UP TO one million vehicles a day will be checked by police using high-tech cameras, to be set up on key North Yorkshire routes.

Police chiefs said the automatic technology would be a major new weapon in the fight against crime.

They intend to place 12 cameras at three sites, linked to central police operators and databases, on trunk roads near the county's border, at a cost of £450,000.

The Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras have already been used from a mobile van and some police cars and have proved extremely effective at identifying travelling criminals.

Assistant chief constable Peter Bagshaw said the cameras would be invaluable in tracing known offenders and suspicious vehicles as they travelled into and out of North Yorkshire.

He said: "What the fixed sites will do is allow us to check somewhere in the region of a million vehicles over each 24-hour period."

He added that £200,000 had been made available by the Home Office for the project, with the remaining £250,000 coming from police funds. A further £60,000 annual running costs, to pay for communication line rental and maintenance, will also be met by the force.

Members of North Yorkshire Police Authority yesterday approved the £250,000 for the scheme, which would come from their budget.

Senior officers declined to reveal where the cameras would be sited, but the locations are expected to be on major routes such as the A1M, A64 and A19. The eventual sites will not be secret.

The ANPR cameras operate by "seeing" the number plates of passing vehicles. This information is then cross-checked against DVLA and police databases.

Police control rooms will be alerted if a suspicious vehicle travels past a camera.

The cameras have proved effective at targeting stolen vehicles, known drug dealers and people on the run from police.

When officers are alerted to a vehicle of interest senior officers will have to decide how to respond and may also be able to track their movements on the county's CCTV network.

Chief constable Della Cannings said: "Clearly throughout the region we want to make sure there is an adequate network of these fixed sites on trunk roads so we can track the movements of certain people."

Assistant chief constable David Collins said: "It's a piece of technology that's developing constantly and we have been very impressed with it."

In 2004, ANPR officers arrested 363 people and recovered stolen property and illegal drugs worth more than £400,000.

Updated: 10:09 Tuesday, March 08, 2005