MORE than 3,000 speeding tickets were issued to the county’s ambulance service in just one year.

Only two other ambulance services in England – Yorkshire Ambulance Service and East Midlands Ambulance Service– were given more tickets than the 3,306 given to South Central Ambulance Service, which covers Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Hampshire.

The penalty charge notices added up to £330,600 in 2013 for the service, but it is believed many of them were successfully appealed against because speed limits do not apply to emergency vehicles responding to calls.

Former volunteer SCAS ambulance driver Goff Smith, 66, said the tickets should not be issued.

The Faringdon resident worked as a community first responder for the service for 15 years until 2013 before being sacked for speeding on his way to a call-out, as the exemption does not cover volunteers in their own vehicles.

He was reinstated after an Oxford Mail campaign but left SCAS again in December 2014 to retire.

He said: “I think we need to look at the way these tickets are sent out to stop this happening.

“I think if an ambulance goes through a speed trap but it clearly has its blue lights on a ticket should not automatically be issued.

“It is an added pressure for paramedics and this has been going on for years but nobody has ever done anything to stop it happening.

“The time spent appealing against these tickets would be much better spent saving lives.”

As well as the 3,306 speeding tickets issued to the ambulance trust, another 58 were issued to paramedics working for SCAS between 2013 and 2015.

The highest speed recorded by a SCAS emergency vehicle was 96mph in a 60mph zone.

In order for an ambulance service to appeal against a speeding ticket it must check the vehicle’s registration against records to get a radio call sign and then check this call sign against the 999 incident logging information

If it turns out the incident log matches the time that the vehicle got the ticket then the service must write an official letter to police. SCAS spokeswoman Michelle Archer said: “SCAS has worked closely with the police forces in our area to develop an approved and robust system to handle all notices of intended prosecutions which means that we should not receive notifications for activations where blue lights are visible.”

Section 87 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 states that police will assume a vehicle with blue lights is allowed to speed.