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30 July 2009

Thank you for your request for information, which was received by Essex County Council on 9th July 2009.  

 Your request is covered by the Freedom of Information Act, under which we must respond within 20 working days.
 
The information requested was;
 
Q1) How many Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras does your authority operate?
 
Essex County Council currently has 82 ANPR cameras in operation on the Essex road network.
 
Q2) Where are they positioned and why are they sited where they are?
 
The ANPR cameras are sited along major inter-urban and town centre radial routes in Essex. They are strategically located for the purpose of effective real-time journey time measurement in order that Essex County Council can measure network performance and demonstrate journey time reliability as one of their statutory duties under the Traffic Management Act 2004.
 
Q3) How many individual number plate records does your authority hold? Note: By individual record I mean the recording of a number plate at a specific time and location. So if your camera recorded 20 cars every day for a year and all those records were retained you would hold 20x365=7,300 records.
 
The ANPR camera network is installed for the calculation of real-time journey time across Essex. For the purpose of real-time journey time calculation, number plates recorded by the ANPR cameras are temporarily held in the volatile memory of the system for a  short period of time (no more than 2 hours) before they are deleted.
 
As number plates are held temporarily by the system, the total number of plates stored can vary considerably at any point of time as the total number is dependent on traffic flow at each ANPR camera location. An estimated average figure for the number of plates temporarily heldby the system is in the order of 98,000. No vehicle or owner personal details are derived by the system.
 
You may reuse all or part of this information free of charge in any format or medium.  You must reuse it accurately and not in a misleading context.  The material must be acknowledged as Essex County Council copyright and you must give the title of the source document/publication.
 
Please contact me if you would like further advice or assistance about your request or rights to access information held by Essex County Council.
 
If you are not satisfied with my response to your request, please let me know.  If I am unable to resolve the issue immediately, I will explain our complaints procedure.
If, after following our complaints procedure, you are still not satisfied, you are entitled to ask the Information Commissioner to review our decision.  You can contact him at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Telephone no: 01625 545700.