Warrington Bus Lane Fines — PCNs & Income

How many bus lane Penalty Charge Notices Warrington Borough Council issues, from which cameras, how much it raises — from data released under Freedom of Information (ref IR\ET\1083).

221,735
PCNs issued in 5 years2021–2025
£5.34m
gross income, 5 yearsnet of costs not held
40,113
PCNs in 2025across 11 cameras
This page reports data released by Warrington Borough Council under the Freedom of Information Act (IR\ET\1083, responded 2026-08-07). Figures are the council's own. BusLaneCheck is independent and not affiliated with the council. Compare every UK authority →
Bus lane PCNs issued per year
52,641202150,956202240,087202337,938202440,1132025
Gross PCN income per year
£1,039,0002021£1,299,0002022£1,221,0002023£936,0002024£848,0002025

Penalties fell by a quarter between 2021 and 2024, from 52,641 to 37,938, then ticked back up to 40,113 in 2025. Income has fallen further and faster than the count — £1,299,000 at the 2022 peak against £848,000 in 2025, a 35% drop on 21% fewer penalties — which means the council is collecting less per penalty issued than it used to. Challenge figures were given only as a five-year total: of 12,111 representations recorded, 3,271 were successful and a further 1,709 succeeded at the discount stage, against 107 unsuccessful and 120 ignored, with 6,734 still shown as pending. Those categories are the council's own workflow labels rather than the accepted/rejected split the request asked for, so treat the success rate as indicative only.

Which cameras issue the most fines

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

Location2025PCNs (2025)5-year total
Scotland Road14,34594,032
Bridge Street7,75733,322
Legh Street7,57038,597
Academy Street3,93314,099
Wilderspool Causeway2,23710,425
Knutsford Road1,8136,067
Winwick Road1,36815,831
Birchwood (Ordnance Avenue)1,0909,362

Warrington's bus lane enforcement is dominated by one place. Scotland Road's two cameras issued 23,672 penalties in 2021 alone — 45% of the borough's total that year — and it has stayed the busiest site every year since, though it has fallen to 14,345. Together Scotland Road and Legh Street account for roughly two-thirds of every bus lane penalty the council issues. The two directions of Scotland Road and of Bridge Street are counted together here because the council reports each as a north/south pair against a single lane page. One naming point worth recording: the council's covering letter calls the Birchwood site "Birchwood Ordinance Avenue" while its spreadsheet heads the same two columns "Faraday St North/South" — they are the same location, the unnamed link road between Ordnance Avenue and Birchwood Way, and the letter's list of nine sites maps exactly onto the spreadsheet's eleven columns once the three two-directional sites are paired up.

The fine itself

A bus lane PCN from Warrington Borough Council is £70, reduced to £35 if paid within 21 days. It is a civil penalty — there are no licence points. The FOI response did not restate the penalty. £70, halved to £35 within 21 days, is the amount already recorded on all twelve Warrington lane pages from the council's own bus lane pages. The income reported is consistent with it: across the five years the council collected between £19.74 and £30.46 for every PCN it issued, which is the range you would expect where roughly half to four-fifths of penalties are paid, most at the discounted rate.

What the council does not hold or publish

  • PCNs paid at the discounted rate. The council did supply a discounted-payment table, but it is not shown here because it cannot be what it appears to be. It runs at roughly 30 to 100 payments a month until July 2022 and then jumps to around 3,000 a month from September 2022 onwards. At the later rate the discounted payments alone would come to about £1.26m a year at £35 each — more than the £936,000 and £848,000 of total bus lane income the council reported for 2024 and 2025, which is impossible, because those totals already include the discounted payments and the full-rate ones as well. A follow-up request asked whether the table might be counting every kind of penalty rather than bus lane ones. The council answered in August 2026 that it covers bus lane and bus gate contraventions only, which rules that explanation out and leaves the arithmetic unexplained. It gave two reasons for the jump itself — the Scotland Road bus gate becoming fully operational around that time after a delay in issuing live PCNs, and two changes of back-office system in the same period — and said of the newer system that it "is unable to accurately extract historical data for this specific report". On the council's own account, then, the table is not reliable, and it stays out.
  • Challenges and appeals by year. Challenge outcomes were given as one five-year total by workflow status rather than broken down by year, so they cannot be shown per year or compared with other authorities here. The totals are in the notes below.
  • Cost of running the cameras. No operating-cost figure was given, so the income here is gross. It is not what the council keeps.
  • Academy Way. The council lists Academy Way as camera-enforced from June 2023, but its spreadsheet has no column for it, so no penalty figures for that site exist in this response and it is absent from the table above.

The bus lanes behind these cameras

Each of these locations has a full page with operating hours, permitted vehicles and the governing traffic order: