Barnet CCTV Grows to 60 Moveable Cameras and 950 Feeds

Barnet Council now has 60 “redeployable” CCTV cameras, ones that can be moved from one trouble spot to another, and 950 live camera feeds running into its control room, according to figures released on 12 November by the borough’s ruling Labour group.

The moveable cameras are aimed at hotspots for fly-tipping, drug dealing and anti-social behaviour, and can be shifted quickly when a problem moves on. The council’s own CCTV page still lists 33 of them; the council said on 10 November that 27 more had been added this year, which takes the fleet to the 60 the Labour group gives.

From 37 working cameras to 950 feeds

The Labour group says there were 127 live streams into the control room when it took over the council in 2022, against 950 now, an increase of almost eight-fold.

Council papers from that year back up the starting point, and show it was worse than 127 suggests. A CCTV programme update dated 31 October 2022 records that the borough had 127 fixed cameras, of which only 37 were online in June 2022 and 107 by October. It said 70% of the community safety cameras had been defective since 2017 and went unreported until 2021, that the equipment was obsolete and poorly maintained, that Barnet had no mobile camera capability at all, and that the control rooms were outside the borough and not staffed around the clock.

The two numbers are not quite like for like. The 2022 figure counts cameras; the 950 counts camera views, and the council has been installing multi-lens cameras that each supply several views. Its CCTV page lists the estate today as:

• 498 permanent cameras on high streets, highways and libraries
• 33 redeployable cameras (now 60, with this year’s additions)
• 33 mobile cameras on Barnet Homes housing estates
• two community safety vehicles, run with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, each with four cameras

The cameras are watched 24 hours a day from a control room in Colindale by operators qualified with the Security Industry Authority. When the council marked two years of the expanded network in October 2025, after a £2.3 million upgrade, it said the control room had logged 13,649 incidents since the new system went live, more than 7,200 of them in 2024/25, and had helped the Community Safety Team issue more than 120 fixed penalty notices that year.

What the cabinet member says

Cllr Sara Conway, Labour’s cabinet member for community safety and cohesion, used the figures to attack the previous Conservative administration:

“When Labour took over the Council, Barnet Conservatives were coasting on the community safety agenda.

“Labour has pushed things forward, from introducing a Public Space Protection Order to tackle anti-social behaviour to bringing our summer parks patrols in-house so that they can issue on-the-spot fines.”

The Labour group also points to pop-up hubs where residents can report problems, and to ward walks in which councillors and residents’ groups go round with council officers and local police to look at hotspots together.

The release is a party statement rather than a council one, and the Conservative group was not part of it. The 2022 programme paper puts the failures in the network between 2017 and 2021, when the Conservatives ran the council, and says there was no adequate council oversight in that period.

What it means for you

The moveable cameras are the ones residents are most likely to see go up on their own street, as they are pointed at fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour hotspots. The Labour group says residents can raise problems at its pop-up hubs and on ward walks with councillors, officers and police.

Anyone caught on camera can face a fine: in the latest pilot, fly-tippers picked out in the control room were fined £42,500 between April and October, at £500 a time for a first offence. The council also explains on its CCTV page how residents can request footage of themselves, and publishes camera locations on Open Barnet.

Source: Barnet Labour Group news release, 12 November 2026; Barnet Council.