Reigate and Banstead Borough Council is having a CCTV control room refurbishment.
The council is pooling CCTV monitoring with neighbours Mole Valley Council, whose CCTV control room at Dorking Police Station will be decommissioned. The £300,000 project includes replacing the CRT monitors with energy-efficient flat-panel displays, and going to digital video recorders (DVRs). The new control room has two operator stations, and will include 28 19-inch monitors and two 40-inch monitors mounted in a video wall. Supplier Siemens Building Technologies Security Systems is installing a new video matrix with sufficient capacity to handle inputs from 200 cameras. Since only 120 cameras are in use, this allows a large margin for future expansion. Siemens planned the work in phases, the first involved a temporary control facility at Reigate Police Station. The next step was to co-ordinate work with Surrey Police’s contractors to gut the old control room, and then to install the new viewing screens. Richard Berryman of Surrey Police said: "For us, a key factor is going to be the flexibility of the new system. This will mean that we can, for example, easily home in on incidents and, if necessary, track people as they move between cameras. We’re also looking forward to the new digital recording system which will not only give us much better quality images than the old analogue installation, but also make it a lot easier for us to find specific images that we want to review."
The procurement processes were under the terms of the framework established by OGCbuying solutions, the trading arm of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
The OGC framework, for which Siemens Building Technologies holds Catalist supplier status as a supplier of CCTV and security, enables orders to be placed on the basis of advantageous pre-agreed terms and conditions. These framework agreements are aimed specifically at reducing the cost of procurement within the public sector as they offer best value for money from the ‘best of breed’ suppliers accredited under the agreement. The whole process is EU compliant and means that public sector can save time and money by having direct access to suppliers who have already been fully vetted and approved. Importantly, this method of procurement offers a reduced workload in terms of tender preparation, supplier evaluation and quality control.
What they say
"Being able to use the OGC framework to buy from Siemens saved us a lot of time and effort," said Councillor Mrs Joan Spiers of Reigate and Banstead Borough Council, "and we’re also delighted with how smoothly the work is proceeding to date. When the new system is in place, we are confident that it will enable us to make significant cost savings, as well as helping us to enhance public safety and security."
