Arun councillors approve £30,000 CCTV upgrades

The council’s housing and wellbeing committee members has approved the replacement of current analogue and digital CCTV systems with a cloud-based system, taking the annual £20,000 costs for maintenance and footage transmission via BT to Sussex Police down to £9,000.

James Walsh (LDem, Brookfield) said his main concerns were the police pushing costs onto struggling local authorities and reducing the quality of public-facing CCTV monitoring by entrusting some responsibilities to non-law enforcement.

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He said: “With our district and borough colleagues, across East and West Sussex and Brighton & Hove, for all of us to collectively say that we are not happy to take on this responsibility and that we firmly believe that this should belong with the police.

“[We need] to actually resist this move to offload it onto the boroughs, onto the local council.”

Jacky Pendleton (Con, Middleton-on-Sea) seconded the concerns from Dr Walsh, stating: “I think we need to, very very firmly say to the police ‘this is your job you are not offloading it'”.

The committee passed a motion to resist the ‘offloading’ of costs with support of other local authorities in Sussex.

Council officers said they have requested a CCTV heatmap off Sussex Police for the placement of all 20 cameras and areas the systems might be needed, following concerns from Trevor Bence (Con, Aldwick East) that council surveys might not be up to date.

In 2018, £64,000 was spent upgrading the quality of Arun’s CCTV, £49,000 of which was paid for by the council.