The seven Scottish Borders towns are having their on-street CCTV system replaced. A report to Scottish Borders Council pointed out that its CCTV systems ‘are approaching a point of disrepair and will in any event become obsolete as of 2025’, due to the switch-off of analogue telecoms and the move to IP-only by Openreach. A report by council chief executive David Robertson recommended that the council accept the proposal of its strategic IT provider, CGI on a ‘best value solution for CCTV and associated connectivity infrastructure’, a nod to the idea that spend on town centre Wi-fi for video surveillance would also benefit the Scottish Borders as a “smart, connected rural region”. Under the financial case for replacement CCTV, the report argues that ‘revenue generation opportunities may be realised through leveraging the connectivity infrastructure of the fibre which will be available under an exclusive use arrangement for Scottish Borders Council’. Likewise the replacement system will be funded through a budget for ‘digital transformation’.
As background, the council runs some 65 public space CCTV cameras in the towns of Duns, Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Peebles, Eyemouth and Melrose. Police Scotland besides has two mobile cameras, ‘and a separate project is under way to bring more mobile cameras into service’, councillors were told. Two other places, Selkirk (pictured) and Newcastleton, have their own similarly small CCTV systems, not run by the council but accessible to police. CGI is the IT firm that signed an extension to a contract with the council in 2020 for a further 20 years to provide IT services; one of CGI’s Scottish bases is at Tweedbank outside Galashiels. As for cost of a new system, a ‘CGI recommended vendor solution’ for the service for 16 years was put at £2.63m, including remote IT support, penetration testing, patching and ‘back-up solution’, compared with two other quotes of £3.2m and £4.3m. CGI is proposing cameras and cloud storage by Verkada, allowing for people and vehicle analytics, a ‘closed architecture’ system with five access licenses, backed up to a UK data centre, the report stresses; this Borders installation would be the US firm’s first public space deployment in Scotland. Under what’s proposed Hawick would have most cameras (16) and Melrose fewest (five).
As for use of video data for purposes beyond crime prevention the report suggested opportunities; the intelligence might help ‘to inform and optimise serviced delivery’, such as by monitoring the condition of infrastructure remotely. The Verkada products allow for monitoring of air quality such as carbon monoxide. “However, some uses of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other forms of technology assisted analysis, such as Machine Learning is prohibited for use by Police Scotland, such as the use of facial recognition.”
The report bluntly termed the current CCTV system, managed by the Street Lighting Team within the council’s Environments and Infrastructure department, as ‘inadequate for modern policing’. The report made a commercial case for CCTV as ‘a proactive safety measure’. As for where the new cameras might go, CCTV locations have been ‘overlayed with criminal and antisocial behaviour incidents’, and found ‘coverage of the proposed replacement system largely aligns with the “hot spots” identified through the data’, with some ‘outlying areas’; hence according to the report a need for a system ‘that has a degree of flexibility that will allow a level of responsiveness to changing circumstance and patterns of criminal and antisocial behaviour’.
