Birmingham City Council is proposing a 12-month trial of video surveillance, ‘initially within targeted high crime and antisocial behaviour (ASB) areas’, to assess the effectiveness of CCTV cameras in preventing and reducing crime and ASB. Yet why, given that the council is in such financial straits that central government commissioners are looking over all the council’s spending, with a view to making cuts to balance the books? asks Mark Rowe.
One reason, as Paul Langford, Strategic Director – City Housing, stated in a report to the city council’s cabinet meeting in June on the ‘City Housing CCTV Pilot Programme’, is that the council wants those in its housing to feel safe. More practically for the council financially, vandalism and criminal damage can cost in terms of repairs to doors and communal lights – if CCTV can mean fewer repairs and less removal of repeated graffiti are necessary, might the spending on CCTV actually result in savings?
This same tension between finances and satisfaction of householders (and voters) runs through the report. It noted that the council decommissioned CCTV in its housing blocks in 2014 (in the name of ‘financial pressures’ and not having to spend money during public sector austerity, when kit became ‘obsolete’ and needed replacing). The report stated ‘a correlation between the lack of CCTV within council managed properties and a perceived increase in crime and antisocial behaviour’, such as drug dealing, fire-starting and fly-tipping; and ‘youths hanging around property’.
The Grenfell fire of 2017 in west London led to the setting up of a Regulator of Social Housing, which has required housing authorities such as Birmingham to carry out annual ‘tenant perception surveys’. Those surveys have found ‘low levels of satisfaction around ASB and tenants and leaseholders feeling generally unsafe in their home and how their reports are dealt with’, according to the report. That dissatisfaction in Birmingham is far greater than the national average. While the report to councillors did point out that CCTV is ‘not a specific legislative requirement’, in housing stock nor upon local government generally, the report did term it ‘a further step in assuring tenants that the council takes their safety and wellbeing seriously’.
The trial, to run in ‘ASB hot spot’ parts of the council’s housing stock, will see a spend of up to £500,000 on kit (‘capital costs’) and £120,000 otherwise (‘revenue costs’, such as staffing) in that first year. The council is looking for ‘a specialist contractor to provide CCTV equipment, the cabling, and a fibre optic link’, to be centrally monitored under the ‘City Operations’ arm of the council.
As a comparison, the report recalled that renewing the housing CCTV would have cost a projected £13m (or £18m at 2023 prices). Besides the trial, the council has proposed to fit CCTV as part of general ‘improvement works’ at high rise housing blocks over a 12-year period.
The report did address the possible difference between perception and reality of crime; and that the perception did pose an issue, no matter how subjective; ‘the perception of our tenants is that the two factors [end of CCTV and rise in crime] are directly related’. As for whether the trial will succeed, the report proposed two measurements; subjective, via ‘tenant satisfaction surveys’; and more concretely by ‘successful arrests or prosecutions’.
The report did face up to the cost of any CCTV; the decision not to renew it in 2014 was partly because tenants – faced with the then Coalition Government’s welfare reforms which brought in Universal Credit – would have to pay, through their service charge; and the report noted that for new CCTV, such a rise in service charge, suggested at £1.97 per week per tenant, ‘would be unavoidable’. The council has proposed to absorb the cost of the trial rather than ask householders for some money. Cost of transmission by fibre optic cabling is put at £333.33 per month per block; or £4,000 for each block in a year; and the cost of a proposed single contracted operator to monitor the camera feeds is put at £56,000 for the 12 months.
Background
Under neighbourhood and community standards, according to the regulator of social housing, registered providers must work with councils, the police and others ‘to deter and tackle anti-social behaviour (ASB) and hate incidents in the neighbourhoods where they provide social housing’. Likewise landlords must take measures about the ‘safety of shared spaces’ and against domestic abuse. Visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/neighbourhood-and-community-standard.
Settled home service
As in other places, Birmingham City Council offers a service whereby those experiencing domestic abuse stay in a ‘settled home’ with such security devices as replacement locks, panic alarms, fencing, fireproof letterbox and replacement doors. A tender in 2021 to run for four years for installing such products went to Theam Security, valued at an estimated £1.2m.
