A groundbreaking collaboration on North West motorways is to boost crime-fighting and improve response times to traffic incidents.
Cheshire, Merseyside and Lancashire Police have joined the Highways Agency to form the North West Motorway Police Group (NWMPG) which will bring a regional approach to motorway policing by:
“Softening up” force borders
Improving road safety
Fighting against serious and organised crime
As it stands, motorists can travel from London to Glasgow in a matter of hours which also means terrorists and serious and organised criminals can commit a crime in one force area and be over its border in a matter of minutes.
The NWMPG has been set up to clamp down on criminality with a joint intelligence approach.
Based in the Highways Agency’s state-of-the-art Regional Control Centre at Newton-le-Willows, the NWMPG’s centrally located control room has been designed to ensure the best deployment of resources to incidents on the motorway network.
A regional force joined to the Highways Agency is to reduce the impact of major road traffic collisions.
One serious collision doesn’t just affect the immediate area.
Hundreds of miles of roads can get caught up in a traffic jam, causing misery for thousands of motorists and costing the economy millions.
Police control room staff taking and dealing with calls on the motorway network are working alongside Highways Agency control room staff who answer all calls from hard shoulder emergency telephone boxes, set electronic motorway signs, monitor motorway cameras and despatch on-road traffic officers to incidents.
This arrangement frees up police patrols to focus on fighting crime and enforcement on the motorway network. Having police operators in the Regional Control Centre allows fast and appropriate deployment of police patrol or Highways Agency officers depending on the incident.
Cheshire’s Assistant Chief Constable David Baines is the lead officer on the collaboration.
He said: “By becoming a regional group we will be able to look at the positioning of resources so we are able to achieve economies. This will free up officers and enable more intelligence-led policing of the motorways. It also means we can have more resources operating from more convenient positions, so that we spend less time on travelling through each other’s road areas to get to jobs.”
Motorway police officers will still work for their respective forces.
ACC Baines added: “The collaboration is all about ‘softening the borders’ between the forces to allow motorway patrols to concentrate on denying criminals the use of the road, reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured and making people feel safer while they are using the motorway network.
“Motorway police work will become a lot more ‘cross border’ and more ‘intelligence led’. In the past traffic officers and the police might have turned up at the same incident. This collaboration enables traffic officers to attend more of the day-to-day incidents, reducing this duplication and letting the police focus on criminality on the roads.
“Officers throughout the three forces are also looking forward to the idea of working across borders, enabling them to tackle more serious crime by linking in with their colleagues in other forces.”
Jamie Carr, Regional Operations Manager in charge of the Traffic Officer Service, said: “The arrival of the NWMPG at the regional control centre is a vote of confidence in the Highways Agency’s North West Traffic Officer Service and the role it is playing keeping traffic moving across the region.
“This initiative will undoubtedly lead to better and faster decision-making to the benefit of motorway users.”
