Slough Borough Council’s recent refurbishment of its CCTV and Careline Centre, using icomply’s V-TAS Pro, has seen been recognised for innovation and excellence by the National CCTV User Group. Since completion in 2013 the refurbished centre has experienced massive efficiency gains in supporting the police and local councils in tackling crime and antisocial behaviour. With plans to streamline footage straight to police custody suites, it looks set to achieve even more too.

Slough’s CCTV centre, like many across the country, had evolved over time. Consisting of technology ranging from between 10 and 20 years old, it was clear that integrating these components, and adding new non-proprietary state of the art systems, would lead to many improvements. The council chose icomply and its V-TAS Pro platform to do the job. With the V-TAS Pro system in place, CCTV operatives would be able to assess which cameras were the most useful through frequent reporting. Improving systems across the board would also mean that security officials could see crimes and offenders more clearly, due to better cameras, and improve their response time and service delivery to the police and council in the area.

Peter Webster CCTV and Careline manager at Slough Borough Council said: “We wanted a purpose built control room refurbishment and technology refresh. We spent a lot of time evaluating available solutions. After a stringent performance evaluation and test the Tecton Liberator DVR and BARCO display system were the chosen recording and display solutions, with icomply responsible for holding it all together with its V-TAS Pro system. This system would instantly provide our control room with a comprehensive incident and KPI reporting package, plus the ability to integrate alarms and monitoring from the council, the wider community and the private sector in the future.”

icomply’s Michael Gallagher said of the project: “We are proud of our association with Slough Borough Council CCTV. As well as integrating the legacy system with these new state of art solutions, our V-TAS Pro solution provides details on camera usage, incorporates an event logging system and a quick and easy way to put together ‘incident packs’. This enables the council to decommission cameras that are not paying for themselves, so that resources can be diverted to areas with the most crime. The updates to Slough CCTV in 2014, enabled integration to Thames Valley Police.

Director of the National CCTV User Group, Peter Fry, was incredibly impressed with how proactive the CCTV manager had been in not only improving their cost effectiveness and service, but upgrading their control centre in a revolutionary way. Speaking at the award ceremony he said: “From innovative ways of improving cost effectiveness and the service, to securing funding to upgrade the control centre, Slough is forward thinking, shedding the pedestrian ways of doing it one way because that is always how they have done it.”

A full case study of this icomply V-TAS Pro implementation is available at here. For more information about icomply’s award winning CCTV solutions visit http://new.i-comply.co.uk or call 0113 231 1100.