Click here for linkThe claim
"A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens."
David Davis, resignation statement, 12 June 2008
The analysisOne camera for every 14 people comes with a partner statistic: that there are 4.2 million security cameras in the UK.
The pair of claims come from a working paper published in 2002, by academics Michael McCahill and Clive Norris. FactCheck alarm bells are already ringing. It's now 2008, so is the figure still up to date?
It's hard to say, as there are no official (or even unofficial) statistics on how many CCTV cameras there are. The information commissioner doesn't know, the government has repeatedly told parliament that figures are not collected, and any tally of publicly funded cameras wouldn't cover any small screens set up in the likes of cornershops.
We can look, however, at how the Davis-quoted figure was calculated.
The basis comes from a survey of the number of CCTV cameras in two busy south London streets, Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road.
The researchers sampled 211 "premises" - banks, estate agents, pubs, shops and office blocks - and found that 41 per cent had CCTV systems, with an average of 4.1 cameras per system.
By assuming this is "broadly representative" of CCTV coverage across the whole of London, the authors estimate that 41 per cent, or 102,910, of the 251,000 VAT-registered businesses registered in London would have a CCTV system. Multiply this by 4.1 and there would be 421,931 cameras.
This article is 4 years old. I have read that they have more CCTV cameras in London by more that 300,000 since then!
Still have a high crime rate, that keeeps going up!
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