Staffordshire Bus Lane Fines — PCNs & Income

Staffordshire's cameras issued 24,478 penalties over four financial years and took £794,861 in payments. The county total looks flat until you take Lower Outwoods Road out of it: strip that one 2023/24 scheme away and the remaining sites issued 7,245, 6,606, 3,477 and 3,324 penalties — a steady halving after 2022/23 rather than the spike-and-collapse the headline figures suggest. Then enforcement all but stopped. The council's fifth sheet holds 247 penalties for 2025/26, and it has confirmed that this is a complete year rather than a part one, blaming camera faults and a change of service provider. That is a 93% fall in a single year, and it means the county issued fewer bus lane penalties in the whole of 2025/26 than Burton's High Street camera issued in an average month at its peak. Individual cameras move sharply even in the good years. Innovation Drive fell from 2,875 penalties in 2021/22 to 276 in 2023/24 and then rose again to 1,147 in 2024/25; South Walls fell from 2,821 to 463 across the same four years and has never recovered. Yield per penalty is remarkably steady at £33.22, £34.96, £29.80 and £31.77, which is what a mix of discounted and full-rate payments should look like against a £70 penalty discounted to £35. The council has confirmed that £70, halved to £35 within 14 days, is the charge it makes today, but it would not say when the rise from £60 took effect, and its own website still advertises the old figure.

Which cameras issue the most fines

Camera-enforced bus lane locations ranked by PCNs issued in 2024/25. The last column is the 4-year total.

Staffordshire camera-enforces five sites. It described them all as bus lanes and told us it operates no bus gates at all, but the traffic orders it later supplied do not quite bear that out: three of the five — Innovation Drive, Burton's High Street and the Stone Business Park site — are drafted as orders that stop every vehicle except a named few, which is what a bus gate is. Two of them do most of the work. The High Street in Burton upon Trent, enforced since September 2021, has caught more drivers than anywhere else in the county in every year since it opened, and Innovation Drive at the entrance to the i54 business park near Pendeford is the county's oldest camera, running since May 2015. South Walls in Stafford has been enforced since November 2017, and the two smallest sites — Brooms Road on Stone Business Park and Gainsborough Drive on the Perton estate — both started in April 2022. Every one of those start dates is confirmed by the data itself: each location first appears in the council's penalty records in exactly the year the council says enforcement began. A sixth location, Lower Outwoods Road in Burton upon Trent, is the odd one out. It issued 3,826 penalties in 2023/24 — more than half of everything the county issued that year, and more than any single camera has issued in any year before or since — and then nothing at all afterwards. It was left out of the camera list the council gave in the same response, and asked why, the council said the site “ceased service and is no longer a camera operated bus Gate”. It was a real restriction while it ran: a 2021 order reserved Lower Outwoods Road and Oak Road for buses and pedal cycles only, made on 1 July 2021 and in operation from 5 July. The council has not said when the camera was switched off, or whether the restriction itself still stands, so it has no page on this site. Around 100 further penalties across the four years are recorded against roads near these sites — Albert Street in Biddulph, High Bank Road and the A38 in Burton, Busbys Buildings in Stafford — which look like keying variants rather than separate cameras; they are counted in the yearly totals but not given rows of their own.

Challenges & appeals — do they work?

Staffordshire cannot tell you how often a challenge succeeds, because it does not hold the figures: representations and appeals against its bus lane penalties are administered for it by Stoke-on-Trent City Council. What its own records do show is that a large share of penalties never end up being paid in full. Of the 24,478 penalties issued over four years, 15,807 were paid, 3,389 were cancelled by the council and 2,913 were written off — so roughly one penalty in four was cancelled or abandoned before it was collected. Appeals against a Staffordshire bus lane PCN go to the independent Traffic Penalty Tribunal. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.