For more than 15 years, local authorities have been responding to Government demands and incentives to invest in CCTV surveillance systems to support the police and protect the public. In a number of cases, this has been done with little consideration as to how much money is being invested in these systems, particularly the ongoing running costs impacting on unpredictable revenue budgets being made available following political change.

Increasingly more sophisticated equipment has been installed with the inevitable increase in manpower. Now the focus of pressure on councils has altered. With a difficult economic climate and a change in government, it's time for the authorities to make these systems work for them in an efficient, cost effective way so that they can still deliver public safety and security, whilst satisfying the current need to cut back on spending.

With this in mind, there are options that could be considered. For a relatively modest investment, it is possible to make software upgrades to automate a surveillance system. An upgraded system can operate without human intervention; watching and reacting by itself and only alerting operators when an incident is detected. An automated system is more efficient, can monitor multiple events, never misses an incident and always responds to preset parameters.

This type of software can reduce the manpower required for monitoring and control with developers of this kind of software claiming their products can reduce man hours by anywhere between 25% and 50% resulting in considerable savings to the authority budget.

This option does not come without its own set of problems. There could be considerable political and public opposition to the suggestion of a cut in manpower with the resultant loss of jobs. No council would want to be outwardly seen as adding to the unemployment burden within a community. Somebody would also need to put a strong financial case together to convince an already cash-strapped council to put its hand in its pocket for yet further improvements to a system that has already commanded a significant amount of investment.

A more viable alternative may be for local authorities to become commercial in their outlook to their monitoring capabilities and to proactively offer their professional services and state-of-the-art control room equipment to businesses throughout their area. Having made the not inconsiderable investment in the infrastructure, many council's are only a few steps and a bit of effort away from migrating an existing centre to become a BS 5979:2007 marketable commodity as a ‘third party' monitoring station in its own right. By providing BS8418 detector activated CCTV and alarm monitoring services to local businesses, local authorities can generate much needed income to offset running costs. This could safeguard the jobs of control room staff whilst satisfying the mandate to protect the public, therefore becoming an additional revenue stream rather than a cost to the public purse. ‘Pie in the sky idea some may say', but there are already ‘best practice' examples of local authority public space schemes positively driven forward by a pro-active manager which have become self funding from revenue generated from additional monitoring service level agreements.

It just needs a bit of innovative thinking outside of the box and the determination to build a practical progressive strategy. Failing this, a Local Authority could do worse than undertake a thorough, independent and unbiased strategic review of its whole surveillance set up and its effectiveness in the detection and prevention of crime which may conclude that it would be a better use of public money to scrap the CCTV and put a couple of bobbies back on the street.