Oxfordshire councils are signed up to join the Thames Valley CCTV Partnership, arranged by the area’s Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Matthew Barber.
In December, Professional Security Magazine reported that the PCC and some of the councils in the county were at odds.ย Now Matthew Barber has announced that the county will have a single central CCTV hub in Abingdon, inside the Liberal Democrat-led Vale of White Horse Council. Vale of White Horseโs CCTV monitoring suite is in Abingdon; the council has 23 cameras in Abingdon and six in Wantage.
Matthew Barber said: “The Partnership is already delivering benefits in other parts of the Thames Valley where an enhanced, sustainable CCTV system with closer links with frontline officers is helping to prevent crime as well as catch criminals. With councils now fully on board, work can get under way to deliver the same benefits in Oxfordshire and I hope to see the new hub in Abingdon up and running later this year.
โCCTV is a vital tool in the prevention and investigation of crime. Neither police nor councils have statutory responsibility for CCTV but, we are all committed to it. Working together as a Partnership means we can make savings while fulfilling our joint aim of keeping the public and our communities safe.โ
Background
With some exceptions, PCCs – first elected in 2012 – have not gone down the road of taking CCTV off councils. The prospect is of no further such work, at least for a few years, because governance of the police through PCCs and local government structure alike are in a state of flux. In England and Wales, late last year the Labour Government announced that PCCs would be abolished when they next come up for election, in 2028; instead, elected mayors or boards will have oversight of police forces. The police also face upheaval, according to the Policing Reform White Paper as featured in the March edition of Professional Security Magazine, Labour is proposing a national police force and far fewer than the current 43 police forces.
Council flux
Meanwhile local government in England is also facing years of organisational uncertainty; an end to three tiers (county-district-parish) outside big cities as since 1974. In Thames Valley that looks like an end to Oxfordshire and Berkshire county councils. In the English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, Labour proposed abolishing all two-tier areas in England, to be restructured into single-tier (unitary) authorities; councils have since been coming up with new boundaries. Generally, district councils took up public space CCTV monitoring in the 1990s and 2000s.
In Thames Valley
Elsewhere in the Thames Valley force area, CCTV has been centralised in Milton Keynes and Slough; in those districts, as in Oxfordshire, the idea of local government handing over its CCTV to the police took some getting use to, because while public space CCTV is not a statutory requirement of local government – in plainer English, councils don’t have to do CCTV, whereas they do have to have a library service and empty the bins – and while the police are the major ‘customer’ of any council’s CCTV, local government has tended to be jealous of its services, notably a control room on its patch; and suspicious that centralising will mean a lessening of service in its area.
In Vale of White Horse
In Abingdon, according to the councilโs most recent report, incidents are largely of anti-social behaviour, followed by shop theft. The report gives an example of the control room’s work; a police control room informed the CCTV team that a man had just stolen some high value items from a local store. Although the store was not within view of cameras, the operator made a note of the offender’s description and later that day, they spotted someone matching the description entering a shop in town. They alerted the store via the town radio and police officers attended and apprehended the man, who was found to be in possession of stolen goods. Subsequent checks also resulted in the recovery of the stolen goods from earlier. Retail crime remains a high priority, Vale of White Horse adds.
In Wantage, the council gives an example of young people starting a small fire in one of the public bins in the town centre. The operator on duty passed details to the police control room and officers were dispatched as well as the fire service being called. The fire was put out and arrests made.
When not tasked by police, the Vale of White Horse operators patrol all the cameras and focus on โhotspotโ areas. All cameras are recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week and are set in โdefaultโ positions where they remain while not being actively moved by an operator. These positions are agreed with the police and town councils as covering those areas that are most likely to experience community safety issues.
In Vale of White Horse as elsewhere, a measurable advantage of CCTV footage is in obtaining a guilty plea at the early interview stage. For many offences this early admission is due to the offence being captured clearly on camera and saves the expense of full trial.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Oxford.
