N TAYLOR (You Say, Thursday, November 6) fundamentally misunderstands or misrepresents speed camera scheme.

Central Government covers the direct costs of delivering the service and, in order to do so, chooses to draw upon the fines revenue.

This is completely new money, which is generated only by the scheme and otherwise would simply not be available for any purpose.

So suggestions that the money would be better used to fund other services are invalid and meaningless.

The process is intended to be completely cost neutral to the communities which benefit from it.

His attempts at arithmetic are seriously flawed as the costs quoted by the Evening News are the full costs for delivering the whole service for two years at in the region of 180 sites across the whole area of Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Telford-Wrekin.

Here are some sums worth spending time on. The costs to the community of a collision involving road death are estimated at £1.3m and serious injury £160,000.

In the West Mercia region, last year, there were 91 collisions involving road deaths and 601 involving serious injury.

One way to help the NHS is to cut down the unacceptable, unnecessary and avoidable toll of road casualties.

That's the Safety Camera Partnership's only aim and why the NHS are members of the Partnership closely involved in it.

There's no secret about offence detections, and such figures as are available are frequently released.

But, be assured, these data are not collated and readily available on an individual site basis, nor do we plan for them to be.

The Partnership's operational focus is exclusively upon reductions in casualties and speeds and the work is monitored 'globally' across the whole region.

By special analysis conducted outside this office, I'm able to say that, since April, 6,029 speeding offences have been detected in City Walls Road.

It's not good value to expend scarce resources in searching for the answer to Mr Taylor's more detailed question, but I can also say that, before April, 1.31 per cent of the almost 7,700 daily flow of vehicles exceeded the speed limit by more than 15mph.

After just over two months work by the camera, this figure reduced dramatically to just 0.1 per cent.

TREVOR McAVOY,

Unit Manager, Safety Camera Partnership in West Mercia,

Worcester.