A Midlands council has chosen to take its CCTV monitoring in-house. Newark and Sherwood District Council’s cabinet agreed on a new CCTV Control Centre for the council; Professional Security Magazine featured the council’s old monitoring centre at Kelham in 2013 (pictured), which the council has since moved out of, to new premises in the centre of Newark.
Going in-house means Newark is pulling out of a deal (requiring two years’ notice) whereby its cameras are monitored at a room leased at Nottinghamshire Police Headquarters, at Sherwood Lodge, outside Nottingham. The agreement was otherwise due to end in March 2026. As with other council control rooms, Newark and Sherwood District (NSDC) proposes that its new one will do more than monitor its cameras; it’ll raise and lower as required lorry park barriers and town bollards; monitor and respond to any Help Point activations; monitor ShopWatch radios; and provide ‘out of hours response’ for NSDC, out of office hours. Again like local government generally, the council will be looking to generate income by monitoring cameras not owned by the council. Though pulling away from the police’s monitoring, the council continues to see the public space CCTV as a resource for police. A report to the cabinet asked that the new control room include a ‘separate viewing area for police and council Officers to review footage’; and that such a viewing location could be used as ‘a multi-agency base for large scale events’ management.
Most of the NSDC cameras are wireless, and ‘ping’ data from location to location back to a CCTV mast, which will no longer be required. If it were, it would have to move to keep ‘line of sight’ due to works on the main A46 road, which the report to councillors described as ‘a very complicated and costly process’. The report said a location (unnamed) has been identified for a new control room, owned by the council. On that theme of the council having control of its assets, its data storage for the CCTV system will enable the ICT department to relocate NSDC’s disaster recovery centre there (because the host for the council ‘is wanting to end the agreement’).
As for staffing of the control room, currently it’s been contract operators, mainly on zero-hours contracts, and the report stated that ‘on occasions continuity of staff can vary greatly’. The report made the case for directly employing a CCTV control room manager and four operators: “This option tends to ensure a great loyalty and engagement in the team and sense of pride and purpose for the work …. we will be able to build stronger links and relationships between the control room staff and key stakeholders such as the police, fire, town and parish councils and businesses and enable significantly better and more targeted local intelligence to increase identification of perpetrators, alongside the prevention and detection of both crime and ASB [anti-social behaviour].” The report estimated the costs of 24-hour staffing at about £200,000, and the report noted that ‘staffing costs alone would exceed the current revenue budget’; hence that wish to generate income by monitoring commercially for others.
Like numerous other places in the public sector, the Sherwood Lodge’s back-office system is operating on old IT; Windows 7, according to the report, which Microsoft stopped supporting in 2020. As an ‘insecure and obsolete operating system’, according to the report it ‘poses an ongoing risk to the partnership on its ability to maintain operations’ and would mean a cost of replacing it if the council were to remain in the partnership.
As for affording the capital spend on such a move, the report spoke of seeking money from the central government Long-Term Towns Fund.
