SIX new mobile camera vans are being launched in North Yorkshire to tackle speeding and the number of deaths and injuries on the county's roads.

The new vehicles will bring the total number of speed camera vans in North Yorkshire up to 12.

North Yorkshire Police says, due to their smaller size, the new vans are more suited to hard-to-reach locations.

Using state-of-the art camera equipment, the vans can not only detect speeding drivers, but can also identify anti-social driving such as seat belt offences and drivers using mobile phones behind the wheel.

The vans are also equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology (ANPR), which the force says assists with the detection of cross border crime, protecting those communities more vulnerable due to their location, by deterring and disrupting travelling criminals.

Julia Mulligan, police and crime commissioner for North Yorkshire, said: "The most important thing to me is that they can be much more responsive to local communities and can easily be deployed to where there are 30mph and 40mph limits.

"I get lots of correspondence from people, particularly in rural areas, complaining that speeding and anti-social behaviour on the roads is a real problem within their local area and I think these vans are a really good response to that.

"They have a range of different uses and are much more flexible than the bigger vans."

She added: "North Yorkshire hasn’t ever had any fixed cameras. We have one of the largest road networks in the country so we have a lot of roads to get around and a lot of these are rural roads. These vans are a much better, more flexible resource that can be used in lots of different situations."

Over the past three years Newcastle University has conducted studies into North Yorkshire’s killed or seriously injured statistics across 22 local sites and evaluated the effect of the mobile speed camera vans on the level of road safety. The study found that due to the deployment of the vans to those sites there has been a reduction of eight casualties.

Julia said: “This is genuinely about keeping people safe. It’s a really good way of improving people’s safety, responding to the needs of local communities and saving people’s lives.”

North Yorkshire Police Chief Constable, Dave Jones, said: "The new vans will enable us to reach locations which are both vulnerable to anti-social driving and cross border crime, bringing a further sense of security to our rural communities.

"The mobility of the vans is the key to achieving our aim of changing driver attitudes for the long term. Once a speed camera is fixed, motorists get wise to its whereabouts and only change their behaviour 15 seconds before and 10 seconds after driving past one. Our aim with the vans is to educate drivers about the dangers speeding and distracted driving pose and encourage them to change their behaviour, making the roads safer for all."