DfT's ANPR spending reaches £23.6m

Transport minister Mike Penning said in a parliamentary written answer that the total cost of establishing the Highways Agency's ANPR capability from September 2001 to July 2010 was £12.5m. He told Conservative MP Greg Knight on 22 July 2010 that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has spent £7.7m on ANPR from 2002-03 to date, which includes all capital and running costs and expenditure on vehicles. Penning also disclosed that the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency expended £3.4m on ANPR and weight in motion sensors from 2003-04 to 2009-10. "This figure cannot be disaggregated without incurring disproportionate costs," added Penning. The transport secretary's answer did not include police use of ANPR, which has proved controversial. Project Champion, the installation of hundreds of ANPR cameras in two Muslim areas in Birmingham, was halted in June after it was revealed that the scheme was being funded as a counter-terrorism initiative. The DfT's disclosure of ANPR figures follows a previous parliamentary written answer from Penning to Knight, published on 21 July 2010, about how data captured by ANPR cameras is protected. The transport minister said that data captured by the DVLA's mobile ANPR cameras is stored and protected using security codes generated by Home Office Police Scientific Development Branch published standards for data protection. "The data captured from the DVLA's static cameras is held on a secure data storage server," Penning added. He also revealed that the Highway Agency's camera data is scrambled at source into a non-unique code which can apply to more than one vehicle simultaneously. "This process renders the data as non personal under the Data Protection Act 1998. In addition, the Highways Agency operates a system of information asset owners to ensure that data is held and used in accordance with both the Data Protection Act 1998 and with Cabinet Office data handling guidance issued in 2008," he said. Earlier this month home secretary Theresa May announced that there would be tighter regulation of ANPR cameras, which includes putting in place stricter safeguards on the police database that holds records on motorists.