TWO YEARS AND £85,000 LATER COUNCIL ABANDON TALKING CCTV

Southwark News @ 18 June 2009

Web Link :  http://www.southwarknews.co.uk/00,news,15428,185,00.htm

John Prendergast
johnp@southwarknews.org

EXCLUSIVE

Southwark Council has splashed out £85,000 on Talking CCTV cameras that will never work, and announced this week it will abandon the scheme, which has become a white elephant.

The two year project has been beset by hiccups, hold ups and difficulties including the council's failures to part test some of the eleven sites, or to check if it worked in other boroughs before they ploughed ahead with the scheme.

The document released last Friday showed that the scheme has already cost £61,000 and now the cheapest option is to uproot the blue stands - which will set the council back another £24,000.

Cllr Linda Manchester, the new Communities Safety spokeswoman confirmed the cancellation to the 'News'. She said: "The council has decided to decommission the network and remove the installed help points.

"Existing camera coverage will remain and there will be no reduction in coverage as only the help points would be removed."CCTV cameras are just one part of a package we use to deter crime - including effective street lighting and patrols by our Community Wardens and the police. The removal of the installed help points has no impact on our CCTV coverage and will not affect the service."

The scheme was first trumpeted in April 2007 after the Home Office gave Southwark a £25,000 grant to get the scheme going. The stanchions, which hold cameras which would allow the public to interact with officers in a control centre, were erected a year later but have been allowed to rust and decay due to inactivity since that date.
Cllr Manchester added: "Given the current climate, it has never been more important that we spend taxpayers' money wisely - and sometimes this means we have to make tough decisions, in this case decommissioning Talking CCTV.

"The installation of Talking CCTV cameras was severely delayed due to a combination of staffing difficulties, problems with suppliers and technical. "In light of the delay we contacted several other local authorities to ask them for their opinion on the effectiveness of the scheme."

The feedback, gained from four of the 23 participating boroughs, found only Lewisham used the interactive system to speak directly to the public and that the majority of contacts made to the centre were prank calls.

The other options open to the council were to press ahead with the full scheme, which would initially cost £104,500 and £12,000 a year to operate, or to run a partial service costing £29,000 and £3,000 per annum.

Southwark Labour's community safety spokesman Cllr John Friary said:  "After spending £50,000 on just fifty bikes for community wardens, wasting £85,000 on talking CCTV which has never even been turned on is another indictment of the Lib Dems’ crime fighting priorities. The Lib Dems were quick to press release these new cameras, but not so quick to get them working or make the real changes to make the community safer.

"The Lib Dem/Tory executive has basically paid contractors to dig a hole in the ground and fill it in again. These cameras could have made a real difference to a resident in an emergency. It's outrageous that they were never turned on, but bordering on the farcical that they've cost the council tax payer tens of thousands of pounds."

Of the eleven sites selected all have a blue stanchion, only seven have an operational camera and none have working microphones that connected to monitoring to the observation suite at Borough Police Station.