Living room CCTV feed encourages "inappropriate watching"

THE NATIONAL roll-out of homesnoop CCTV has been set back by the first local authority to pilot the scheme since it was pioneered in Shoreditch, in the London borough of Hackney.

Shoreditch Trust's Digital Bridge gave residents pilot access to local CCTV images through their televisions in a scheme designed to bridge the digital divide between rich and poor residents. In December, the Trust sold the rights to the scheme to Two Four Group, the media agency that produced then Prime Minister Tony Blair's widely-scorned Number 10 promotional video.

Norwich's NELM Development Trust is the first agency to have bought into the scheme, but has ditched the CCTV element.

Gwen May, NELM neighborhood management team leader, said: "The system in Shoreditch was linked to CCTV cameras so you could police the area from your sitting room, but we don't have CCTV cameras in this area."

Digital Bridge had installed its own cameras to deliver CCTV images to living rooms in Shoreditch, while NELM areas do have non-networked CCTV attached to buildings like schools.

But, said May: "It might not be an appropriate use of the technology, because it could lead to the inappropriate watching of people."

Shoreditch Trust is in talks with Hackney, its borough council, about the future of the CCTV element of the original scheme. It is expecting to announce the rollout of the post-pilot Digital Bridge in February, along with the publication of a report it commissioned on the pilot. This will precede the publication of an official assessment by the project's funders, the Government Office for London, expected in March.

The CCTV channel of Shoreditch's public TV service, described by the Trust as the "Community Crime Channel", was meant to be one element of a broader scheme which aimed to give borough residents internet access through their televisions, and then on to local health, education and entertainment services, said its 2006 Strategic Plan.

The Trust intended to have the Digital Bridge rolled out to 40,000 Hackney residents by 2007. But the pilot, which took over £5m from the European Regional Development Fund, as well as money from the Trust and local authority, dragged on till last May.

The system built with these funds when Digital Bridge was a social enterprise was sold to Two Four Group in December for an undisclosed sum. Mark Hawkins, managing director of Two-Four Group, said he had agreed to share with the Shoreditch Trust profits from the sale of the system to other local authorities. But he refused to share details. It was, he said, "confidential" and therefore "inappropriate" to talk about it.

At its height the scheme had little more than 200 people connected at any one time. Almost a third of these were tuned into the CCTV cameras, according to pilot results published by the Trust last year, in which it said living-room CCTV access had proved more popular than Channel4's Big Brother TV programme.

Almost half the scheme's users used the Internet through their televisions for an average of half an hour in a typical day. About the same number had used the scheme to report antisocial behaviour. The education, health and other services were neglected.

The Trust told partners last year that 20 local authorities had shown interest in adopting its Digital Bridge scheme. James Morris, Digital Bridge managing director said hat only one had actually agreed to licence the technology. He would not say how many were interested in using living room CCTV.

May said that NELM had secured £90,000 from Norwich City Council's Regeneration Fund for a six month pilot of Digital Bridge starting in March in North Earlham, Larkham and Marlpit. Like Shoreditch, the scheme would be part of a New Deal for Communities project. µ