SOUTHEND’S CCTV control centre is to be moved as part of a cost-cutting initiative.

The nerve centre, which monitors the town’s 280 cameras, will be moved to the Civic Centre because of plans to close Queensway House.

The council has previously indicated the building, which houses social services and the control centre, could be shut in the future and possibly be replaced by a multi-storey car park.

The plan to move the control centre follows £100,000 of cuts which were made to the service last year, by reducing the number of supervisors on duty. But the council insists there will still always be two people monitoring the cameras 24 hours a day.

Dipti Patel, Southend Council’s head of public protection, said: “The CCTV operations room is due to be relocated as part of the council’s new ways of working programme.

“This rationalisation project will see the closure of four town centre locations used by the council, with services being brought together under one roof at a refurbished Civic Centre.

“We have about 280 cameras in the borough and they continue to be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We restructured the CCTV service prior to this financial year by changing the way shifts were supervised and this realised £100,000 worth of savings without the need for any redundancies.”

However, Andrew Turner, who owns Broadway Presen-tations in Southchurch Road, said there were too few people operating in the CCTV control room to make it effective. He has long campaigned for the camera located outside Queens-way House, in Southchurch Road, to be monitored properly to capture acts of antisocial behaviour.

He said: “If there’s not enough people, they are not going to be able to operate all the cameras.

“If you’ve got 200 cameras and you’ve got two people, they can only watch one at a time.

“I imagine if there’s an incident they have to wait for someone to phone up and tell them to turn the camera to Southchurch Road or Warrior Square.”