Council to look into CCTV scheme

WESTBURY Town Council will be looking into the benefits of the town’s CCTV scheme.

Councillor Ian Cunningham has called for the council’s CCTV working group to bring together performance data to see how beneficial it has been having CCTV in Westbury.

In the current financial to date, the town council has spent just over £19,000 on running and maintaining CCTV in the town and in 2015/2016 the council spent close to £25,000. Town councillors have agreed to look into how worthwhile and cost effective CCTV is from data collated by the working group.

Councillor Cunningham said, “I’m a great believer in scrutiny and this is something I think we should be looking at. With the data we can analyse the costs of running CCTV and the number of convictions resulting direct from CCTV.

“I have no specific desire to cancel CCTV or specific evidence that it either doesn’t work or is not cost effective in Westbury – and I accept that whether it works or not a lot of people think it does and gain comfort from it which may justify some for the expense. But I think we should look at it.”