Police Scotland Loses Fight to Hide Dormant Camera Offences

Scotland’s information watchdog has ordered Police Scotland to publish offence counts from 119 speed cameras it switched off, rejecting the claim that the figures would fuel speeding. Scottish Information Commissioner David Hamilton found the force was not entitled to withhold the offence data and set a deadline of 5 February 2026.

The request covered cameras made dormant after a 2024 review. By then the sites were already public, and many housings had been bagged to show they were not enforcing.

The Empty Housing Argument Police Scotland Used

On 9 August 2024 the applicant asked for 2023 offence totals at each of the 119 cameras, plus monthly counts for 2024 up to the switch-off. He wanted to know whether offending was still happening as the sites were turned off. Some of those cameras, he said, had been in place for 25 years.

Police Scotland first answered under environmental information rules and released mobile-site figures while holding back fixed, dual and red-light counts. After Hamilton ruled in Decision 025/2025, issued on 4 February 2025, that the request sat under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, the force issued a fresh review on 20 March 2025 and still refused.

Its case was the old empty-box trick. Visible yellow housings are meant to slow traffic even when no camera is inside. Units rotate live cameras between boxes, and a driver cannot tell an empty housing from a loaded one. Publish the offence counts, the force said, and motorists would work out which sites had gone quiet, speed up, and leave fewer people to prosecute. It also warned that named cameras would draw vandals.

THE FOI FIGHT OVER 119 CAMERAS

1. 9 August 2024: Applicant asks for 2023 totals and 2024 monthly offence counts at 119 switched-off cameras.
2. 25 September 2024: Force releases mobile-site data and withholds fixed, dual and red-light counts.
3. 4 February 2025: Decision 025/2025 finds the request should have been handled under FOISA, with a review due by 21 March 2025.
4. 20 March 2025: Revised review still withholds the data, now citing law-enforcement and health-and-safety exemptions.
5. 22 December 2025: Decision 314/2025 orders release of the withheld data, with location information, by 5 February 2026.

The force told Hamilton that more than 100 cameras were deactivated in April 2024 after the Scottish Safety Camera Programme found they were no longer needed for the safety outcomes it tracks, and that the pause was a three-year assessment, not a scrapheap.

The Commissioner Called the Safety Claim Contradictory

Hamilton was not buying the harm chain. The switched-off locations were already a matter of public record, listed by national media and on the Police Scotland Safety Cameras website. The data was historic. The cameras in question were no longer being used to prevent or detect crime, whether a housing still had a unit inside or not.

Because those cameras could no longer be triggered, he also rejected the claim that publishing the counts would damage the arrest and prosecution of offenders. He did not reach the public-interest test, because the exemptions did not bite in the first place.

The health-and-safety argument got a sharper shove. Police Scotland said any rise in speeding would raise risk for every road user, and that the original sites had been chosen because they were high risk. Hamilton accepted that speeding makes crashes worse. He did not accept that historic offence numbers at cameras already known to be off would, as a direct result, endanger anyone.

It is contradictory to then take the position that the deactivated cameras would immediately see an increase in speeds thus severity of collisions at those sites.

David Hamilton, Scottish Information Commissioner, Decision 314/2025

If the programme had turned the cameras off because behaviour had improved and collisions had fallen, he wrote, the withheld figures would support that call rather than prove a new danger. Guidance for fixed cameras also says they must be visible, empty housing or not. A secret about which box is live does not survive a bag over the box.

119 Sites Left the Enforcement List

The 119 figure is not a journalist’s round number. Transport Scotland’s Scottish Safety Camera Programme annual report for 2023/24 says a combination of 500 fixed and mobile sites were reviewed against recent collision and speed data, and 119 sites were assessed as no longer a priority for enforcement after a sustained effect on driver behaviour. That is the start of the three-year pause: housings bagged, signs left up, enforcement stopped, with the option to switch a site back on if behaviour reverses.

The same report’s site-selection table records a wider set of outcomes for that year, including red-light sites, so it should not be collapsed into the 119.

SITE SELECTION OUTCOMES, 2023/24

A further 48 sites finished dormancy and went to abandonment, which the report treats as the point when fixed kit and signs can come out. New cameras were still going in, including a shift from mobile to fixed at several roads, so the programme was moving metal rather than shutting up shop.

The empty-housing model shows up in the kit list. At the end of 2023/24 the West unit recorded 58 fixed camera locations and 23 fixed speed cameras. The East unit recorded 23 locations and 18 cameras. The North unit sat at 5 and 5. Rotation only works as a bluff if drivers cannot see which boxes are dead.

Bargeddie Already Tried Dormancy Once

The force’s own site files sit awkwardly beside the FOI argument. An assessment of the camera on A89 Coatbridge Road at Bargeddie, North Lanarkshire, accepted that speeds would rise if it were switched off. The camera went in during 1993 after a fatal crash outside a school. It was made dormant in 2018 and had to be put back on a year later.

Recommending another pause, the report said the outcome was very likely to be the same, in that speeds would increase again. Because the stated purpose was to cut injury collisions, it still called dormancy the only way to test what would happen if the camera were removed, “despite likely objections from local residents again.”

On Kingston Road in Neilston, East Renfrewshire, the camera came off even after the local council voiced major reservations. Police files noted that Neilston Primary School and Madras Nursery face onto the road, with 550 children using the route each day. The community council flagged HGVs heading to a nearby quarry. The police report recorded recent complaints about that volume and alleged speeding, then concluded that, despite the roads authority’s reservations and the increased risk, it would still be prudent for the site to enter dormancy.

CASUALTIES LOGGED AT DISARMED SITES

• Deaths: 7 fatalities over a five-year period at more than 100 sites where cameras were disarmed.
• Serious injuries: 73 people seriously injured at those sites in the same window.
• Slight injuries: 162 slight injuries recorded across the same five years.
• The spike: One camera logged more speeding drivers in a month just before dormancy than in the whole previous year.

Those casualty totals, disclosed under information law, sit beside the same shutdown of roadside cameras that first raised whether dormancy was being used on roads that still worried the people who walk them. They are not a verdict on each camera. They are the five-year human ledger the force was asked to put next to a pause it called evidence-led.

The Scottish Government said the sites had recorded no speed-related injury collisions and a consistent level of speed limit compliance for a number of years. A Police Scotland Safety Cameras Unit spokesperson said site selection is “evidence led and data driven, focused on areas that have the highest rate of serious collisions and casualties,” so cameras are used “in the most effective locations.”

Why Are the Cameras Bagged, Not Removed?

Dormancy is written into the programme as a holding pattern, not a vanishing act. Official guidance says that on an annual check with local roads authorities, a site that is no longer a priority is made dormant: no enforcement, but signs stay, and fixed and red-light cameras get a bag. A site may remain in that state for a three-year dormancy with annual reviews, after which it is abandoned or switched back on. If it is abandoned, signage and equipment should be removed.

HOW DORMANCY IS SUPPOSED TO WORK

• The bag: A cover goes over a fixed housing so drivers can see it is not enforcing.
• The signs: Camera warning signs stay up during the pause.
• The clock: Three years of monitoring, with a yearly review, then abandon or reactivate.
• The map: Once a site is no longer operational it is taken off the Safety Cameras mapping system.

That last step matters for the FOI fight. The same organisation that told Hamilton that naming quiet sites would teach motorists where to speed also takes those sites off its public map and wraps the boxes. Older Home Office type-approval text on dummy units said they should be indistinguishable from a live camera unless the housing is open. A labelled bag does the opposite on purpose.

The pause did not stop in 2024. On 16 February 2026, Police Scotland Safety Cameras named 16 locations within the West Safety Camera Unit for dormancy, including A879 Balmore Road in Glasgow, A803 Springburn Road near Huntershill Street, and A814 Cardross Road in Dumbarton. Mobile sites were to go dormant at once, with fixed cameras following over the coming weeks.

Alan Bowater, Safety Camera Unit Manager for the West, said the process can cause concern, and that where sites are going into dormancy, or already sit there, the unit will keep watching speeds and collision figures “and if there is a significant upturn enforcement will recommence.” The sentence is both a reassurance and a confession that the pause is a live experiment on real roads.

Bagged cameras already tell that story at street level. Living Streets Edinburgh, posting in March 2026 beside a Police Scotland Safety Cameras road-safety message, said two-thirds of speed cameras in Edinburgh are bagged and asked what message that sends to drivers. The group wants Holyrood to change the programme so the force has a reason to keep cameras maintained and upgraded. A reply pointed out that a camera pictured on St John’s Road had been taken away some time ago. The secret, such as it was, is hanging off a pole.

Average-Speed Columns Still Keep Their Secret

Hamilton’s December decision does not throw open every live camera in Scotland. It orders historic offence counts, with locations, for cameras that had already been switched off. A later case, Decision 058/2026, drew a line through the kit that is still running.

That request asked how many times each speed camera in Scotland had been triggered in the last year, by type and location, and for the highest speed in each local authority area. Police Scotland released some activation totals for 1 January 2024 to 21 November 2024, grouped only as East, North and West, and kept site-level fixed-camera figures back on the same law-enforcement and safety grounds. It later handed over mobile data and aggregated average-speed figures, arguing those patterns were already visible.

Hamilton again refused to treat fixed-camera activation counts as a substantial threat to catching offenders, and required that withheld fixed-camera data out by 9 May 2026. He accepted the force could keep holding back information on average-speed systems. Those columns are not rotated in the same way, so a location-plus-activation table would show which points on a stretch are doing the measuring. The ghost in the box survives, in other words, where the box is still in the fight.

Campaigners are not arguing about that legal split. They are arguing about the pause itself. Ruth Billingham, head of campaigns and public affairs at Living Streets, said high speeds are a factor in nearly one in five fatal collisions each year in Scotland, and that speed cameras have been proven to reduce road incidents by up to 39 per cent. “It’s puzzling, therefore, that Police Scotland has chosen to switch speed cameras off.”

The paper Hamilton himself footnoted is cooler and still pointed. A College of Policing evidence review of speed-camera studies found cameras cut severe or fatal crashes by 21%, with injury crashes down 18 per cent and all crashes down 19 per cent, while the share of vehicles over the limit fell 57 per cent and average speed fell 7 per cent. Those are site effects from cameras that are actually running. A bagged housing is a different machine.

Police Scotland can still say it is moving scarce cameras onto roads with the worst collision records. The Commissioner did not rewrite that operational choice. He only stripped the claim that the public cannot be trusted with last year’s ticket numbers at boxes the force has already covered, mapped off, and, in files such as Bargeddie, predicted would run faster once they went to sleep.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Police Scotland Appeal the Dormant Camera Ruling?

Yes, but only on a point of law to the Court of Session, and the notice of appeal has to be lodged within 42 days after the decision was intimated. Decision 314/2025 also warns that if the force fails to comply, the Commissioner can certify that failure to the court, which may treat it as a contempt of court.

What Is the Difference Between a Camera Activation and an Offence?

Police Scotland told the Commissioner that a “trigger” is what the Safety Camera Unit calls an activation, and that someone then has to view the evidence and decide whether an offence was committed. Offence totals drop emergency-service vehicles, which are exempt, and cases where the image is too poor for the secondary checks. The August 2024 request asked for offences, so that is the set Hamilton ordered out, not the raw trigger log.

How Does a Dormant Camera Differ From an Abandoned One?

Dormancy pauses enforcement while the housing, bag and signs stay in place so the site can be watched. Abandonment is the next step after that watch period, when the site still does not meet the selection rules, and it is the point at which kit and signs should come out. The 2023/24 report recorded 48 abandoned sites and said that metal can then be moved to locations coming out of later selection rounds.

Did Police Scotland Offer a Compromise on the Offence Figures?

During Hamilton’s investigation the Camera Safety Partnership said it was willing to disclose data on the temporarily paused fixed cameras without names. Officials asked the investigating officer to see if that would satisfy the applicant. He said it would not. The final order requires the withheld data with location information, not a stripped list of anonymous counts.

Hamilton required the 119-camera offence file out by 5 February 2026. The bags are still on the boxes, and the West unit has since added another 16 sites to the pause list.