Brighton & Hove Bus Lane Fines — PCNs, Income & Appeals

Two junctions at the top of the Old Steine one-way system do most of Brighton's bus lane enforcement. York Place and St Georges Place have issued 149,690 penalties in five years — 31% of the city's total — and Marlborough Place with Gloucester Place another 80,269, so between them a quarter of a mile of road accounts for nearly half of every bus lane fine in Brighton & Hove. Both have fallen a long way from 2021/22, when York Place alone issued 50,584 and Gloucester Place 23,110. Gloucester Place has not appeared in the council's figures since. The city-wide total fell from 134,047 to 78,015 across the five years, but the fall is not shared out evenly, and three sites moved sharply the other way. Oxford Street issued a single penalty in 2021/22, nothing at all for two years, then 6,056 in 2024/25 — the signature of a camera being switched on. St Peter's Place nearly trebled in the same year, from 5,145 to 14,276. Marine Parade appears for the first time in 2025/26 with 1,407. Old Steine ran the other way and effectively stopped, from 1,843 penalties in 2024/25 to 120 in 2025/26. Income has followed the penalty count down, from £3.91m to £2.33m, and the council collected £14.99m in total over the five years.

Which sites issue the most fines

Camera-enforced bus lane locations ranked by PCNs issued in 2025/26. The last column is the 5-year total.

Brighton & Hove refused to say where its cameras are, but it did break its penalties down by road — so this table is built from the council's own figures for where penalties were issued, not from a list of camera sites. The council names each stretch with a letter in brackets, which is its parking zone rather than a camera number: Lewes Road appears five times as Lewes Road, (B), (D), (V) and Lewes Road/Stoney Mere Way, and those are grouped into one row here, as are the two entries each for Western Road, Preston Road, London Road and Marlborough Place. Because the letters mark zones rather than junctions, a road with several bus lanes on this site — Lewes Road has five pages, Old Steine four — cannot have its penalties split between them, so those rows do not link through to a single lane page. Six rows do match a lane page one-for-one and are linked. The table accounts for 478,271 of the 478,285 penalties; the missing 14 fell at eight other addresses across five years — Boundary Road, East Street, George Street North, Highcroft Villas, Kings Road, Portland Road, St Aubyns and West Street — never more than four in a year, which looks like the occasional stray contravention rather than a working bus lane camera.

Challenges & appeals — do they work?

Formal representations to the council, and appeals to the independent Traffic Penalty Tribunal. Drivers made 63,029 formal challenges over 5 years.

The council's own figures show the share of challenges upheld went from 57% in 2021/22 to 13% in 2025/26 — so a well-grounded challenge is worth making. Brighton drivers challenge bus lane penalties more than most and, for a while, won a lot. In 2021/22 the council received 27,545 formal representations — one for every five penalties it issued — and accepted 15,711 of them. Four years later it received 6,785 and accepted 852. Read the drop with care: the council's figures for 2021/22 and 2025/26 do not add up, with 11,000 and 2,000 challenges respectively falling into no stated category, and 315 of 2025/26's were still open when it answered, so the 13% shown for the last year is a floor rather than a settled figure. The tribunal numbers are complete and tell a clearer story. Appeals to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal have risen from 420 to 418 a year with a peak of 511, but the odds have turned: in 2021/22 the council lost 315 of 420 appeals once cases it chose not to contest are counted, and in 2025/26 it won 289 of 418. Going to the tribunal is still free and still worth it on a well-grounded case, but it is a harder room than it was. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.