A POLICE force is dismantling ten speed cameras and removing film from another fifty after the first official admission that badly positioned devices could undermine road safety.

West Midlands Police found after a review of all its cameras that many fail to comply with strict government rules on where they can be located. The force is expected to be the first of many to remove them after the Government ordered an audit of 6,000 speed cameras.

The cameras being removed in the West Midlands were installed before the rules on siting were tightened in 2000.

Three were found to break guidelines that cameras must be visible from at least 60m (200ft) away. Two were obscured by a bridge and one was hidden behind a road sign.

A spokesman for the West Midlands Casualty Reduction Partnership, which includes the police and seven local authorities, said that motorists had been braking suddenly when spotting the cameras too late.

"We recognise that there is a potential safety hazard from sudden braking if you can’t see the camera," he said.

Several other cameras were removed because road layout had changed or the highway authority had used some other method to slow vehicles. In two cases a dangerous crossroads had been replaced by a roundabout. In another, traffic lights had been installed on an open stretch of road.

The partnership spokesman said that West Midlands also decided to switch off cameras where there had been no injury in a collision in three years.

Under the Department for Transport’s rules, cameras can be positioned on roads only where there have been at least four collisions involving death or serious injury within a onekilometre stretch in the previous three years. Once the camera is installed, it can remain indefinitely even if there are no further collisions. Supporters say that this is sensible because collisions might occur again if the camera were removed. But West Midlands has decided that it cannot justify fining drivers when there have been no recent casualties.

The spokesman said that sites free of collisions for four years would be reviewed to see whether the cameras could be removed. "We hope our approach will convince motorists that we only have cameras where there is a road safety problem," he said.

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed anti-camera campaign, called on other forces to copy the move. "We hope this is the beginning of the end for cameras. Motorists have been fined more than £700 million since the early 1990s but the roads haven’t got safer."

Several speed camera partnerships are having to delay plans to install hundreds of new cameras because the Department for Transport has yet to approve them. Some partnerships suspect that the department is beginning to doubt the effectiveness of cameras.