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What the police really do for the UK motorist

Traffic police often get a bad press, but there's more to their job than handing out speeding tickets. Steve Cropley finds out what's involved in looking after the M25

The control room looks like something out of a Bond movie. It's a long and thin, and half-darkened so the staff manning the phoneladen desks can see the wall of monitors which dominates the room. Each screen draws real-time pictures from a nearby traffic hotspot, the worst of which are displayed on a massive central monitor. This is the nerve-centre of the Essex Road Policing Unit (RPU) which controls the intersection of London's M25 orbital motorway with the M11 motorway that heads north out of London. From the outside it looks like a sprawling brick bungalow, but from here 56 officers and 18 patrol cars (two Land Rover Discoverys, two unmarked Skodas and a gaggle of Volvo estates and saloons) promote traffic flow, deal with accidents, crack down on car crime and, of course, enforce the law. The unit covers 50 miles of Britain's busiest motorway, plus surrounding roads in towns like Brentwood and Harlow. The control room can bring up pictures from hundreds of traffic cameras: if you ever doubted that the police had your number on major roads close to the capital, this place will change your mind. This unit is the biggest is the county, but Essex has six more like it. If you pick up a roadside phone anywhere in the region this is where you'll be answered. From here, a police patrol car will be dispatched to help. Within seconds you're a dot on a big electronic map, and probably be visible on camera, too. If your incident is big enough, the motorway will be closed from here to deal with it. It is, in short, a vital cog in the wheel of London. In charge is Inspector Nicola Burston - or rather, she was in charge until she was recently promoted. As we stand watching the screens, an incident occurs before our eyes as two cars collide. Four people are suddenly in danger. Though both cars are driveable, they have stopped in the Holmsdale Tunnel on the M25 and the occupants are standing inside the Armco, two actually between the vehicles, even though it's well-proven that people on the hard shoulder can be killed without warning. A patrol car is deployed to sort them out, but it'll take 10 minutes so we watch, hoping we won't see someone hospitalised or killed. The police arrive promptly, and there's no disaster.
'We get relatively few motorway fatals,' says Burston, 'though when they come, they come in groups for some reason. But there's no argument; motorways are our safest roads.
'The good thing about the M25 is that when there's an incident, the traffic slows because it's congested. You do get accidents from people rubber-necking on the other side, but those usually happen at lower speeds. The M11 is dangerous after an accident because it's less busy. The traffic keeps arriving at 80-90 mph, which is really dangerous. We usually despatch two vehicles: one to attend the scene and one to slow traffic past the scene.'
Burston's attitude to fatal accidents (there were 32 in her region last year) comes across as the perfect mixture of steel and sympathy. When you meet her she seems insufficiently hard-boiled to be the one who tells relatives their loved one has just perished at the roadside. But it's the job and she accepts it. Fatal accidents generate a huge workload, she says, sometimes a pile of paperwork four feet high, and of last year's 32 fatals, enquiries from six are still live. As a newcomer to this RPU you can't help being impressed how willingly the staff accept such tough work. But Burston and colleagues - including one officer with 29 years and 96 crashes on his CV - believe doing your best for victims is the important thing.
All of which takes us far from the things road-users usually associate with traffic cops: radar, slavish speed enforcement, ticket writing, curt lectures at the roadside. It's remarkable, at this Essex HQ, how magically such things seem to disappear. Speed limits are there to be enforced, says Burston, but she readily mentions the Association of Chief Police Officers' 'nicking' guidelines: speed limit, plus 10 per cent, plus 2mph. That's 79mph on motor ways - not too bad. But what about ticket quotas? 'We do have figures,' she says, 'but they're nothing sinister. We have them to be sure people are doing their jobs. If an officer stops 10 people and reports no offences, he won't be disciplined. But if he doesn't stop anyone, questions will be asked. Just the same, no-
one should forget that this job is about enforcement. Britain has road law and it has to work. But I'd be happy, if there was a way of doing it, to trade no tickets for no fatals. That would mean everything was working fine.'