How many bus lane Penalty Charge Notices Tower Hamlets Council issues, from which cameras, how much it raises — from data released under Freedom of Information (ref 72928431).
100,254
PCNs issued in 5 years2021/22–2025/26
£5.74m
gross income, 5 yearsnet of costs not held
19,533
PCNs in 2025/26across 13 cameras
23%
paid at the £80 discount2025/26
This page reports data released by Tower Hamlets Council under the Freedom of Information Act (72928431, responded 2026-08-28). Figures are the council's own. BusLaneCheck is independent and not affiliated with the council. Compare every UK authority →
Bus lane PCNs issued per yearGross PCN income per year
Tower Hamlets cameras caught 100,254 drivers over the five years and took £5,741,179 from them, but the total is falling sharply: 34,403 penalties in 2021/22 against 19,533 in 2025/26, a drop of well over a third. Almost all of that is one location. The Wapping High Street bus gate alone issued 23,482 penalties in 2021/22 — more than the rest of the borough put together — and was down to 6,597 by 2025/26, a fall of 72% as drivers learned it was there. Against that, the borough's bus lanes are going the other way: the six camera-enforced roads issued 3,036 penalties in 2021/22 and 5,008 in 2025/26, because four new cameras went live on Cambridge Heath Road between February and April 2025 and took that road from 214 penalties a year to 2,868.
Which cameras issue the most fines
Camera-enforced bus lane locations ranked by PCNs issued in 2025/26. The last column is the 5-year total.
Tower Hamlets named thirteen camera-enforced sites and gave penalty counts for eleven of them, grouped onto the six roads above. Two bus gates carry most of the borough's enforcement between them: Wapping High Street, where a pair of cameras between Sampson Street and Wapping Lane account for 56% of every penalty in this table, and Blackwall Way at Newport Avenue, live since August 2017. Blackwall Way appears here without a link because the council publishes no operating hours or permitted vehicles for it, so it has no page on this site yet. The four Cambridge Heath Road cameras and the two on Gillender Street are reported by the council as separate numbered sections of road rather than as cameras, and several roads were renamed and resplit during 2025 — Cambridge Heath Road became three numbered sections — so each road's figures here are the sum of the sections the council reported for it. A road showing nothing in a given year is a year the council reported no separate figure for it, which is not the same as a year with no contraventions. Three roads show no start date because the only dates the council gave are for the cameras standing there now, all of them installed in 2025, and each of those roads was already issuing penalties years earlier from equipment it did not date.
Challenges & appeals — do they work?
Formal challenges cannot be shown year by year here, because the council counts them by calendar year while it issues penalties by financial year. The totals still say something: 14,855 challenges over six years against roughly 105,000 penalties, so about one driver in seven wrote in. Wapping High Street drew 10,186 of them on its own. Of the challenges the council recorded a reason for, "no mitigation" is much the commonest rejection, while the commonest reason for cancelling a penalty is a hire agreement — the driver was renting the vehicle and the penalty went to the hire company instead. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.
The fine itself
A bus lane PCN from Tower Hamlets Council is £160, reduced to £80 if paid within 14 days. It is a civil penalty — there are no licence points. £160 is the current penalty, reduced to £80 if you pay within 14 days. It has only been £160 since Monday 7 April 2025 — before that a bus lane PCN in Tower Hamlets was £130, halved to £65 — so most of the penalties counted on this page were issued at the lower rate, and the income figures should be read with that in mind. The council published the increase in its notice of changes to penalty charges and additional fees.
What the council does not hold or publish
Challenges and appeals on the same basis as the penalties. The council counts formal challenges by calendar year but issues penalties and records tribunal appeals by financial year, and confirmed both bases when asked. The two cannot be lined up without inventing a split, so there is no year-by-year challenge table on this page. Drivers made 14,855 formal challenges across the six years the council reported, and 2,864 cases reached London Tribunals.
Penalties from the two Monier Road bus gates. The council's own camera list includes two bus gates on Monier Road, at the Roach Road and Bassett Lane junctions, live since December 2023 and June 2024. Neither appears anywhere in the penalty figures it supplied, so this page cannot say whether they have issued any. A separate request for their operating hours and permitted vehicles is outstanding.
Income net of what enforcement costs. Every income figure here is gross. The council was not asked to separate out what the cameras cost to run and did not volunteer it.
The bus lanes behind these cameras
Each of these locations has a full page with operating hours, permitted vehicles and the governing traffic order: