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The Chairman: That is not a point of order, but I take on board the hon. Gentleman's request. I am sure that the Minister will do so as well.
Mr. Jamieson rose—
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford) (Lab): Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Jamieson: I will in just a moment. There are so many things happening just now.
The rules are available in the Library, of course, and it is not necessary for me to provide them for Members. However, if that would be helpful, I am sure that we can pass a few copies around and provide some interesting bedside reading for Members.
To complete the point that I was making to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher), proper signing, warning and advertising are all part of the package that safety camera partnerships must accept.
Mr. Fisher: On a point of clarification, the signs to which I referred are the infrequent but helpful signs that are just a warning. They alert people by flashing up that they are doing more than 37 mph. As a motorist, I find them salutary indeed. One immediately responds to them, and I would have thought that they would be more effective than the threat of a camera and likely prosecution.
Mr. Jamieson: Yes, local authorities may place signs outside of the partnership arrangements at certain times. The Highways Agency sometimes puts them up on or near roadworks. A partnership can pay for vehicle-activated signs, but only at camera sites where there has been a certain level of speeding or death and injury. Such signs can be paid for out of partnership funds. Any highways authority or, I suppose, the police could pay for them outside of the partnership arrangement if they thought that that was appropriate.
Generally, I am very much of the mind that the signs are good. They should be used as a first resort, particularly if there is a problem for a certain period of time. They provide a useful adjunct to the rest of the partnership.
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Mr. Kidney: I wanted to help my hon. Friend by making it clear that the rules and guidance about where to site safety cameras are contained not in a secret document but in a handbook that is published every year. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport announced on 4 November 2004 in a written statement at column 16WS in Hansard that this year's handbook had been produced and that copies were available in the Library.
Mr. Jamieson: Yes, he did. I thank my hon. Friend for that. The document is freely available. The local authorities and the police have it and it is in the Library.
Richard Younger-Ross (Teignbridge) (LD): The Minister referred to signage for speed cameras and said that the purpose of speed cameras was to reduce speed, not to catch motorists speeding. If that is the case, why can there not be signage before the speed camera to warn that it is 100 yd away? Instead of having generic signs which are spread all over the place and all down the side of the road, why can we not have a sign that says, ''100 yd'', with a picture of a speed camera? At least that would stop motorists looking for the yellow cameras and then slamming on their brakes at the last second. They would be given an opportunity to slow down in a reasonable manner.
Mr. Jamieson: The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. At the vast majority of sites motorists are warned in advance. It staggers me that people get caught on the cameras because they are so well flagged up. There are websites and press releases; the vast majority of cameras have a sign beforehand saying that they are coming up; and they are painted yellow so that they can be seen, yet there are still people exceeding the speed limit.
Richard Younger-Ross: The Minister and I both travel to the same part of the country. I was surprised to hear his comments because I regularly drive on the A303 and no speed camera that I know of on that road has a pre-warning sign. There are generic signs that indicate that there are speed cameras on the road, but they do not warn that there is speed camera 100 yd away.
Mr. Jamieson: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman wants a policeman to stand at the side of the road and tell people to slow down because there is a speed camera up ahead. The cameras are clearly painted and they are signed beforehand—although not at a specific distance. There are areas with mobile sites and there are often several signs along the road. To relate that to the area near his constituency, I can think of parts of the A38 that have mobile sites on the bridges, in places where there has been death and injury through excess speed. There are regular signs along that stretch of the road alerting motorists that a mobile site could be in operation.
Richard Younger-Ross: I am not arguing about mobile sites because that is a slightly different issue. However, where there is a fixed camera on a pole, and the purpose is to slow people down, as the Minister
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said, we could stop them having to look for the yellow camera and then break when they come to that point by having a warning sign that says, ''100 yd''.
10.15 am
Mr. Jamieson: Perhaps I can help the hon. Gentleman. The document that we are going to be provided with shortly states:
''All safety camera sites within the Safety Camera Programme must be signed in accordance with the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions. This ensures that all sites whether fixed, mobile or red light are clearly highlighted to motorists thus giving them every opportunity to moderate their speed to within the posted speed limit or to stop at a red light.''
If he knows of some sites that do not meet those criteria, he should bring it to the attention of Devon county council and the partnership. I am sure that they will take the appropriate action.
Mr. Knight: The point that the Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) is making is that sites should be specifically signed and that there should not be generic permanent signs on a stretch of road when there is no camera in place. There should be a specific sign. If it is the Minister's policy that cameras should always be visible, why, on many occasions, do employees of the camera partnership hide in the back of an unmarked white van which has been specially converted so that the rear window drops down to enable them to film through it? Why are they not standing by the roadside in bright orange jackets, making themselves visible?
Mr. Jamieson: The people that the right hon. Gentleman says are hiding in the van are the police, for whom we have high regard. They are catching people who are breaking the law and who are contributing to killing and injuring children and other people on our roads. Mobile sites are clearly signed. In some cases, the police or the partnership advertise when they are going to set up a site, with a view not to catching people, but to getting them to slow down.
Mr. Wilshire: The Minister is being contradictory. I accept what my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire says. If the police hide in the back of vans, so that one does not know they are there, it is an argument for hiding fixed cameras in hedges. The Government have accepted that we should not do that, and that fixed cameras should be made visible. Surely to goodness, consistency means that police should not hide in the back of unmarked vans.
Mr. Jamieson: The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire said that the police were hiding in the back of the van. The vans are usually police vans and they are very conspicuous, but if he has a complaint about that in his constituency, he should raise it with the partnership. However we pick over this point, the sites are signed and the police catch only people who are exceeding the speed limit and breaking the law in areas where there has been death and injury due to people speeding.
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Richard Younger-Ross: On the distinction between the vans with mobile speed cameras, the officer in the van has discretion over whether to photograph and do someone for speeding. They will make a judgment within bounds and by what is on the road. A fixed camera takes a photograph when a pre-determined speed has been reached. The Minister keeps saying that those cameras are signed, but let us make it clear: fixed speed cameras are not signed to say that there is a speed camera within a certain distance.
Mr. Jamieson: The hon. Gentleman is quite right. With cameras operated from the back of a van, a degree of judgment is left to the police officer in the back of a van about a particular motorist and the danger that they might cause at a particular site. He is right to say that there is no specific sign standing at a certain distance from a speed camera; nevertheless, they are signed in the area in which they are placed. If he wants to present an argument that they should be signed differently, he may want to see if he can get some interest locally. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) said, we annually review the guidance on this matter, and if the hon. Gentleman thinks that we can improve it, I would be happy to consider what he has to say. We considered a large number of representations last time and we made several helpful changes, so if he wants to contribute to that, it will be his major contribution to the Committee and road safety.
The hon. Member for Christchurch raised a point about clause 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill. It is not for me to speak to that Bill in this Committee, but I can say that it legislates for the fines that have been generated by the automatic number plate recognition cameras. Some of that money will be hypothecated to the police. Again, as we are putting so much extra money into the police, it represents more money that is not being diverted from the tackling of other crime. It is money from those detection cameras that can be used. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman's point relates to any of our discussions.
This has been an illuminating debate. We have spent a long time discussing speed safety cameras, which was, I suppose, almost inevitable. Some of the grants that we have given to local authorities, which this clause will make much easier to provide in the future, have been used to great effect. I say to the hon. Gentleman that they are far in excess of the revenue from fines that the Exchequer currently holds on to. It retains about £20 million, which goes into the Consolidated Fund.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central will know that his constituency has benefited from a grant given to his local authority. I wrote to him earlier in the year. The local authority has been providing extra facilities in Stoke-on-Trent. They may not be specifically in his constituency, but they are certainly in Stoke-on-Trent. Moneys were focused specifically on authorities, such as Manchester and Blackpool, which had a high rate of child deaths on their roads. Many of those authorities are introducing innovative schemes to improve road safety for children. The clause enables us to provide funding for
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those schemes freely, without requiring the bureaucracy of going through the House with a special order each time we want to fund a scheme.
The amendments would prevent any authority that was in a camera partnership—in other words, virtually every authority in the country, whether controlled by the Tories, by Labour or by the Liberal Democrats—from receiving one of those grants. That totally contradicts what the hon. Member for Christchurch said he wanted. On the one hand, he said that we should take more money from the cameras. Should we put it into road safety? The hon. Member for Spelthorne said, ''Let's get rid of those wretched things'', which would mean less money going to the authorities. On the other hand, he opened his speech by saying that we should spend more money on road safety. Perhaps, as the Committee proceeds, the Opposition will provide more clarity on those matters. They have certainly not provided any yet.
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