Surveillance cameras on Britain's roads have almost doubled over the last three years, capturing 26 million images daily, raising privacy concerns about numberplate recognition cameras.
The number of police CCTV cameras trained on Britain's roads has almost doubled over the last three years, giving police forces and the intelligence agencies access to up to 26 million images a day, the Guardian reported today.
There are now more than 8,000 cameras in the network, with senior officers hopeful of extending it further because they regard it as a key tool that helps to cut crime and save lives, the paper said.
However, the scale of the system is causing privacy campaigners grave concern and senior officers admit they need to do more to address fears about suspicion-less surveillance.
A national database that stores pictures taken by the automated numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras currently has 17 billion images in its archive - thought to be the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world, the report said.
That number is likely to increase over the next five years with advances in technology and the roll-out of more fixed and portable cameras, the report said.
Although there is no specific police target, authorities believe it should be possible to read and store between 50 million and 75 million "reads" a day by 2018.
Police also want to link the UK database - called the National ANPR Data Centre (NADC) - with similar systems run by other countries in Europe.
Julian Blazeby, who is the lead on ANPR for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said the system has become "one of the jewels of modern policing".
But he conceded the cameras had concerned human rights groups and said the police needed to be more transparent about a system which has been shrouded in secrecy.
"We want to reassure the public we are doing everything we can do prevent the misuse of the systems, with national standards and guidelines in place."
But Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, raised concerns about the scale of the expansion of the system.
"ANPR is a classic example of a very intrusive technology being rolled out with zero public debate," he said.
The ANPR system has become a cornerstone of British policing over the past decade, but details of the number of cameras in operation, and the number of images on the database, are not publicly available.
The first ANPR cameras were introduced in 1984 on the M1 motorway to help identify stolen vehicles. In 2005 the government approved a scheme to set up 2,000 fixed cameras nationwide and a data centre.
