Birmingham City Council has revealed that they operate 342 CCTV cameras around Birmingham.
The highest density of council-owned cameras in operation is located in the city centre, around High Street. More than one in every twenty cameras operated by Birmingham City Council are situated there.
But the council-owned cameras are likely to be a small proportion of CCTV in the city: a report by the CCTV User Group in 2011 calcualted that publicly-owned CCTV cameras – those operated by bodies including councils, police and health authorities – account for fewer than 2 in every 100 cameras.
In 2009 the BBC also reported that Birmingham had more CCTV cameras in operation than there were in operation in Paris, France, a city with a population of over 1.22 million higher than that of Birmingham’s.
There is no clear figure on the number of CCTV cameras in the UK. The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimated in 2013 that there were between 4 and 5.9 million, one surveillance camera for every 11 people in Britain.
