CCTV From Chinese Manufacturers
Case reference FOI2026/01523
Received 22 July 2026
Published 7 September 2026
Request
I am writing under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from your authority:
Please can you tell me how many CCTV cameras the council operates and how many of these are produced by Chinese companies. Please can you show this as two figures.
Please also provide the total number of the council’s CCTV cameras that use either live or retrospective facial recognition and how many of these are produced by Chinese companies.
Response
Thank you for your recent request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Please find the answers to your queries below:
I am writing under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from your authority:
Please can you tell me how many CCTV cameras the council operates and how many of these are produced by Chinese companies. Please can you show this as two figures.
529 fixed CCTV cameras and 205 mobile CCTV cameras.
We do not hold information regarding the country of origin for each individual camera. Assuming it took a minimum of 5 minutes per camera to obtain information regarding the country of manufacture across our 734 CCTV cameras, it would take us a minimum total of 3,670 minutes (equivalent to 61.2 hours). We are therefore unable to respond to this part of your request, because it would take us over 18 hours to obtain this data, which would place a substantial and possibly unreasonable burden on resource and your request is therefore exempt under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act (where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit).
Please also provide the total number of the council’s CCTV cameras that use either live or retrospective facial recognition and how many of these are produced by Chinese companies.
None.
Yours sincerely,
FOI Team
Guildford Borough Council
Documents
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