DIY speed monitoring for villages

New scheme under consideration to enable communities to tackle speeding drivers

Villagers in North Hampshire may soon be empowered to monitor speeding traffic for themselves, if proposals being mooted by Hampshire police for a community speed watch scheme get off the ground.

Kingsclere and Silchester parish councils are among those considering proposals for Hampshire Constabulary's community speed watch scheme.

At a meeting of Kingsclere Parish Council last month, chairman Peter Goff gave a resumé of the scheme as outlined by Hampshire police at a meeting of the Basingstoke and District parish and town councils, which he attended on behalf of the parish council.

The scheme, said Mr Goff, would enable several parishes to bear the expense of obtaining equipment costing a total £2,500, aimed at recording the details of vehicles exceeding the speed limit through the village.

The equipment would include boxes installed on lampposts and wires laid on the road to record the speed of each vehicle.

Volunteers would manually record the registration number of

the vehicles and this information would be passed on to the police.

“If traffic persists in speeding, the police will then put in further enforcement measures,” said Mr Goff, while pointing out associated risks to volunteers, which included being subject to ‘road rage'.

There would be an additional training cost for each volunteer of £500 per person, incurred by the parish council, while the cost of maintaining the equipment, including an annual check, was not known.

No parish, he said, was likely to be able to afford this, although he said there was the possibility of training one person who could then pass on the knowledge to other volunteers and also of hiring out the equipment, once purchased, to surrounding parishes, or alternatively sharing the total cost with them.

Mr Goff said the measures could prove particularly useful to residents of Basingstoke Road, Kingsclere, who had recently complained about speeding traffic.

The same proposals were also discussed at a Silchester Parish Council meeting on March 7, where chairman, Tony Stanley, revealed the same costs to purchase equipment and for training volunteers, while pointing out the training could be done en masse to reduce costs.

Kingsclere Parish Council is awaiting more details from Hampshire police about the scheme, while Silchester Parish Council has put it on the agenda for the next meeting on Monday, April 4, at Silchester Village Hall.