New contracts worth up to £1.75 million over seven years for the maintenance and equipment provision for East Lancashire's Blackburn-based crime-fighting CCTV monitoring hub are being put out to tender.
The current engineering and supply arrangement for the camera nerve centre in King George's Hall has now come to an end.
The hub provides CCTV surveillance service to six Lancashire boroughs - Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Preston and Rossendale.
It has supported the police and council staff in investigating 10,631 incidents since April 1, 2023.
A report by Blackburn with Darwen Council public health boss Cllr Damian Talbot says: "I approve the procurement for a new provider for CCTV engineering and the supply of equipment through an open tender process for one year with the option to extend for a further six one-year periods.
"The CCTV Hub was built in 2016 as a partnership-funded service to provide public space surveillance monitoring, maintenance and installation services across East Lancashire, Preston and beyond, following a successful grant application.
"This represents a significant public sector investment and efficiency in both cost savings, and situational awareness of crime with the hub supporting the police and partners with 10,631 incidents since April 1, 2023.
"The current maintenance contractor and the CCTV hub manager have dealt with 1,500 faults in the past twelve months as well as new installations and planned preventative maintenance.
"The current provision for engineering and supplying of CCTV-related equipment to the CCTV hub has just ended and is on a one-month rolling contract, therefore a tender exercise needs to be undertaken to procure these services.
"Over the last few years, the CCTV Hub has adopted a model of splitting the requirements into two separate tenders, one being engineering provision and the other being the supply of CCTV equipment.
"The department is only going to commit to an initial one-year contract due to previous major issues with providers of maintenance services.
"If no contract is in place, the existing equipment wouldn’t be maintained and would ultimately lead to the degradation of service and evidential image quality which would impact the ability to prevent and detect crime and anti-social behaviour and in providing images of sufficient evidential quality to be used in proceedings.
"The annual expenditure will be circa £250,000 which equates to a potential of £1.75 million over the seven-year term of the contract which will be fully covered by partnership income and therefore will have no additional financial impact on the council."
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