The most northerly town centre public space CCTV systems in the country, by some distance, are being upgraded from analogue-era kit to digital. The Caithness Committee of the Highland Council agreed to digitalise the ‘ageing analogue public space CCTV system’ in Wick and Thurso town centres in the north east of Scotland.
The spend of £41,725 is part of the Scottish Government’s Town Centre Fund, as part of the Holyrood government’s national economic recovery stimulus package, particularly aimed at supporting construction activity across Scotland.
In Wick, some eight analogue cameras will be replaced with digital pan and tilts, and in Thurso a dozen units. The monitoring facilities in Thurso Police Station will be updated; and both towns’ systems will be connected to Highland Council’s CCTV monitoring office at Inverness police station, some 110 miles from Thurso. The council proposes that installation run from April to June.
Other public realm works are planned for the towns, such as signposts, planters and benches, through the Town Centre Fund.
Many local government areas have similarly been updating their public space CCTV, which typically dates from the later 1990s or early 2000s, when first the Conservative and then Labour governments gave central government grants for council CCTV. While public space surveillance has not been a mandatory service, unlike household waste removal or libraries, CCTV has adapted to public sector austerity of the 2010s and has largely proved resilient, not only for crime prevention and detection but for more general management of public spaces, such as finding missing persons, and countering fly-tipping with re-deployable cameras.
For example one of the larger council systems, North Lanarkshire’s, has 1,288 cameras, monitored 24 hours. The former Town Centre Activities (TCA) Ltd, which included public space CCTV monitoring and the antisocial behaviour out-of-hours service, was brought in house and delivered through the Community Safety Hub within the Housing Solutions service from April 2019.
