Despite the Covid-19 lockdown and the resulting economic dislocation, local government still goes on, albeit meetings are going ahead virtually. Public space is still monitored by CCTV; and analogue-era kit is not getting any younger. We feature two cases, one from a city, one from the shires, of how councils are despite the coronavirus pandemic looking to renew, and use, their public space CCTV systems.
First, City of Edinburgh Council. Its policy and sustainability committee recently discussed ‘Public Realm CCTV Continuation of Service’. A report went before councillors by Executive Director for Communities and Families, Alistair Gaw. Like other cities, the Scottish capital has public space CCTV also covering housing blocks, transport and council buildings. The analogue-era equipment including image transmission over fibre optic cabling has ‘surpassed the end of their serviceable life expectancy’, as the report put it, and hence in January 2018 the council agreed to a ‘CCTV working group’ with an eye to what the report termed an ‘end-to-end Public Realm CCTV upgrade project’ and going digital.
Meanwhile, the legacy kit needs maintaining. The council uses two firms, unidentified in the report. One ‘does not have procurement routes to source replacement parts or
replacement units to resolve faults’ and is not working beyond the end of contract date of June 30; the other maintenance firm is to pick up the slack, mainly of cameras in the council’s housing stock. Cost of installation works would be £112,000 and cost of analogue fibre rental £26,000 a year.
The council’s monitoring centre covers 213 cameras and runs 24-365. The maintenance contract there is held by SPIE, which runs out on August 31; again, the report proposed that the contract be extended, because ‘due to the obsolescence of the equipment, SPIE holding the spares, the short term and the potential risk of failure to maintain the equipment it is highly unlikely that any other service provider would be prepared to bid’. Besides, according to the report, CCTV monitoring is a ‘critical service’ during the procurement for the digital upgrade.
SPIE has proposed a one-year extension at a cost of £87,900 compared with the previous year of £75,400; and increase of 16.6 per cent. That rise is partly due to a new asset, a mobile CCTV van, which transferred in ownership from the Environmental Wardens to public realm CCTV. The report did not say anything about the progress of the upgrade project beyond that it is due in ‘the immediate future’.
The moral of the story; everything costs money. While spending on new kit is most expensive of all, many councils in the 2010s, despite austerity and despite (as the Edinburgh report pointed out) CCTV being a non-statutory service – unlike libraries or the bins, councils don’t have to by law run CCTV – did ‘spend to save’. They saw that over time buying new cameras, and maybe going for wireless transmission to do away with the cost of renting cable, saved a council money ultimately, compared with keeping the old kit going, quite apart from the improved image quality and searchability of new, digital kit.
Photo; Edinburgh Castle from Princes Street, by Mark Rowe.
