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Council hits back at 'wasteful' CCTV spending





The council spent £1.5m on 40 cameras in four years, according to privacy pressure group Big Brother Watch, which sent Freedom of Information requests to every council in the country to highlight concerns about the level of surveillance to which British people are subjected.
It emerged that between 2007 and 2011, local authorities spent £515m on CCTV, the same amount the civil campaigners claim it would cost to put 4,121 police officers on the streets – the equivalent of Northumbria police’s entire force – but the leader of the council Graham Jones (Con, Lambourn) said that after the initial outlay the new system provided better protection and would save money in the long run.
He said: “CCTV is definitely an important tool in modern policing, and we now have the right number of cameras in the most effective locations. Using these alongside traditional policing is bringing results – crime in the district has gone down over the past four years by 7.5 per cent,” he said.
“The previous CCTV scheme used to cost us about £500 000 a year. The new contract reduced this sum to around £250, 000 a year saving approximately £1.25m over five years, so it is very good value for money.
“The new system has been highly praised by the police and we continue to work closely with them.”
The director of Big Brother Watch, Nick Pickles, said that he believed Britain had an out-of-control surveillance culture which did little to improve public safety but made UK cities the most watched in the world.
“Surveillance is an important tool in modern policing but it is not a substitute for policing. Despite millions of cameras, Britain’s crime rate is not significantly lower than comparable countries that do not have such a vast surveillance state,” he said.
“There is no credible evidence that more cameras will reduce crime, yet councils have poured enough money into CCTV in just four years that would have put more than four thousand extra police officers on the streets.”
The council is nowhere near the biggest spender on the list. Birmingham shelled out more than £14m on 636 cameras, and the most covered area, Leicester, spent £4.7m on 2,083 cameras.
The district council, which began the switch to a new digital service in December 2010 when it moved the district’s CCTV surveillance hub from Newbury to the Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, said the £1.5m had been spent on a varying number of cameras across the four years.



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