Criminals will be 'denied the use of the road system' as police in Oxfordshire extend the use of special cameras that detect the number plates of offenders.

The Government has given Thames Valley Police a grant of £300,000 which the force will use to expand its use of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras across the region.

The cameras have helped officers make 1,030 arrests between April last year and March this year.

The arrests were for offences including robberies, burglaries, thefts, motoring offences and driving while disqualified.

The force is planning to use the extra money to improve its ANPR coverage across the region.

ANPR-equipped vans are used by the force's technical operations group, based at Arncott, near Bicester, to scan the number plates of passing cars. Nineteen cars from the roads policing department are also equipped with ANPR cameras.

They are linked to databases which contain information from the Police National Computer, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and Customs and Excise.

When an offender's vehicle is identified, a team of officers on motorcycles chase and stop it. Town centre CCTV systems in Banbury are being upgraded to incorporate ANPR technology. Insp Gary Grant, the force's ANPR project manager, said: "Today's criminal is a mobile criminal, able to travel beyond local and force area boundaries. "The Thames Valley has 196 miles of motorway and many major routes allowing criminals to travel freely and rapidly in and out of the region.

"The real beauty of ANPR is that it only targets the guilty and is therefore an efficient means of arresting offenders.

"If there's a hit on one of the many databases we carry, then that person is almost 100 per cent of the time guilty of some sort of offence.

"The statistics speak for themselves. ANPR is helping to target serious drugs and violent offenders as well as those contravening the Road Traffic Act, it also helps to reassure the public.

"The extra funding demonstrates the importance being placed on ANPR technology and will allow us to improve our ability to deny criminals the use of our road system."