Westminster Council and DfT In CCTV Row

Story link: Westminster Council and DfT In CCTV Row by Jan Harris

Westminster City Council claims that a ruling by the Department for Transport (DFT) that it must switch off its digital CCTV system, is ‘Draconian’ and could waste £15M of taxpayers’ money.

The DfT says that the council’s 100 digital CCTV cameras do not comply with the Traffic Management Act of 2004 which states that cameras must operate at 720 x 576 pixels, whereas the Council’s cameras have an image resolution of 704 x 576 pixels.

This act only came into force last year, but Westminster Council installed its camera network in 2006 and has only just been informed that it does not meet the required standard.

Westminster Council has lodged an appeal against the decision because, according to industry experts, its cameras do meet the required standard of image resolution.

Although the resolution of analogue images appears to be higher, analogue images include the black ‘buffer’ lines around the image, where pixels are unused.

It has been confirmed by several camera manufacturers that the final image from an analogue camera is 702×576 pixels.