West Midlands commissioner seeks wider AI camera use after 18,995 possible offences

Wider use of AI road cameras is under discussion in the West Midlands after a trial flagged 18,995 potential offences in two weeks. In a BBC interview published November 15, road safety commissioner Mat MacDonald said officials were discussing the resources needed to deploy the technology. The March trial ended early, with no enforcement planned.

MacDonald wants the cameras to become more than an experiment. He told the BBC he was working to bring the technology onto the region’s roads, describing the trial’s findings as evidence of a widespread culture of dangerous driving. His immediate task is turning those findings into a viable deployment.

Two locations, thousands of suspected offences

The cameras operated outside Ladywood fire station in Birmingham and at Fallings Park in Wolverhampton for two weeks in March. The West Midlands Combined Authority funded the trial, working with police and fire services. The systems were trained to recognise patterns associated with behaviours such as apparent mobile-phone use behind the wheel.

• Ladywood: 11,045 potential seatbelt offences and 1,163 potential mobile-phone offences.
• Fallings Park: 6,030 potential seatbelt offences and 757 potential mobile-phone offences.

Seatbelt detections dominated at both sites. MacDonald said the trial was stopped sooner than intended because of the volume of possible offences being detected. These were potential offences, not a tally of penalties: no enforcement was planned as a result of the exercise.

Some images showed risks beyond the two categories counted. MacDonald described a child sitting unrestrained on a front passenger’s lap as particularly shocking. He also cited images of people apparently inhaling from balloons while driving and someone appearing to drink from a wine bottle at the wheel.

From detection to possible enforcement

West Midlands police and crime commissioner Simon Foster has separately described the findings as deeply concerning. He previously said officials were closely evaluating the results to consider how the technology could be used for future police enforcement. That is a possible next use, distinct from the trial’s non-enforcement purpose.

The authority linked the behaviours being monitored to fatal road risks. Citing 2025 road safety data, it said mobile-phone use was linked to 32 deaths on UK roads, while unfastened seatbelts were linked to 133 deaths. Those figures concern the wider road network, not outcomes measured by this trial.

What this trial has shown to me more than anything else, is we have a huge problem with these potentially lethal behaviours behind the wheel

Mat MacDonald, West Midlands road safety commissioner, speaking to the BBC

Police still have a call to make

For Christophe Bastien, an associate professor of transport safety at Coventry University, the cameras offer a way to measure behaviour and direct interventions where they are most needed. He told the BBC that the number of detections in such a limited deployment suggested risky driving remained more common than many people thought.

Bastien also cautioned that AI systems are not always perfect. He argued that the cameras should support existing enforcement methods rather than replace them, with police still making the call. His distinction puts the technology in an evidence-supporting role, rather than treating every automated detection as a final judgment.

MacDonald’s stated goal is not a growing pile of fines. He said success would mean both fines and camera activations falling to zero because drivers had changed their behaviour.