cameras play an important role in saving lives.

The main report says that fixed cameras reduce deaths and serious injuries by 50 per cent and mobile cameras by 35 per cent. It calculates that cameras prevent 1,745 deaths or serious injuries a year across Britain.

But once the regression to the mean was taken into account, fixed cameras were found to reduce deaths and serious injuries by only 873, or 24 per cent for fixed and 17 per cent for mobile cameras.

While still impressive, these reductions are lower than could be achieved by other road safety measures. Speed indicator devices, which inform drivers that they are breaking the limit but do not result in fines being issued, have been shown to reduce crashes by 34 per cent.

Paul Smith, founder of Safe Speed, said: “The truth is finally emerging about how hopelessly ineffective speed cameras are. Realising the gross error, the department is now seeking to move quietly away from speed cameras.”

Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, said: “I want cameras to be linked more closely to wider road safety. In some places cameras will still be the solution. In others there will be alternative solutions.”

CAMERA, ACTION

Main findings of the Department for Transport report on the effectiveness of speed cameras:

71 per cent of people surveyed agreed that the primary use of cameras was not to raise money but to save lives

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