Speed cameras: how enforcement works and where the money goes

The accusation follows every yellow box on a pole: it is a cash cow, a stealth tax, a revenue machine dressed up as road safety. The accusation is almost twenty years out of date. Since 2007, when the Treasury abolished the "netting-off" arrangement that let camera partnerships keep a share of their own fines, every penny of a speeding fixed penalty has gone to the Consolidated Fund — the government's central account — with nothing returned to the council, the police force or the partnership that operates the camera. The people who run the cameras make nothing from the fines. The money that actually sustains the system moves through a different channel entirely, and it starts with a classroom.

First, the mechanics. A fixed camera — the rear-facing Gatso with its radar and road markings, the forward-facing Truvelo that photographs the driver's face, or the HADECS units mounted on motorway gantries — records a vehicle exceeding the limit and captures the registration plate. Average-speed systems such as SPECS work differently: paired cameras read plates at two points, timestamp them, and calculate whether the car covered the distance too quickly, which is why slowing for each camera and accelerating between them achieves nothing.

The plate goes to a central ticket office, usually run by the local police force or a safety camera partnership — a consortium of police, council highways teams and National Highways. Within 14 days the registered keeper must receive a Notice of Intended Prosecution together with a Section 172 request, which legally obliges them to name who was driving. Refusing to answer is its own offence, carrying six penalty points and a heavier fine than the speeding itself — the trap into which former minister Chris Huhne and his ex-wife famously fell when she claimed to have taken his points. Miss the 14-day service window through police error and the prosecution generally collapses; drivers who bank on this are usually disappointed, because the clock runs to the date the notice was posted to the keeper on record.

Enforcement thresholds are guidance rather than law. The National Police Chiefs' Council recommends acting at 10 per cent over the limit plus 2mph — 35 in a 30, 46 in a 40 — but a force may prosecute at 31mph if it chooses. Above the threshold, three outcomes are possible: a course, a fixed penalty of £100 and three points, or, for the worst excesses, magistrates' court, where fines are banded against weekly income and can reach 175 per cent of it for driving at 51mph or more in a 30 zone.

The course economy

The speed awareness course is where the money now flows. Drivers caught marginally over the limit — broadly between the threshold and 10 per cent plus 9mph — and who have not attended a course in the previous three years are offered four hours of retraining instead of points. The fee, typically £90 to £100, is paid by the driver to a commercial or not-for-profit provider operating under the UKROED scheme, which licenses the national course syllabus. Out of each fee, a fixed cost-recovery portion — capped by national agreement at around £45 — goes back to the police force to cover the administration of offering the course in the first place.

That cost-recovery slice is the only enforcement-related income forces legitimately retain, and it is ring-fenced against the expense of running the diversion scheme, not free cash for new cameras. With well over a million drivers a year historically taking courses, the sums are real, and critics note the incentive it creates: a force earns nothing from prosecuting a driver but recovers costs from diverting one. Defenders answer that the alternative — points and a fine that vanishes into the Treasury — funds nothing local at all, and that an evaluation commissioned by the Department for Transport found course attendees reoffended less than drivers who took the penalty.

The cameras themselves are bought and maintained by councils and National Highways from ordinary budgets, which is why some authorities have switched cameras off in lean years — behaviour that makes no sense for a machine that supposedly prints money. The system works roughly as designed: casualties fall at camera sites, the Treasury absorbs the fines, and the drivers who fund what remains are the ones sitting in a conference room on a Tuesday morning, learning why 34mph matters.