Fine on paper, but while we await the detail of precisely what that means, permit me a couple of observations from a local perspective.
The first is a general point. It has come to be understood that Britain is ‘over-watched’ by cameras. Today it is widely – but falsely held – that the average person is watched by CCTV ‘300 times a day’ – the factoid generally used in evidence. This damaging urban viral has been comprehensively demolished by David Aaronovitch after only a modicum of digging.
Anyone in public service acquainted with antisocial behaviour policy will know just how effective CCTV technology has been in reducing crime. It brings security to inner city estates and streets. CCTV is often a condition of licensing for clubs and off-licences, especially in city centres, to ensure law and order and to crack down on antisocial behaviour.
It empowers residents to give evidence in court where they didn’t before and gives extra backing to Safer Neighbourhood Teams.
But contrary to Liberal insinuation, most CCTV is not run by the state, but by businesses and private individuals as a private choice – how will this be regulated? After all, isn’t there a right to make your own property or business safer? Is it liberal for Nick Clegg to say that a shopkeeper can’t use cameras to stop shoplifting in their own store, or that they have to go to the council for a permit? Which criteria would we use to allow one set of cameras in one shop, and to deny another on someone else’s estate?
Should we not use cameras on buses to protect the travelling public? Should we “regulate” CCTV more at major transport hubs? are there implications for national security?
Unless the coalition goes against policy and sets up a National CCTV Licensing Quango or suchlike, odds are that it will fall on Town Halls to implement – no doubt subjectively and sometimes clumsily.
In my experience as a local councillor more often than not the real fears expressed by people about CCTV have to do with the privatisation of open space, a trend which has occurred in many private planning developments under the eyes of councils up and down the country.
Private streets, with private security, governed by private rules constrain individual liberty in many city centres up and down the country much more than the existence of a camera-on-the-corner.
When Camden Labour negotiated the massive King’s Cross development in London in 2005, we did so on the basis that the public realm would stay in public hands. It was a notable achievement which others have followed.
Surely it is the public realm which should be protected, and glibly taking aim at ‘CCTV’ is fundamentally soft posturing – but then something that actually addresses the problem might not go down too well with the people Clegg rubs shoulders with now, would it?