Ahead of the CCTV User Group conference next month, Mark Rowe considers the prospects for public space CCTV. Much depends, he suggests, on something that will happen soon after the gathering.
That something is the elections that run once every four years for police and crime commissioners, on Thursday, May 2, alongside local government elections. It means that PCCs have been going a dozen years, having first been elected under the Coalition Government, in 2012. While any interest in public realm CCTV has been slow to emerge among PCCs โ and naturally some will have more interest in this aspect or that of crime prevention and community safety than others โ it has come to matter, as a result of recent rounds of Safer Streets Funding from the Home Office. It may matter here that most of the PCCs outside the main conurbations, and the Westminster Government, are Conservative, and that Safer Streets money is now funnelled through PCCs to councils, rather than councils bidding to the Home Office. If only because the last, May 2021 (delayed due to covid) PCC elections were during the honeymoon of the Boris Johnson regime, fewer Conservatives may be elected as PCCs. Might that funding link be broken after May 2, if some or many shire PCCs become Labour?
Regardless, public space CCTV and Safer Streets have been made for each other, as PCCs and the Home Office have sought something visible, that they can point to so that citizens (and voters) can see that something is being done, whether about particular crimes, or to further policies such as (to quote from Wiltshire Police recently) โsafer spacesโ. For that reason – people can see something in place – CCTV remains popular with people, when asked.
Thatโs not the same as saying that public space CCTV is necessarily, let alone always, the best use of such money, or that the money is being put to best use.
In Lincolnshire, besides seeing Safer Streets money (for example in Scunthorpe) the PCC Marc Jones (to quote from his annual report for 2022-23) โengaged an external provider to undertake a countywide review of CCTV. The review commenced in early 2023 and will involve scoping of the fixed and mobile/hotspot public space CCTV managed and operated by local government partners. The output will be a consistent, county-wide vision for the use of CCTV between district councilsโ and the Lincolnshire force. That review is still going on. Other PCCs are further down the road, such as Thames Valley, towards centralising monitoring, and taking it out of the hands of local government, where itโs been since public space CCTV got going in the mid-1990s thanks to first John Major Conservative and then Tony Blair Labour government grants for the capital spending.
That numerous council control rooms might get closed would be a political decision; party-political and political in the wider sense of the word. For not only might the council leaders negotiating with Tory PCCs not be Conservative, councillors might be proud and protective of โtheirโ services; yet they are perennially looking to save, or share costs. While since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 local government has had a responsibility to combat crime, the major โcustomerโ of public space CCTV has always been the police, and yet (with exceptions) forces have left it to councils to fund cameras and (above all) the operating costs of human operators. Police only put their hand in their pocket metaphorically speaking when a council threatens to, or actually does, pull the plug during the austerity of the 2010s; and local government of all political colours fears that a further round of cuts must come in the mid-2020s to balance the books. When a serious crime happens, such as a terrorist attack or the Skripal poisoning in 2018, when police and the security services descended on the Salisbury council CCTV control room and commandeered the recording devices (and meanwhile the council had to carry on its service), public space CCTV suddenly becomes important, in that place.
It would make financial and managerial sense, then, for police forces to take charge of public realm CCTV; except that in places, small and large, councils are finding money for a new generation of cameras, and control rooms, replacing any analogue era systems. Last summer Professional Security Magazine featured Warminster Town Councilโs spend, in Wiltshire; the same installer, Smart Integrated, is similarly at work on a system for Teignmouth Town Council, in Devon.
The UK has no shortage, then, of good practice; what it lacks, as in public-private policing partnerships on high streets and in town centres, is a central clearing house to hallmark either new ways of doing things, or particular consultants or installers, to spread good practice beyond the patches. Ever since that first spend on CCTV in the mid-1990s, Britain has been crying out for a public realm CCTV centre of excellence or college, to document (and certificate and enforce?) good practice. The prospect of such quality control โ of the wise spending of public money, after all โ is if anything further away than ever, given that the Coalition Government showed no signs of wanting the surveillance camera commissionerโs office to develop powers, and the promise of the work of the last commissioner but two, Tony Porter (among the speakers at the CCTV User Group conference on April 23, in Northamptonshire) has been lost and stands to be abolished altogether. Porterโs successor Prof Fraser Sampson went down the blind alley of a campaign against Chinese manufacturers of video surveillance products, a campaign that absolutely no-one in the sector was asking for, and his successor Tony Eastough is a caretaker until โnew structuresโ (whatever they may be).
What makes the lack of a video surveillance-industry wide oversight body yet barmier is that the tech is exploding, as Tony Porter pointed out during his years as camera commissioner. Besides the extra pieces of kit that can gather live video – drones, body-worn โ ever more powerful software can mine video data. That brings opportunity for local government (or PCC) control rooms; yet brings the challenge of keeping abreast of the tech so as to not become redundant. At the same time, thereโs nothing new under the sun; itโs not new, to make use of traffic management cameras. Ten years ago, the ambitious Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was proposing to give the Met Police access to Transport for Londonโs ANPR traffic cameras. Other places have similarly merged their traffic control and public space control rooms. Still some traffic control cameras are not even recorded; their data could be more used, such as to broadcast to drivers that a road is blocked.
Photo by Mark Rowe; public space camera, Blackpool.
