Tom Duckham of Redspeed International argues that deliberate attempts to evade detection are undermining road safety – and welcomes the new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre as an important opportunity to bring police, technology and intelligence together.
One of the most worrying developments in road safety today is not a new type of crash but a new type of behaviour: the deliberate attempt to avoid accountability. Ghost plates, cloned plates, obscured registrations and other forms of non-compliance are a growing threat to the integrity of our enforcement system.
They are not clever tricks. They are deliberate acts that weaken deterrence and put everyone else at greater risk.
The issue was brought into sharp public focus by BBC Panorama’s Ghost Plates: Drivers Cheating the Law, broadcast on BBC One on 28 September. The programme exposed the scale of illegal plate use and the harm it can cause to innocent motorists, road users and public confidence in enforcement. It also demonstrated how specialist camera technology can identify ghost plates that evade conventional ANPR systems.
That is why the Government’s announcement of Department for Transport funding for a new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre (NRPCC) is welcome. The centre is intended to bring police forces across England together to share intelligence, data and technology in tackling illegal number plates, those who evade penalties and the organised crime groups that exploit the road network. The proposed trial of specialist goggles capable of detecting number plates that have been altered to be unreadable to cameras is a further sign that the response needs to keep pace with the tactics used to defeat enforcement.
For those of us working in enforcement technology, this is not an abstract issue. The principle of road safety depends on the simple idea that the law applies to everyone and that those who choose to break it cannot easily escape the consequences. Once that principle starts to erode, the message to offenders is clear: if you can disguise yourself, you can keep offending. That is bad for compliance, bad for fairness and bad for casualty reduction.
The Department for Transport’s Road Safety Strategy rightly places emphasis on safer speeds, safer behaviour and the intelligent use of technology. The NRPCC has the potential to reinforce those priorities by making action on illegal plates more coordinated and consistent. But its value will ultimately lie in whether it helps turn information into timely intervention: identifying repeat patterns, targeting the routes and times where evasion is concentrated, and ensuring that vehicles linked to fraudulent plates are acted upon quickly.
The challenge is not just to catch more offenders. It is to make evasion harder, riskier and less attractive in the first place.
That means joining up the tools we already have. Automatic number plate recognition, camera enforcement, police intelligence, roadside patrols and vehicle data all have a role to play, and we know they are most effective when used as part of a system, not as isolated tactics. If a vehicle is known to be operating with a fraudulent plate, that information should travel quickly through the enforcement chain. If certain routes or times are attracting repeat evasion, we should be able to respond with targeted action, not after the fact but in real time where possible.
Crucially, enforcement technology must not only identify a suspicious or illegal plate; it must be capable of producing evidence that supports action against the underlying offence. Redspeed’s Home Office Type-Approved Sentio Shield system combines speed-enforcement capability with ghost-plate detection software, helping enforcement authorities identify vehicles attempting to defeat conventional ANPR while retaining the evidential capability needed to act where unsafe speed is detected. That distinction matters: detection alone may reveal a problem, but Type Approved enforcement capability helps turn it into accountable action.
BBC Panorama rightly demonstrated the importance of technology capable of identifying ghost plates that defeat conventional ANPR. But detection must be only the first step. The wider road-safety opportunity is to combine ghost-plate identification with evidential enforcement capability, so that a vehicle displaying an illegal plate can also be dealt with where it is speeding or committing another detected offence.
Redspeed’s Sentio Ghost technology is designed around that principle: it provides ghost-plate anomaly flagging and evidential image capture, while Redspeed’s wider enforcement capability can support action on unsafe speed. In practical terms, the goal is not simply to identify a suspicious plate after a vehicle has passed a camera, but to prevent illegal plates becoming a means by which drivers evade the consequences of dangerous behaviour.
The new Coordination Centre should help make that more achievable. National coordination can improve the consistency with which forces identify emerging methods, share evidence and work with partners including the DVLA, DVSA, manufacturers and technology providers. It can also help ensure that successful local operations do not remain isolated examples, but inform a stronger national response.
Technology alone will not solve the problem, however. There also has to be a stronger public and political message that evasion is not a victimless offence. A driver who obscures a plate to avoid speeding penalties may also be avoiding detection for dangerous driving, uninsured use, or far more serious offending. A cloned or ghost plate can leave an innocent motorist facing enforcement correspondence for offences they did not commit, while making it harder for police to trace a vehicle linked to crime. That is why this issue belongs firmly within the wider road-safety conversation, not just in specialist enforcement circles.
There is also a fairness argument that matters. The majority of drivers and riders comply with the law. They pay attention, accept accountability and expect the system to be robust. When a minority exploit gaps, they undermine public confidence in enforcement and create resentment among those who do the right thing. Strong, visible and fair enforcement protects the credibility of the whole system.
We should recognise that the problem is evolving. As enforcement improves, so too do the methods used to evade it. That means our response must be agile, data-led and collaborative. The NRPCC is a positive step, but it should be the beginning of sustained cooperation: police services, regulators, manufacturers and technology providers sharing intelligence, identifying emerging methods of non-compliance and acting quickly to close loopholes.
The public attention generated by Panorama should now help accelerate that conversation. The test is whether new capability is deployed not only to reveal illegal plates, but to restore effective enforcement against the behaviours those plates are often intended to conceal – including speeding.
In the long term, the goal should be simple: make evasion difficult enough that it stops being worthwhile.Road safety has always depended on a mix of engineering, education, enforcement and personal responsibility. But where deliberate non-compliance is concerned, enforcement is the front line. If we want a system that protects the law-abiding majority and deters the deliberately non-compliant minority, we need to stay one step ahead.
The message is clear: compliance is not optional, accountability matters and the road-safety system must be designed to meet those who seek to evade it.