Scotland spends £22,600 a day to run CCTV

Edinburgh alone spent £6.2m between April 2007 and March 2011, the largest bill in Scotland and fourth highest across the whole of the UK.

The report also revealed that Fife and Aberdeen were among those local authorities with some of the highest numbers of CCTV cameras – Fife has 1,420 and Aberdeen has 942.

The figures were obtained by the campaign group Big Brother Watch through Freedom of Information requests. The group claims there is no evidence to suggest that having more cameras makes us safer or that they reduce crime rates.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “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.

“Surveillance is an important tool, but it is not a substitute for policing. In too many cities across the country, every corner has a camera – but only a few ever see a police officer.

“Despite millions of cameras, Britain’s crime rate is not significantly lower than comparable countries that do not have such a vast surveillance state.

“There is no credible evidence that more cameras will reduce crime, yet councils have poured enough money into CCTV in just four years that would have put more than 4,000 extra police officers on the streets.”

Figures obtained by The Scotsman in December revealed that £8.2m had been spent on staffing and maintaining Scotland’s network of CCTV cameras in 2010-11 alone, an increase of almost £100,000 on the previous year.

Scotland spends less proportionately on CCTV than the UK as a whole, which ran up a bill of £515m over the four years.

There were 6,414 cameras in operation north of the Border over those four years, according to Big Brother Watch, compared to 51,660 across the whole of the UK. The size of the network in Scotland has soared since 2003, when there were 1,269 cameras.

This has led critics to describe Scotland as one of the world’s CCTV capitals.

However, police insist that closed circuit television is vital to their work and balanced against civil liberty concerns. ACC Ruaraidh Nicolson, chairman of the National CCTV Strategic Group, at the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (Acpos), said: “The importance of CCTV as a tool in modern policing is paramount.

“There are many benefits, but there are also many challenges and we are fully aware of the perceived threats to privacy and civil liberties.

“Acpos is committed to working with partners across Scotland to ensure the balance is maintained and we will continue to consider the views of as wide a range of people as possible as the use of CCTV continues to develop.”

Some local authorities, including Glasgow, were unable to provide a figure for how much money is spent on CCTV, while others such as Aberdeenshire, do not own cameras but instead make a contribution to other agencies in their area that do.

The City of Edinburgh Council said the £6.2m it had spent on CCTV had yielded positive results.

A spokeswoman said: “Our high-quality CCTV network deters crime and helps the police bring criminals to justice.

“It is just one element of our highly successful strategy to reduce anti-social behaviour and recent figures show a drop in crime of 21 per cent, with complaints to community safety teams falling by 22 per cent.”

A Cosla spokesman added: “The use of CCTV cameras is rightly an operational matter for individual councils. [It is] entirely up to them, based on local needs.”