Common fixes for CCTV as research reveals faults on one in four council cameras

New research highlights most failures on council CCTV systems are due to network and technology errors with experts now calling for more support for CCTV teams.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, which gives access to recorded information held by UK public authorities, TrellisWorks asked all 317 of England’s councils how many faults had been recorded on their CCTV systems and what were the most frequent causes.

The results showed that of the 233 councils which responded with fault causes only 93 reports out of 22,828 were recorded as vandalism or storm damage in the last two years. The rest all focused on connectivity, technology faults and lost images.

With 11,031 faults recorded in 2025 alone the figure amounts to nearly one in four of council cameras not working, at some point in the year, due to technical errors.

TrellisWorks is now looking to help councils get the support they need to beat common failures and have launched a free guide to troubleshoot common issues.

Launching the guide, which focuses on ways to resolve frequent failures, Nick Metcalfe, wireless specialist for CCTV at Newbury based TrellisWorks, said the data showed some common themes.

He said: “There are lots of reasons why faults can occur on a network, and it is important to remember that some downtime is inevitable as cameras can be taken offline due to ongoing works or maintenance.

“However, the data shows that there are councils across the country running with heavily fault led systems. This could be due to budget constraints and current configuration, but many could be rebooting cameras to fix the problem for it only to reoccur.

“Many councils will add and change the CCTV network over time as demand changes and can often grow their network quite substantially over an extended period of time. This leaves the network vulnerable to problems where it isn’t always configured as a whole or is left with repeated connection errors.”

In total 233 of England’s councils replied with 108 citing they did not hold the information or for security reasons could not divulge details. Of all the councils that did confirm details about faults they reported having 46,107 cameras in total.

From lost connection to poor configuration or blurred images at least 10,938 faults were logged in 2025 due to technical issues with repairs taking anywhere from a few hours to 9 months. In the first two months of 2026 a further 2,766 faults were logged.

Figures related to the number of faults logged in the year with some reports accounting for more than one camera. This means the figure for actual faulty cameras could actually be higher. Repeated faults could also refer to multiple errors for the same camera.

For more information on what the council responses revealed about CCTV failures and how to fix the common faults go to www.trellisworks.co.uk/cctvguide