MORE than 22,000 motorists in Medway were fined after being caught by speed cameras last year.

That's nearly 10,000 more than the previous year and the highest number of penalty notices issued anywhere in the county.

We can also reveal that motorists in Kent have handed over around £8.3 million in fines in two and a half years. The money goes to the Government.

The figures were obtained by Kent Online's sister newspaper, the Medway Messenger, using the new Freedom of Information Act.

It is the first time that a statistical area-by-area breakdown for the whole of Kent has been made public. Until now, only figures for motorists caught across all of Kent have been made available.

We used the Act to ask the Kent And Medway Safety Camera Partnership, responsible for speed cameras, for a detailed breakdown of the number of motorists caught on camera over the last three years.

The partnership provided the information but declined our request for more detailed statistics about the number of motorists caught at each of the county’s fixed sites.

The figures show that in Medway, 22,142 motorists were issued with fixed penalty notices in 2004, compared with 12,305 in 2003 and just 2,464 in 2002, although that figure covers only a six-month period.

That equates to 1,700 tickets for each one of Medway’s eight fixed camera sites and five mobile cameras.

The 22,142 penalty notices were three times more than the number of tickets issued in neighbouring Maidstone and more than twice as many as Tonbridge and Malling.

Chris Rogers, of the Kent Partnership, said Medway had seen a greater increase because it had seen more cameras installed than many other parts of Kent.

He said: “Whilst the installation of new fixed site cameras has covered nearly every district in the county, many of the devices happened to fall in Medway, as well as Gravesend and Dartford.

"Any proposed new fixed camera site can be operated using mobile enforcement as soon as it is agreed with the DfT and thus those that haven't actually been installed yet are nevertheless operated from the earliest opportunity.

"That is why there has been a considerable increase in offences detected in Medway, year-on-year.”

Motorists in Sevenoaks received the fewest fines in 2004. There, just 804 fixed penalty notices were issued – nearly 700 fewer than the previous year.

The figures show some wide variations across the county, with some districts seeing large increases and others big falls.

In Tonbridge and Malling, nearly three times as many motorists (9,125) were fined in 2004 than 2003 (3,075). The area has three fixed camera sites and five mobile camera sites.

In Tunbridge Wells, 9,450 tickets were issued – more than double the 4,024 issued in 2003.

Across the whole of Kent, nearly 13,857 more tickets were issued in 2004 (82,906) than in 2003 (69,049).

In the first year that the partnership took control of speed cameras in Kent, 26,549 motorists were caught.

However, that only covered a six-month period and was at a time when there were far fewer cameras.