Foreign drivers have skipped off without paying half a million pounds worth of parking and speeding fines, according to figures released to the BBC.

Motorists visiting south-west England have avoided the fines over the past five years in Cornwall, Devon and Dorset as they are commonly written off as drivers are hard to trace.

Registrations details of the foreign motorists are not available on the DVLA database.

A Cornwall Council spokesperson said: "We're forced to write off this debt if a driver of a foreign registered car chooses not pay.

"Unless the law changes there is no economic way that we can recover this debt.

"We don't view the writing-off any debt lightly."

Unpaid parking tickets totalled £385,500, while 2,079 foreign drivers were snapped by speed cameras.

The figures come from Freedom of Information requests answered by Devon and Cornwall Police and councils.

Inspector Richard Pryce, of Devon and Cornwall Police, said : "For one-off offenders there are options for us to ensure we try to trace them through contacting the country of origin but clearly we need to be proportionate in what we do."

Adding tracing drivers could be "very prolonged" with costs of "many thousands of pounds".

The Department for Transport said: "Foreign drivers are subject to the same rules of the road as everyone else and it is vital that they are punished for driving dangerously.

"The police are already able to take on-the-spot fines from foreign drivers who break the rules and can immobilise their vehicles."