Our latest report highlights the cost to local authorities of their CCTV operations – £515m in the past four years.
There are now at least 51,600 CCTV cameras controlled by local authorities, with five councils now operating more than 1,000 cameras. In comparison, £515m would put an extra 4,121 police constables on the streets – the equivalent of Northumbria police’s entire force.
The picture varies massively across the country, as you can see from our interactive map below, the huge increase in surveillance has not been a co-ordinated and intelligence-led response to crime, but a haphazard and badly measured rush to spy on citizens. The variations in how much councils were able to tell us, and the wide range of different structures in place to manage and monitor cameras, highlights the need for a national review of CCTV and its regulation.
As part of the report, we are calling for five changes to improve the way CCTV is regulated and evaluated. We believe the Government should:
- Give the CCTV regulator the powers to enforce the code of practice
- Require any publicly funded CCTV installation to refer to crime statistics or demonstrate a significant risk of harm before being commenced
- Require public bodies to publish the instances where their CCTV cameras have been used in securing a conviction, and for what offences
- Require public bodies to publish in a standardised format the locations of their cameras (save for those used in direct protection of sites at risk of terrorism)
- Begin a consultation on regulating private CCTV cameras, both those operated by commercial companies and by private individuals
You can download the full report now.





Londoners are among the most surveyed people anywhere in the world, captured by cameras in nearly every aspect of their daily lives. Some reports have estimated that Britain is home to as many as 20% of the world’s total CCTV cameras. In November 2011 Transport for London
Big Brother Watch has published a report into the worrying scale of data loss across local authorities.
A new Big Brother Watch report reveals how medical information is lost, shared on Facebook and how NHS staff look at each other’s medical records
For the first time, Big Brother Watch has uncovered the true extent to which Police abuse their access to confidential databases.

Between 1997 and 2010, the last government quadrupled pre-charge detention, enacted over 3,000 new criminal offences and introduced identity cards. Random police stop and search expanded exponentially. Free speech has been undermined, whilst control orders introduced house arrest for individuals who have not been convicted of any crime. These authoritarian measures have not eliminated or substantially reduced the threat to Britain – in September 2010, the head of MI5 warned that the terrorist threat remained ‘persistent and dangerous’, presenting a ‘serious risk of lethal attack’.
New research reveals councils in Great Britain have authorised over 8,500 RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) operations since April 2008

