A Surrey council is renewing its public realm surveillance cameras, which reflects the continuing value that local government sees in CCTV, Mark Rowe writes.
A meeting of Surrey Heath Council executive is due to review the town’s CCTV at a meeting on January 21. The Camberley-based council has some 30 public realm CCTV cameras, all but two in Camberley town centre; most of the 30, 23 ‘were initially introduced in 1997 following funding from the Home Office CCTV Challenge Competition’, a report to councillors states. First Surrey Police (which of late have pulled back from CCTV monitoring) did the monitoring at their control room in Woking Police Station; the surveillance then switched to Woking Borough Council. Surrey Heath is proposing to move the monitoring over to Addlestone-based Runnymede Borough Council. Woking monitors Surrey Heath’s live CCTV footage from 8am to 12 midnight Monday to Thursday, and midday to 4am Friday and Saturday (the extra hours at the weekend to reflect the busier night life). The report to councillors describes the service as ‘inconsistent’. The report notes a change to the licensable hours of the nightclub on High Street – now extended to 4am on Fridays &and Saturdays and 3am Sunday to Thursday. In other words, the ‘spillout’ from the premises by patrons comes after the monitoring ends. The report says that when Surrey Heath asked Woking to expand the monitoring hours to fit, Woking replied that it could not practicably be extended.
According to the report, Surrey Heath approached Runnymede, whose control room works 24-hours, to reduce costs besides to improve the coverage of cameras. “This allows Surrey Heath to tailor the monitoring and recording of its CCTV on a camera-by-camera basis to match the demands placed upon it within the day-time and night-time economies within Camberley,” the report says. Runnymede is proposing to offer Surrey Heath other services such as out-of-hours call triage; Runnymeded ‘already delivers these services to multiple boroughs across the county and within North Hampshire’. When the Surrey Heath contact centre is closed, the council has another contractor to take calls and pass on any emergencies requiring attention.
Like other councils, Surrey Heath’s CCTV stock has expanded with the years; it has stand-alone CCTV systems covering multi-storey car parks (separately, the council is looking for central Government money, Hotspot Policing POP Funding, to update cameras there), the town theatre and council office reception; besides re-deployable cameras ‘to mitigate against fly-tipping’. As elsewhere, although the cameras have been subject to maintenance, repair and some replacement, ‘the hardware is ageing with many cameras requiring upgrading to improve the quality of the images being monitored’, the report says. Due to new buildings, some cameras now need to ‘incorporate privacy screens to avoid unintentional intrusion’, the report adds. Given the better quality of cameras a generation on, the report states that Camberley need only have half its current number – the report suggests retaining only 14 in the town centre. The report aired the decommissioning of the CCTV system (at a cost of £10,000) only to discount it on personal safety grounds, ‘and the potential to have an effect on the police’s ability to investigate crime’.
Also with time, like elsewhere, other bodies have formed, with a public protection remit; such as Collectively Camberley, the town’s Business Improvement District (BID), which funds the retail radio system Townlink.
CCTV round-up
Other recent cases show that crime prevention is far from the only, or the main, reason for public space cameras.
Fly-tipping continues to be an issue across Peterborough, as the city sees year-on-year increases in prevalence, according to a report before the climate change and environmental scrutiny committee of Peterborough City Council. Councillors were told that since 2017 the city has seen a 19 per cent increase in fly-tipping despite work by the council to clear fly-tipping within the key performance indicator timeframe of 24 hours for hazardous waste and 48 hours for non-hazardous waste. In Peterborough as elsewhere, the covid pandemic appear to have led to more fly-tipping, because householders were unable to freely dispose of their waste during lockdowns; for a year from March 2020, the first month of lockdown, the number of fly-tips in the month was larger than the corresponding month of the previous year.
In May 2024, the council was among those given a grant by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as part of a national scheme to target fly-tipping hotspots. The council used its £50,000 to provide video cameras at hotspot locations to assist with collecting evidence to allow for enforcement actions, and to raise awareness of fly-tipping and waste disposal. The report added: “A social media campaign ran across the council’s channels, which focussed on the responsibility of residents to make sure that a person or organisation they are paying to remove their waste has the correct documentation in place. Two advertising vans were also located across the city during a weekend to raise awareness.”
Similarly, Wiltshire Council is using CCTV in remote places, to counter ‘environmental crime’ (pictured, an installation on the high ground near Salisbury racecourse). The council runs a We’re Targeting Fly-tippers (WTF) campaign, which offers a reward to people who give the council information that leads to an environmental crime FPN (fixed penalty notice) or prosecution. Locals that assist in cases have been rewarded with vouchers. Nick Holder, Cabinet Member for Highways and Street Scene, said: “We have made commitment in our business plan to tackle environmental crime such as fly-tipping and littering in Wiltshire, and our zero-tolerance enforcement approach is going to continue into 2025.”
As for where money might come from to pay for renewing CCTV, Sandwell Council is among those looking to use ‘levelling up’ grants as given under the previous Conservative Government. In the West Midlands, CCTV cameras including eight deployables have been fitted across Wednesbury and Friar Park. Peter Hughes, Sandwell’s Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Infrastructure, said: “A significant amount of the Wednesbury Levelling Up Partnership programme will be delivered by March 2025. This includes our community safety project, several green spaces projects and most of the public realm and urban greening work. We have also launched a new masterplan for Wednesbury town centre.”
Another source of money are police and crime commissioners (PCCs), funnelling Home Office Safer Streets Fund grants, increasingly given to address the VAWG (violence against women and girls) agenda. In Nottinghamshire for instance, High Road in Beeston is the latest place to have fitted high-definition, 360 degree rotation CCTV cameras, mounted on yellow bases with a help point button, allowing people to speak to Broxtowe Borough Council’s CCTV control room operators. Nottinghamshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner Angela Kandola, who leads on prevention of violence against women and girls for the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, said: “These new cameras are a great additional layer of security for anyone who uses this busy area of Beeston. They should make anyone who comes here feel even safer – knowing that they have help at hand 24-hours-a day should they need it.”
