Scotland’s Phone Cameras Count Drivers and Issue No Fines

Scotland is running a six-month AI camera survey at 12 sites to count drivers on phones or without seatbelts. The trailers will not issue a single fine.

Two unmanned units rotate each month. Transport Scotland wants a map of the problem before it talks about tickets, education or new spend, and it calls the exercise the largest survey of its kind ever run in the UK.

Two Trailers and a Six-Month Count

The kit is trailer-mounted and made by Acusensus, an Australian firm whose Heads-Up system uses two cameras, one front-facing and one overhead, to look through a windscreen at speed. Artificial intelligence flags likely phone use or a missing belt. Two further stages of human review then check the stills. The units run 24/7 in all lighting.

Transport Scotland is not publishing the 12 sites. It says the trailers will be highly visible where they stand, with onboard security and CCTV, and that a post-survey report will compare urban and rural roads, single and dual carriageways, and roadworks against clear stretches. A unit was seen in late August 2026 on the B765 near Robroyston Retail Park in north-east Glasgow. Trailers also spent four weeks at two Edinburgh spots that month. Drivers who meet one on a retail-park road often read it as a speed trap. It is a counter.

WHAT THE TRAILERS WILL DO

• The filter: Onboard AI scores the chance of a phone or seatbelt offence in each passing vehicle and drops the rest.
• The check: Two human reviews then confirm or reject what the software kept.
• The sample: Two unmanned trailers move monthly across 12 sites for up to six months from March 2026.
• The output: Counts feed a post-survey report. There is no timetable for tickets.

A live handheld-phone offence in Scotland is a £200 fine and 6 penalty points. New drivers can lose the licence on that one hit. Not wearing a seatbelt is a £100 minimum fine, rising as high as £500, under Road Safety Scotland’s own advice. None of those penalties attach to this survey.

Devon Already Tickets With the Same Kit

The Scottish job is a count. The same Heads-Up cameras have been used for more than three years with Devon and Cornwall Police and the Vision Zero South West partnership, and that scheme does not stop at a spreadsheet. Images go to at least two human reviewers in the UK. Confirmed offences have brought warning letters or a notice of intended prosecution.

Acusensus said in September 2025 that the cameras had reached 10,000 offences detected in the previous year. Across three sites in that force area it reported an 83% reduction in seatbelt offences and an 80% reduction in mobile phone offences since the programme began in 2023. Adrian Leisk, head of road safety at Devon and Cornwall Police, said the partnership was committed to using the technology against the behaviours that lead to collisions.

SAME CAMERAS, DIFFERENT JOBS

Geoff Collins, who speaks for Acusensus in the UK, said the Scottish project would give “clear evidence for the scale of poor driving behaviours on Scottish roads.” He also said existing operational schemes show that knowledge can change bad habits. Scotland has bought the knowledge step. It has not bought the ticket step that south-west England already uses.

Where Do the 169,000 Unbelted Drivers Come From?

The daily headcounts in the announcement are not a Scottish roadside tally. They are a 2023 UK-wide survey rate painted onto Scottish traffic. Transport Scotland applies those rates to an estimated 4.7 million daily vehicle journeys, then rounds to 169,000 unbelted drivers and more than 28,000 handheld-phone users every day. The cameras now in the field are meant to test whether those imported shares hold on Scottish tarmac.

THE RATES BEHIND THE HEADCOUNTS

• Daily journeys: 4.7 million, Transport Scotland’s working figure for Scotland.
• Unbelted share: About 3.6% in a 2023 UK-wide survey, then applied to those journeys.
• Handheld share: Up to 0.6% in the same survey, then applied the same way.
• In-car deaths: 23% of in-car fatalities in 2024 involved no seatbelt, from reported road casualty statistics.

Cabinet Secretary for Transport Fiona Hyslop used the looser “almost a quarter” phrasing for that 2024 in-car figure when she launched the survey on 11 March 2026. Phone use and missing belts sit on Transport Scotland’s Fatal-5 list of high-risk driving behaviours. Dr Jamie Uff, technical director at AECOM, the firm analysing the trial data, said both still kill or seriously injure far too many people “despite high awareness of the risk of these behaviours.”

Provisional figures in Key Reported Road Casualties Scotland 2025 put road deaths at 134 in 2025, down 26, or 16%, from 160 in 2024. Serious injuries stood at 1,906. Total casualties were 5,535. Against the Road Safety Framework to 2030, which wants a 50% cut in people killed from a 2014-2018 baseline, the 2025 reduction achieved is 23%. The survey is one tool aimed at the rest of that gap.

A £350,000 Hire Awarded Without a Contest

The cameras did not arrive through an open tender. A Find a Tender notice published on 6 February 2026 records a non-competitive direct award to AECOM of 1 Tanfield, Edinburgh, for short-term equipment hire and data analysis, valued at £350,000 excluding VAT. The contract was concluded that day. Transport Scotland said the camera equipment and deployment method was the only available technology for a pilot at this scale, and that market testing found no other supplier able to put this range of kit on concurrent mobile sites.

The notice also says the contract is likely to be subcontracted, which is how Acusensus sits behind AECOM on the job, and that the short-term hire “may inform future competitive action.” In other words the no-bid pilot can become the brief for a later contest, once the report exists.

HOW THE PILOT WAS BOUGHT

1. 6 February 2026: Transport Scotland concludes the AECOM hire at £350,000 excluding VAT, without a prior call for competition.
2. 11 March 2026: Fiona Hyslop announces the six-month survey at 12 locations, with cameras due out that week.
3. Late August 2026: A trailer is recorded on the B765 near Robroyston Retail Park; Edinburgh hosts a four-week stint at two spots.
4. Post-survey report: Data from the monthly rotations is due to set out where phone use and missing belts cluster. No results have been published.

Human validation is described by Transport Scotland as daily work by AECOM operatives trained to scrutinise the images the AI has already picked. That is a labour cost sitting on top of the trailer hire, and it is also a dry run for whoever would have to process tickets if the next step is enforcement.

Live Speed Cameras Went Dark as the Survey Began

The new trailers arrived in a network that has been shrinking in the one place it already issues tickets. A large share of roadside speed cameras taken out of live use still stand in their housings with “not in use” covers, after Police Scotland and the safety-camera programme stood units down at sites that, officials said, no longer met the collision test. Freedom of information fights over those switch-offs ran through 2025 and 2026.

So Scotland is paying to watch phone use and belts on two moving trailers while a fixed camera estate built to punish speeding has been bagged at scale. The behaviours are different. The public read of a camera at the roadside is not. A driver who sees a new trailer at Robroyston has no way, from the hardware alone, to know this box will not put six points on a licence.

Police Scotland’s job on this pilot is not to empty a ticket printer. Traffic Scotland says the work will also assess resource implications for the force and for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, the prosecutors who would have to take camera cases if the policy later moves from counting to charging. That is the quiet half of the brief.

The Trial Is Also a Workload Test for Prosecutors

Hyslop framed the cameras as a way to inform “enforcement, education and targeted investment,” and tied them to the 2030 aim of the world’s safest roads. She did not attach a date to the first of those three. The archived trial note is blunt: there is no timetable for enforcement at this stage.

Recent statistics show that almost a quarter of in-car fatalities were of drivers and passengers who were not wearing a seatbelt at the time and tens of thousands of drivers continue to use mobile phones behind the wheel on a daily basis at serious risk and danger to themselves and others. We cannot allow that to continue, and this trial will help inform the next steps in tackling these behaviours through enforcement, education and targeted investment.

Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Transport Scotland announcement, 11 March 2026

If the Devon pattern holds, detections fall once drivers believe a camera can hurt them. Scotland has not given them that reason. The two trailers can still change behaviour at the 12 unmarked sites through rumour and a high-vis box, which is a cheap form of education, but they cannot fill a prosecutor’s inbox until someone decides the stills are evidence rather than research.

The post-survey report is the next public document that matters. Until it appears, the UK’s largest phone-and-seatbelt camera survey remains a £350,000 count, a workload test for police and prosecutors, and a preview of a competitive buy that has not been written. The 2030 target still asks for a 50% cut in deaths. The last full provisional year delivered 23%.