CCTV Project Update:
A resident has asked for an update on the installation of CCTV following the discussion at last summer's public meeting when there was near unanimous support.
Following the spate of anti-social behaviour mostly during summer last year, the parish council called a public meeting in August 2022. The view of residents was that they would like CCTV installed around the village green area.
The provision of CCTV in the Halton Borough is undertaken by Halton Borough Council (HBC). Recognising that the Borough has considerable budgetary constraints, the parish council offered to pay for the cameras to link to HBC's monitoring centre.
At a subsequent meeting in December last year, we were informed that HBC would not sanction that without considerable additional and unacceptable costs to the parish council. The Parish Council were prepared, however, to consider these and Halton were to provide definitive costs and arrange visits to other sites. We were also made aware of government advice that the competitively priced Hikvision cameras were generally not to be used on council systems. We would, however, be able to mount a camera or cameras to a lamppost in the village green area to secure power.
Whilst we are working with HBC to understand the costs and reasons why Sandymoor cannot be part of the borough's CCTV network without incurring considerable extra cost to local residents, we also investigated other ways in which to deliver the service including solar powered cameras. As the most cost-effective option was to mount the camera/cameras on a Halton BC lamppost we needed to ascertain that the ban on Hikvision did not apply to just mounting them on their lampposts. We were advised that Halton BC had no objection just a few hours before the May Parish Council meeting and this was reported then.
CCTV has been discussed at nearly every parish council meeting. The main reasons for connecting to a central system are:
- Data protection requests. The Parish Council is not sufficiently staffed to deal with requests to search, view and be challenged over content that has been recorded.
- Police can access the data when events occur more easily.
- The parish council have concluded that they will not use Hikvision cameras at the May parish meeting.
- Sandymoor is the only area in Halton Borough without CCTV provision and the parish council feels its wrong to burden residents with further costs for such a system when other parishes have them included as part of their council tax.
Your local Borough Councillors, John Bradshaw, Sian Davidson and Mike Ryan are also working with us to deliver a cost-effective solution. We would continue to urge all residents to report crime to the police on 101 or in an emergency 999. Anti-social behaviour around the area tends to rise during good weather and school holidays, CCTV will not cure this on its own which is why reporting incidents to the Police is so important as they do not monitor or use social media to record or react to crime.
