Scores of police officers are being taken off the beat to catch speeding motorists.

Neighbourhood officers around the county are being trained by colleagues from Sussex Police's Road Policing Unit (RPU) to cover traffic officers' work because of a lack of funding.

It means the neighbourhood officers will go out to catch speeding motorists instead of patrolling the streets so RPU officers can concentrate on high risk roads.

Last night the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said senior officers had been forced to hand cameras to beat bobbies because they did not have the money to hire enough traffic police to do the job.

And MPs accused the Government of starving Sussex Police Authority of the funds to police the streets.

Arundel and South Downs MP Nick Herbert, the shadow secretary of state for justice, said the move was the result of prolonged underfunding.

Mid Sussex Conservative MP Nicholas Soames said: "Anything that takes the police away from their prime duties in whatever field is clearly bad news for the community.

"For those tasks they need an adequate number of people and they are not adequately funded so the fault lies with the Government."

Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes Norman Baker said: "There may be a need for more police officers on the roads but they should not come from there. They can't be on the beat and enforcing regulations too."

In May the Argus revealed how an average of almost 20 people were being killed or seriously injured on Sussex roads every week.

Government statistics showed 99 people lost their lives on roads in the county in the year to April 2007 - more than in all but five of the police force areas in the country.

Some 1,127 people were fatally or seriously injured on the region's roads - up by 26 on the previous 12 month period. Only the Met, West Yorkshire, Essex, West Midlands and Thames Valley police areas saw more deaths.

Senior officers are trying to reduce the number of casualties in Sussex by making drivers stick to the speed limit or face fines.

The Department for Transport has ordered the force to cut the number of people killed or seriously injured to 726 a year by 2010.

Roads have been categorised as red or amber for high risk, which RPU officers will patrol, and green and unclassified for low risk, which regular officers will monitor.

The latest beat officers to undertake the training using the hand-held laser device are based in Littlehampton, to the anger of town councillor Mike Northeast.

He said: "Police are trained to catch criminals and detect crime. Not diluting the fact that speeding is a criminal offence and needs to be dealt with, I wonder whether we need highly trained, highly paid officers to do it."

Brian Stockham, the chairman of Sussex Police Federation, said speed enforcement was a responsibility for all officers.

He said: "We usually rely on the enhanced training and skills of traffic officers to focus on speed law enforcement but because of cut backs we don't have as many traffic officers as we used to have so the policing of our road network is necessarily curtailed. They do need some support.

"There have been too many cutbacks in specialist law enforcement because budget restraints mean we can't maintain everything at the same levels."

A spokesman for Sussex Police said beat officers had been trained to use the cameras in most areas of the county but could not say how many officers would have to take on the extra duty.

Sergeant Marc Clowthier, from the RPU, said the officers would not be taken away from their normal jobs and would use the cameras only if there was an issue with speeding in the area.

He said: "Historically road policing officers have been cut back but I think lately road policing within Sussex has become much more intelligence led so we can focus on policing against those persons who present the greatest risk.

"If the problem for us is that we feel people are driving too fast and we feel that's our main issue that's what they should be targeting. If they say our main priority is graffiti then that's what I would expect the majority of time would go into."

Captain Gatso, the director of the campaign group Motorists Against Detection, said: "The fact that police and Government want to police by camera is a nationwide problem. Traffic policing has suffered due to putting all the eggs into one basket - cameras.

"They are now waking up to the fact that you actually need to police in person."