Stafford like other towns has lately seen its ageing public space cameras replaced, as the products now had a ‘high failure rate’ and the maintenance costs were only rising. But that is not the whole story for updating public space video.
A report on the latest work on Stafford Borough Council’s CCTV went to the council cabinet on November 5.
The council sought permission to buy a new CCTV operating system, to replace its 11-year-old Synectics kit. As the report set out, while in the last couple of years new digital cameras have replaced the old analogue-era ones, mainly from the manufacturer Hikvision, the older operating system is no longer supported. The report admitted, ‘we are experiencing regular CCTV system down time due to hard drive failures and loss of camera telemetry, and other associated hardware faults to encoders and graphic cards. Unfortunately, parts are not readily available from the supplier and on occasions have been sourced on eBay’.
The borough’s public space camera system numbers 130. While the new digital cameras offer 12MP (megapixel) images, the old Synectics operating system can only handle one or two MP, meaning that the control room has had to ‘throttle a lot back’.
The report notes that the borough requires a new operating system that will work with the new cameras without ‘compatibility issues’; and that would work with camera makes from other manufacturers. And, like other councils, Stafford is looking to take on outsourced CCTV monitoring, for example of schools, to bring in income.
The commercial property management company Savills has asked the borough council to monitor their 19 cameras recently installed in Riverside shopping centre. A contact has now been written with a view to start monitoring their cameras as soon as the council’s CCTV room has been upgraded. As Stafford is the county town and the base for the county council, that also brings some potential for monitoring of other local government sites; and indeed the borough is to monitor a Pupil Referral Unit and is working on a contract to monitor Stafford library as a trial. If a success, the county council which runs library services could extend it to all libraries, ‘to enable the county council to reduce staffing costs and will bring in an income to Stafford Borough Council’, the report notes.
The borough’s CCTV Maintenance Contract was up for renewal in July; however, as with other councils, the procurement process was delayed, due to the pandemic, and the contract extended to February 2021.
Photo by Mark Rowe; outside toy shop, Stafford town centre.
