Big Brother is Billing You

Nick Pickles, head of the pressure group Big Brother Watch, counts the cost of the UK’s surveillance cameras.

Back in 2010, Big Brother Watch conducted the first study of the true cost burden of CCTV to local councils in the United Kingdom. The 342 local councils who disclosed figures had spent a total of over £320 million between 2007 and 2010.  The exact figure was £321,331,453.1 — the true figure is certainly much higher.

In an age of squeezed budgets, councils continue to pour huge amounts of money into technology that indiscriminately monitors us all as potential criminals, while the actual causes of crime go ignored. Britain has become one of the most ‘watched’ societies in the world, far outstripping some authoritarian regimes, and the fervour with which some groups defend their ‘right’ to monitor us all is a social ill that few would recognise as a sign of a healthy, civil society.

It is impossible to put a price on our privacy or our safety.  But with this continued spending, running into potentially half a billion pounds in just four years, councils are choosing to value posturing and rhetoric over evidence and results. When decisions have been considered about shutting cameras down, local authorities have only considered the costs – with one even suggesting they might charge the police to use the footage.

When a camera is being installed, and when decisions are being made to replace them, all we are asking is that the evidence be considered. If, as we found recently with Transport for London, 9 in 10 cameras are not used by the police, then there can be little justification for continuing to divert significant resources away from alternatives which would do more to improve public safety without the wholesale invasion on our privacy that CCTV entails.

By Nick Pickles