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New Era for Motorway Policing in the North West
A new era for motorway policing in the North West has been launched from the Highways Agency's North West Regional Control Centre.
The RCC, headquarters of the North West Traffic Officer Service, is now also home to the centralised communications operation for the North West Motorway Policing Group (NWMPG) - only the second such motorways policing group in the country.
Lancashire, Cheshire and Merseyside police forces have all committed themselves to the NWMPG which features 115 police officers and 30 police staff from the three forces. The NWMPG started to cover Cheshire motorways this month (July) and will be extended to Merseyside and Lancashire by the end of the summer - including a section of the M6 previously covered by Greater Manchester Police.
The NWMPG comms team at the RCC will call on around 40 vehicles to deploy covering 612 miles of the region’s motorway network. New ‘soft’ boundaries will allow response from the nearest patrol regardless of force ownership.
The NWMPG follows the model of the Central MPG in the Midlands which has been running successfully since 1990 and was incorporated into the RCC at Quinton in 2004 with the launch of the WM Traffic Officer Service.
The ground-breaking collaboration will boost crime fighting and improve the response to traffic incidents. The NWMPG’s centrally located control desk at the RCC has been designed to ensure the best deployment of resources to incidents on the motorway network. Having police operators in the RCC allows fast and appropriate deployment of police patrol or HA officers depending on the incident.
Cheshire’s Assistant Chief Constable David Baines, 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 others’ 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 Highways Agency 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 North West 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.”
