The claim
“There’s one study that said we have 1 per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras.”
Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch, 12 August 2013
The background
A new code of practice on the use of CCTV cameras by police forces and councils comes into force today.
Nick Pickles from the Big Brother Watch campaign group called it “a good first step” in regulating public surveillance.
In an interview with the BBC, he added: “There’s one study that said we have 1 per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, so this is an important moment to try and bring some confidence back that the surveillance state hasn’t got out of control.”
We first FactChecked the spread of CCTV back in 2008, and found that claims about the numbers of cameras fixing us with their beady eyes were exaggerated.
There’s been a lot more research since then. Has Britain really turned into what the graffiti artist Banksy described as “One Nation under CCTV”? And will the new code make a difference?
The analysis
We don’t know how many CCTV cameras there are in this country. And we certainly don’t know how many there are in the entire world. Nevertheless, everyone seems to think that 20 per cent of that number are trained on Britain’s high streets and car parks.
The only source for the 20 per cent thing we can find is the Daily Mail, which ran this story on the back of a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
But the report doesn’t stand up any of the claims made in the article. It doesn’t say there are 4.2 million cameras in the UK, that this represents 20 per cent of all cameras in the world, or that “the average Londoner may be monitored by up to 300 every day”.
There is a source for the 4.2 million claim: this 2002 paper. The authors found that 41 per cent of premises in affluent Putney High Street, south west London, were covered by an average 4.1 cameras each.
Extrapolate this to the whole of the UK, adding in cameras on the streets, public transport, hospitals, schools and so on, and you get 4,285,000 cameras, or about one for every 14 people.
The basic assumption we are making is that a posh part of London full of bars and restaurants is representative of the whole of the capital, and that London is representative of the whole of the UK.
Not surprisingly, doubts were cast about the reliability of this number, not least by us.
One of the authors of the report, Professor Clive Norris of Sheffield University, is also the source for the Mail’s claim that the average Londoner could be filmed up to 300 times a day.
In 1998, the sociologist wrote an account of a fictional character’s journey through London, based on the real location of cameras.
Prof Norris later stood by the figure of 300, but admitted the passage was “a piece of rhetoric” and the route of the imaginary journey was designed to cross the paths of CCTV systems, taking in schools, a hospital, public transport, several car parks and Heathrow airport in a single day.
Hardly the day in the life of an average Londoner, and the CCTV coverage that you might find in London or other big cities will not be replicated across the UK.
This is a point made by Graeme Gerrard, Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire Constabulary, who sent his PCSOs out to count cameras used by businesses across the county in 2011.
He then factored in the big differences in coverage between urban and rural areas. In towns there were about 3.6 cameras per 100 people, and only 0.9 in the countryside.
Instead of 300 cameras watching you, the senior policeman concluded that it was likely to be a more modest 68, on average.
Mr Gerrard also added in council cameras monitoring public space and those on public transport, before extrapolating to the whole of the UK and coming up with a much lower estimate: just under 1.8 million CCTV cameras in the country.
This is in the same ballpark as a separate estimate of nearly 1.6 million published by the CCTV Users’ Group based on surveys of its members.
On the other hand, the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) hit the headlines this summer when they suggested that there were between four and nearly six million cameras in operation across the country.
That’s a massive difference from the lower estimates, but one that’s fairly easy to explain.
Cheshire police and the CCTV User Group only counted cameras that were likely to film members of the public, whether it be on the streets or in a bar or a shop.
The BSIA numbers refer to all cameras, private or public-facing. A camera set up in the back room of a jeweller’s shop or trained on the back door of a warehouse doesn’t raise a civil liberties issue.
All the studies agree that private cameras vastly outnumber those used by local authorities, transport companies, schools and hospitals, suggesting that the phrase “surveillance state” might be a bit of a misnomer.
New CCTV code of practice
It’s not the state that does most of the surveilling, which opens the government up to the accusation of bringing in a toothless measure with its new CCTV code of practice.
The code only covers the police and public authorities, but not council-run schools and hospitals. It will be overseen by a new surveillance camera commissioner, whose job is to encourage public bodies to follow the new rules and give them advice.
If they break the code, the new commissioner has no power to force them to toe the line.
That’s in contrast to the independent Information Commissioner’s Office, which already publishes a code of practice and has an overlapping and slightly confusing responsibility to make sure CCTV operators – public and private – don’t break the Data Protection Act.
Unlike the new government commissioner, the old independent one has powers to prosecute those who break the law on surveillance and can dish out fines of up to half a million pounds.
The verdict
Old urban myths die hard and the hoary old claims about CCTV are still in widespread circulation despite having little credible evidence to back them up.
Frankly, no one knows how many cameras there are in this country, although we’re leaning towards the lower estimate in Graeme Gerrard’s study, with its more realistic view of the differences between rural and urban areas.
Remember that – no matter how many millions we are talking about. Not all the cameras will be pointing the right way, switched on or recording at any given time. We know from numerous reports that councils like CCTV systems, but don’t always have them plugged in.
Not surprisingly, we can find no reliable figure for the number of cameras on the planet, making the claim that Britain is home to one in five of all CCTV cameras ridiculous.
By Patrick Worrall
