http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-25527721

'What? I was hungry, ye ken?'

Bollocks to that. I was in a fairly serious car crash because an ambulance ran through red traffic light and caused mayhem at a busy junction. Every driver on the road expects every other driver to act more or less within the bounds of the law. if we let one group of people (even for very good reason) not do that, there are going to be consequences.

It is there for a reason. Though if it becomes a blanket exemption it could be abused, then what about police cars rushing back to get doughnuts. The fact that there is a procedure to cancel the tickets is good. It should be more automated though. It would not be impossible to develop a system that will automatically mark an ambulance as on emergency call the moment it is sent, and to cancel that emergency status when it is over. That way the administration of the fines would be a lot simpler.

Do you mean like having Sirens and lights on? That kind of shows emergency no?

Yes but those will not necessarily be picked up by a photograph. I have not heard of still cameras recording sound yet!

Plus they aren't allowed to - or at least often don't - use their sirens during the night.

Perhaps I'm mistaken but I was under the impression that emergency calls were all logged through (increasingly centralised) control centres.

It's surely not beyond the whit of the authority issuing the speeding ticket to cross check with the police/fire/ambulance service concerned whether, at the time the emergency vehicle was snapped, it was booked out on an emergency call and to do so in an automated manner.
Fire engines and ambulances generally don't go haring off on a whim, the only emergency vehicles with a serious possibility of doing so are the police themselves and they are meant to call in when they start giving chase to something they've seen and will certainly have had to log it by the time a speeding photo has gone through the gears to the point of issuing a ticket.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic here but the data to ascertain whether or not an emergency vehicle was actually responding to an emergency is already recorded electronically so a cross check of the data is potentially trivial. Mind you, past experience of government attempts at joined up IT systems suggests I may indeed be being optimistic.

Gatso's etc are automated systems, the photo's taken, ANPR pulls the details from the plate & gets the address etc from system and the paperwork goes out.

The only time a human will check it is if you contest it

That's rather the point I was making. The data about the speeding vehicle is all collected and processed automatically. At some point before the paperwork goes out there should be a crosscheck with the relevant emergency service computer system to determine if the 'responding to emergency' checkbox has been completed. If there is a positive result then the paperwork is automatically binned, if there isn't then it's sent out.

As I said, that level of IT interconnect may or may not already exist (it probably doesn't) and the past record of government IT in creating such an automated system isn't exactly encouraging but at the basic level it should be relatively simple to achieve given that the data to enable it to happen is presumably already being captured anyway.

The disparity of systems the government used would make it extremely expensive to make everything talk nicely

You'd think the simpler approach would be to mark some registrations as requiring manual checking, but I imagine that is not nearly as simple as it sounds. I'm sure somebody's done a cost:benefit analysis somewhere though.

Certain government system are legally not allowed to be connected together, due to the strictures of privacy legislation.

I do not think that the traffic authorities have access to that data. It is the ambulance managers who are complaining about the paperwork.

Personally I think they should be exempt from all fixed camera fines.
If they're doing wrong, mobile police cameras with humans involved in the process will still pick up that wrong doing.

Not many of those, also if they have the siren on and lights flashing would you still radar track an ambulance? I would not, and I suspect that most police would also use common sense as well. The problem with blanket exemptions is that they will be abused.