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Mike Rutherford's column

Police-turned-businessmen confirm the true colours of the despised speed camera

By Mike Rutherford

24th October 2006

The trouble with motorists is that we are, by nature, far too trusting. When we're lost and ask strangers for directions, we have faith in them to put us on the right road. We believe garages and mechanics we don't know will service and repair our cars competently, and fill them with the correct fuels and lubricants. When men with shovels and muddy boots dig up roads and divert us on to others, we just accept, without question, that they're qualified and authorised to block our paths, and knowledgeable enough to put us on the best alternative routes.
 
Are speed cameras there for safety, or are they simply money-making machines, as police-turned-businessmen now seem to prove?


And when senior police officers, Government ministers and road safety 'experts' collectively told usthat speed cameras are about saving lives, not devices for making money, we were suspicious but - initially at least - gave them the benefit of the doubt. We'd much rather have belief in our top cops, politicians and their appointed agents than not. But no more. They have lost credibility and are there-fore incredible. They don't tell us the truth and that makes them unbelievable. They've been cheating on us. They expect us to be squeaky clean on the road, while they count the ill-gotten gains they've cynically derived from drivers who've been comprehensively had by the State.

And now there's a new issue to consider - ex-cops who set up in business that's related to their previous, uniformed lives. The Mail on Sunday highlighted two policemen who've jacked in civil duties to take up lucrative employment in the commercial world of speed cameras. One of them is Jon Bond, the ex-Chief Superintendent in charge of cameras in Warwickshire. He's now the boss of a firm called Tele-Traffic, which supplies over 90 per cent of the UK's police with portable hand-held or vehicle-mounted cameras.

In the article, Bond touts for business by telling potential buyers that if they buy his equipment "the money will come in buckets", which will be so large, profitable and frequent "that you won't be able to cope with them". He goes on: "They will catch businessmen going in to work in the morning, and school-run mums in the afternoon. There will be so much money coming in, you won't know what to do with it."

One of his partners, another former cop called Peter Gay, provides further evidence that speed cameras are little more than a licence to print money. His grubby talk of "£60 a pop" fines is a million miles away from a police officer whose first concern was to serve and protect the public.

Isn't there something unsavoury about people who once claimed to be interested in looking after motorists' safety using speed cameras who now seem only interested in making money, using that same equipment? Former bobbies who advertised deadlocking double glazing for your house, or signed up to extol the virtues of safer, grippier tyres were bad enough. But this is worse. Are speed cameras there for safety reasons, or are they simply money-making machines, as police-turned-businessmen now seem to confirm?

Most motorists no longer trust or believe the cops, politicians and road safety experts who trot out that fatuous line about cameras not being there for revenue-raising purposes. Instead, we now believe the entrepreneurial ex-cops who confirm to us what, deep down, we already knew: that these devices are made, sold and operated for money-generating reasons. Buckets of it.

Mike Rutherford writes for the Times, Daily Telegraph and Independent, presents ITV's Pulling Power and is founder of the Motorists' Association

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