In the Big Brother Watch report, “The Price Is Wrong: The cost of CCTV surveillance in the United Kingdom”, the level of Isle of Wight council spending on CCTV has been revealed today .
Just between 2007-10 IWC has spent £1,483,729 on installing and operating CCTV on the Island.
Everyone who lives on the Isle of Wight knows that we’re blessed with very low crime levels. Despite this, the council is the 65th highest spender out of the 336 local authorities across the UK who responded to the study.
£315m spend nationally
The report has unearthed a total of £314,835,170.39 was spent just between 2007-10, local authorities on installing and operating CCTV cameras.
Commenting on the £314 million cost of CCTV, Big Brother Watch Director Alex Deane said, “This is a shocking figure. Public money is being wasted on snooping surveillance that does next to nothing to prevent or solve crime. We are being watched more than ever before, and we’re being ripped off into the bargain. British taxpayers will be scandalised to see their money being thrown away like this in the current economic climate.”
Some spending comparisons
Here’s some sobering comparisons on the UK’s CCTV spend …
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The UK spends more per head on CCTV coverage than 38 countries do on defence.(Paul Bradshaw questions the figures behind this). - The UK spends more on CCTV than the entire annual budgets of eight independent nations.
- The UK spends twice as much on CCTV as the entire annual Rwandan education budget of £150 million and more than three times what the country spends on health (£92 million per year).
- The total cost of CCTV is equivalent to four times the running costs of the Scottish Parliament (£72 million).
The report points out that …
Defenders of CCTV always like to point out that these costs are from installation and that costs reduce over time but when the costs of maintenance, repair and upkeep are taken into consideration alongside the costs of monitoring, retaining and reviewing footage the ongoing costs are considerable.
Furthermore, the ‘initial’ costs of CCTV are effectively recurring as new technology or at least new expenditure is constantly incurred.
For those interested, there’s a lot more detail in the document (PDF).
Thanks to VB Pal Paul Bradshaw for highlighting the report.
Image: photocapy under CC BY-SA 2.0
