This is likely to surprise a public that has, in the same period, had to face rising costs and taxes and a falling standard of living. The data has been compiled by privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch (BBW) and published in a new report, The Price of Privacy, following replies from 428 local authorities to its Freedom of Information requests.
It shows that two authorities have spent more than £10m each (Birmingham spending £14,293,060.00, and Westminster spending £11,831,554.00). Eighteen more have spent more than £1m per year. The result is that the UK is now home to more than 51,600 local government controlled surveillance cameras, and is thought to have 20% of all the surveillance cameras in the world.
The cost is only one issue – loss of privacy for no benefit is another. “Britain has an out-of-control surveillance culture that is doing little to improve public safety but has made our cities the most watched in the world,” comments BBW’s director Nick Pickles. He is concerned that the money spent on cameras means less money spent on real-life policemen for no benefit.
A BBC report in 2009 quotes an internal police report suggesting that only one crime was solved per 1000 cameras. The report quotes MP David Davis saying at the time, “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.” He went further to suggest that “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”
The BBW report demonstrates that this has not happened. “There is no credible evidence that more cameras will reduce crime,” says Pickles today, “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.”