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Oh rats as rodents land Highland Council with CCTV bill





Rodents have been causing havoc with the city's CCTV system
Rodents have been causing havoc with the city's CCTV system

Rats have attacked Inverness city centre’s expensive CCTV system and caused £5,000 worth of damage, it has emerged.

The rodents chewed through underground cables of the expensive cameras leaving the Inverness Common Good Fund with a hefty repair bill.

It comes as a new CCTV camera – costing £7,500 - is to be installed at Castle Wynd bringing the total of screens in the city to 41.

Councillor Donnie Kerr was unhappy that a definitive figure of the CCTV system’s annual cost - which is between £121,000 and £141,000 - could not be provided at the city of Inverness area committee on Tuesday.

The Inverness Central councillor said it was a heavy investment for the fund and the estimate gave a "fair bit of leeway."

Isabella Baikie, a community safety officer for Highland Council, said the imprecise figure was given because of unexpected circumstances including vermin attacks.

"It is all about how much money we will spend in a year on repairs which we can’t plan for," she said.

"For example, within the last few months we paid £5,000 for only two repairs to rectify damage caused by rats. If we had five rat invasions the we would have a bill of almost £10,000, hence the varied figure."

Ms Baikie said three cameras out of the 41 screens were currently out-of-order but repair parts were due to arrive on Thursday (6.3) and she hoped they would be operational by the weekend.

The cameras are monitored seven days a week from Burnett Road Police Station.

There were 4,008 incidents specifically monitored in the last year by Inverness CCTV operators, with 93 per cent of them classed as "preventive".

The remaining 292 incidents were recorded and used by the police as evidence to support investigations and court proceedings.

Police chief inspector Mark Mackay praised the cameras’ role.

"It is difficult to contextualise the impact CCTV has but it is fair to say that having CCTV in Inverness city centre is a significant prevention and detection tool," he said.

But Councillor Kerr said some screens were not in use and he had recently noticed the camera at the Friars Bridge Roundabout had been "pointing in the air" for around four weeks.

"Quite often the cameras don’t seem to be working," said Councillor Kerr, who said the camera at the bottom of the Raining Stairs at Castle Stet had not moved in three hours one day. "We’re obviously not getting the full benefit of them," he added.

Inverness Millburn councillor Jimmy Gray said he had concerns about the direction the camera at Stephen’s Brae was pointing in and suggested its default setting should be assessed.

Chief inspector Mackay said it would encourage anybody to get in touch if the cameras appeared to be out-of-order.

"We would look to discuss and rectify that straight away," he said.


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