Fire and Security Association (FSA) chairman Pat Allen discusses the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.
Despite the first milestone for CCTV nearly 30 years ago when the first large-scale public surveillance CCTV system was temporarily erected in Bournemouth, it’s the Jamie Bulger case that first thrust this technology into the spotlight. The iconic, grainy images of the toddler being led away from a Merseyside shopping centre occupied the front pages and headline footage of the national media, putting CCTV firmly in the eyes of the public and starting a race to secure the most surveillance cameras possible. Come 1998, government had secured £85m for capital funding of CCTV systems and imprinted in the minds of the public the obvious benefits of having them installed. Today it’s estimated there are now around 5.9m cameras in the UK – the equivalent of one for every 11 people.
All this raises a number of questions, but the most obvious concerns privacy. With the advances of technology, CCTV data has become an intelligent beast, with facial recognition, algorithms predicating people’s behaviours and automatic number plate recognition tracking vehicle movement across the country which has, quite fairly, caused concern among the public regarding intrusion of privacy. The Coalition’s response to these concerns was to introduce the role of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, and the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (PoFA) Code, which was built upon 12 guiding principles. This provided a framework of good practice that includes obligations on the processing of personal data under the Data Protection Act 1998; a public authority’s duty to adhere to the Human Rights Act 1998; and the safeguards under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 associated with the use of directed and covert surveillance by a public authority.
One issue that has arisen as a result of this development is that only about a tenth of the CCTV cameras deployed in the UK are owned by government-run authorities, leaving the majority of cameras in the hands of people who are not legally obliged to adopt the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.
The law enforcement agencies and the Crown Prosecution Service already promote the importance of using correctly installed and set up CCTV systems and following industry best practice, but one issue which is affecting mass adoption is the rather over-congested approach to technical standards around CCTV. Attempts to work through this issue have resulted in the formation of an industry standards group which aims to review, simplify and broaden the scope of these standards. This group is determining the minimum standards required of CCTV installation, monitoring and operation, using the operational requirements as the cornerstone. This is to be achieved, incrementally, during the tenure of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner Tony Porter, pictured.
One crucial point that won’t have been lost in discussions around the standards is the importance of minimising additional cost and burden incurred by those who maintain compliance through third party accreditation. This issue has been prominent in discussions around business licensing within public space surveillance associated with monitoring via alarm receiving centres (ARCs) and remote video response centres (RVRCs), and is equally relevant when discussing the Surveillance Camera Code. The importance of the quality and integrity of privately owned cameras means that it’s logical for their operators to sign up to it, but it would be wrong for those businesses who want to do so to incur additional, unnecessary costs – and this is something we hope the government will realise as it moves to develop the new standards. This is a crucial issue for the CCTV industry, and one which, when resolved, will hopefully help it continue to evolve at the speed it has since the 1980s.
