Nick Clegg Pledges To Ensure CCTV Is “Properly Regulated” In “Big Bang” Reforms
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg yesterday pledged the “biggest shake-up of our democracy” in 178 years, including reforms to ensure CCTV was “properly regulated”.
At the Lib Dem Conference back in September 2008, he said that we have “more surveillance cameras than anywhere in the world”. It is a sound bite that has been widely quoted in the press, as has one made by David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary. In his resignation statement he claimed “there is now a CCTV camera for every 14 people”.
It’s a precise-sounding figure, and one that Davis was far from the first to quote. It’s come up in The Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Observer and the Daily Mail, among others. So if it’s so widely reported, it must true, surely?
One camera for every 14 people comes with a partner statistic: that there are 4.2 million security cameras in the UK. The pair of claims come from a relatively old working paper published in 2002, by academics Michael McCahill and Clive Norris. Their figures were guestimates based on the number of cameras in two busy south London streets, Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road.
However, the authenticity of these figures has been widely questioned. The trade body The CCTV User Group estimates there are currently probably about 1.5m public space surveillance cameras focusing on these areas and it believes the research that lies behind the 4.5 million figure is “extremely questionable”. It says on its web site that “based upon the number of cameras (irrespective of ownership, purpose and field of view) in a small postcode area in Putney, and extrapolated in proportion to the number of businesses in that area compared to the number of businesses in the UK, it can hardly be considered reliable or any true measure of public space surveillance!”
So what is the real figure for the number of CCTV cameras in Britain today? It’s hard to say, as there are no official (or even unofficial) statistics on how many CCTV cameras there are. The Information Commissioner doesn’t know, the previous government repeatedly told parliament that figures are not collected, and any tally of publicly funded cameras wouldn’t cover any small screens set up in the likes of corner shops.
Given that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are, and given that they have proved so useful in helping catch criminals and monitoring anti-social behaviour, shouldn’t Nick Clegg be focusing on other things in his first keynote speech as a Cabinet Minister? Perhaps increased powers for homeowners so they can defend themselves against armed burglars without the risk of prosecution for assault if they use what is not deemed as “reasonable force”?
Tags: Big Bang Reforms, CCTV, Direct Response Security, Nick Clegg
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 9:50 am and is filed under Home security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
