A civil liberties group has put a number on the cost to UK local authorities of their CCTV operations – £515m in the past four years. According to Big Broither Watch (BBW) there are now at least 51,600 CCTV cameras controlled by local authorities.
Five councils are said to operate more than 1,000 cameras: Leicester (the most with 2083), Fife, Wandsworth, Nottingham and Southampton. In comparison, according to BBW, £515m would put an extra 4,121 police constables on the streets – the equivalent of Northumbria police’s entire force. Some 18 councils have spent more than £1m a year on CCTV – Birmingham (most with a total spend of more than £14m in the years 2007 to 2011), Westminster. Leeds, City of Edinburgh, Croydon, Enfield, Cambridge, Wandsworth, Leicester, Barnet, Nottingham, Housnlow, Knowsley, Barking and Dagenham, City of Bristol, Caerphilly, Wakefield, and Lambeth. The Protection of Freedoms Bill proposes a national CCTV Code of Practice, to be enforced by a national CCTV regulator. This is an important step to properly regulating CCTV and must not be a symbolic gesture, says the civil liberties group. The report suggests that spending on public space CCTV is steadily rising; and that CCTV serves as a ‘costly placebo’ for many councils, to ‘appease neighbourhoods suffering from anti-social behaviour problems’.
The picture varies massively across the country, say the campaigners. What BBW terms the huge increase in surveillance has not been a co-ordinated and intelligence-led response to crime, but a haphazard and badly measured rush to spy on citizens. The variations in how much councils were able to tell us, and the wide range of different structures in place to manage and monitor cameras, highlighted, said BBW, the need for a national review of CCTV and its regulation.
As part of the report, BBW called for five changes to improve the way CCTV is regulated and evaluated:
– Give the CCTV regulator the powers to enforce the code of practice;
– Require any publicly funded CCTV installation to refer to crime statistics or demonstrate a significant risk of harm before being commenced;
– Require public bodies to publish the instances where their CCTV cameras have been used in securing a conviction, and for what offences;
– Require public bodies to publish in a standardised format the locations of their cameras (save for those used in direct protection of sites at risk of terrorism)
– Begin a consultation on regulating private CCTV cameras, both those operated by commercial companies and by private individuals
You can download the 36-page report from www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk.
BBW says that Britain has an out-of-control surveillance culture that is doing little to improve public safety but has made our cities the most watched in the world. Despite millions of cameras, Britain’s crime rate is not significantly lower than comparable countries that do not have such a vast surveillance state, the campaign group claims.
