MADAM,

Following Monmouth Town Council’s recent newsletter asking the public whether they support the funding of CCTV next year, I received a number of enquiries from residents interested in finding out more information.

CCTV was installed in 2002/3 with a Home Office grant plus additional funding from Monmouthshire County Council (MCC) and the four town councils and full monitoring was provided by Caerphilly Council. The contribution from each town council was set then at £11,000 a year (£916 per month).

The original system had good quality component parts at the camera end, but were let down by the transmission process.

In 2007 Monmouth Town Council withdrew funding from the scheme due to poor performance and for the next five years there was no public space CCTV in Monmouth.

In 2011 Monmouthshire moved from Caerphilly to join the brand new shared resource centre in Blaenavon, which provided a state-of–the–art HD digital recording facility and control room. At the same time the town councils invested in upgrading their old ‘shoe-box’ style cameras to new 360 degree Dome cameras.

In 2012, MCC invested in the Wireless Link which replaced the BT lines and took advantage of improved MCC Network Data delivery of the images. This also provided flexibility to the system in that the camera locations were no longer ‘fixed’.

This was the catalyst for Monmouth Town to re-join the Monmouthshire-wide scheme in 2013. MTC bought six new dome cameras and MCC fitted in the wireless equipment. It is worth mentioning at this point that the annual contribution from the town council is now £12,800 (£1,066 per month). This represents an increase of only 16 per cent over 11 years or £150 a month. A cost amounting to little more than £1 per head of population or £2.60 per household.

Monmouth Town Council signed into the scheme in April 2013 under a Memorandum of Understanding for three years. This is up for renewal next March 2016.

The success of the cameras is down to how they are managed and deployed by the partnership of MCC, police, town council, control room operators and local businesses.

The cameras are additional eyes and ears on the town, but the majority of the population will go about their daily business unaware of their presence.

The strategic aims of the MCC-CCTV scheme includes: prevention and detection of crime and anti-social behaviour, enhancing community safety, reducing the fear of crime, and assisting the local authority in the overall management of the town centre.

Some people would judge the cameras on the number of people arrested for a crime, but that is only a very small part of their achievements, they have such a wider scope than that; from alerting police to a disturbance at an early stage to prevent the situation from escalating; to monitoring vulnerable people.

In Monmouthshire we have a very good partnership between the local authority and the town councils who share the cost of CCTV. We are continually striving to develop and to improve the system with up to date technology, and thereby reduce our overall running costs to the benefit of all partners.

I think you can see we have made vast strides since the early days of 2002 and in an arena where technology does not idle for very long, our strength for the future is by remaining as a group, to keep challenging each other and working together to keep Monmouth and Monmouthshire as safe a place as possible.

Andrew Mason

(CCTV coordinator for MCC)