Consultation on changes to town's CCTV provision

Public consultation has opened on whether to scale down a town's CCTV monitoring as a council seeks to make £62.5m in budget savings.

Shrewsbury is the only town in Shropshire for which the county council funds and runs a 24/7-monitored CCTV service.

However, to close its budget gap, the council is reviewing non-mandatory services to see whether it can provide them more efficiently.

Shrewsbury Town Council has offered to contribute £40,000 towards maintenance costs.

Shropshire Council spent more than £381,000 on the service in 2023, compared to £419,000 in 2022 and £260,000 in 2021.

The consultation will run until 4 September and sets out a number of options, with residents able to give their opinions via the council website.

The council said its preferred option would be to retain 24/7 CCTV coverage, but cease round-the-clock active monitoring, and instead have staff prioritising out-of-hours emergency calls for key council services.

Under the preferred option, police would still be able to acquire footage to help investigate crimes and some live monitoring would remain, as well as active monitoring of specific events as agreed with police, such as Shrewsbury Town "derby" match days - moves funded by partner grants.

According to the results of a freedom of information (FOI) request submitted to Shropshire Council by the BBC, the local authority currently has nine members of staff working on Shrewsbury's CCTV service, with 39 cameras in operation.

Currently, Shropshire Council wholly funds staffing and running costs for CCTV monitoring for Shrewsbury.

In other Shropshire towns , CCTV is run and funded by the town or parish council.

Shropshire Council has said it is seeking £40,000 a year from partners for the cost to maintain the CCTV network.

Other options include working with partners to develop CCTV volunteer monitoring, although this would be unlikely to provide a 24/7 monitoring service, while partners could also fund extra CCTV staff to provide more active monitoring capacity.

Councillor Robert Macey, cabinet member for culture and digital, said: "We face a very difficult financial situation, due to rising costs and the growing demand for our services particularly social care, which accounts for £4 in every £5 we spend.

"This is one of a number of very tough decisions that we do not want to make but we have to if we are to survive financially."

A drop-in consultation event for businesses is planned for 2 September at the Shropshire Local unit in the Darwin Shopping Centre, Shrewsbury, from 17:00 BST to 19:00 BST.