Nearly one in four council cameras in England are offline each year due to technical faults, according to new research.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that in 2025 councils reported over 11,000 faults, equating to around one in four council CCTV cameras not working, at some point in the year, due to technical errors. Experts are now calling for more support for councils to resolve the issues and find ways to reduce fault time across the CCTV network.
The research carried out by connectivity specialists TrellisWorks found that most CCTV failures across the country are due to technology issues rather than damage with 2,766 faults already reported in the first two months of 2026.
From lost connection to poor configuration or blurred images at least 10,938 faults were logged in 2025 due to technical issues with fixes taking anywhere from a few hours to 9 months.
Some councils were unable to confirm the cause of faults due to how the data is held, however, of the 124 that did they all cited connectivity or camera errors as the biggest concern.
Nick Metcalfe, wireless specialist for CCTV at Newbury based TrellisWorks, was surprised the data shows a worrying trend across council networks.
He said: โThere are lots of reasons why faults can occur on a network, and it is important to remember that some downtime is inevitable as cameras can be taken offline due to ongoing works or maintenance.
โHowever, the data shows that there are councils across the country running with heavily fault led systems. This could be due to budget constraints or current configurations, but many could be rebooting cameras to fix the problem for it only to reoccur.
โMany councils will add and change the CCTV network over time as demand changes and can often grow their network quite substantially over an extended period of time. This leaves the network vulnerable to errors where it isnโt always configured as a whole or is left with repeated connection errors.โ
Nick wants more to be done to help councils explore how errors can be corrected.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, which gives access to recorded information held by Englandโs public authorities, TrellisWorks asked all 317 councils how many faults had been recorded on their CCTV systems and what were the most frequent causes.
In total 233 of Englandโs councils replied with 108 citing they did not hold the information or for security reasons could not divulge details. Of all the councils that did confirm details about faults they reported having 46,107 cameras in total. Numbers of cameras affected could be higher as figures relate to the number of faults logged rather than the number of cameras. This means some faults could refer to more than one camera. Repeated faults could also refer to multiple errors for the same camera.
Only 93 out of all 22,828 faults reported in the FOI since 2024 could be confirmed as due to vandalism or storm damage putting camera faults and connectivity as the highest cause for concern.
One council reported that 19 of their 24 communal building cameras were currently faulty and another highlighted that 75% of errors were due to outdated equipment.
TrellisWorks is now looking to raise awareness of simple ways councils can cut down the faults and keep their CCTV up to speed.
More information is available at www.trellisworks.co.uk/cctvguide.
