Curiously the letter from Elizabeth Kennedy last week (Town is missing out on CCTV coverage) gave a wrong account of the issues surrounding CCTV in Chippenham.

We are not awaiting the arrival of CCTV cameras in the town as she suggests, as they have been up and running with a professional monitored system since 1999.

Maybe it is the start of the silly season, with elections so close that has precipitated the misunderstanding, but let me place the facts on record here.

Chippenham Town Council conducted a Best Value Review of CCTV last year. From that the independent consultants suggested that the cost of the professionally monitored system, as opposed to using volunteers or simply recording events, should be picked up by several other agencies alongside our own.

At present it is only the householders within the Chippenham boundary, excluding the Cepen Parks, who pay toward CCTV and this is not fair.

At budget time the Town Council had not even received replies to our inquiries from the Wiltshire Police, and so our only recourse was to suggest that the present contract to monitor the system would not be renewed in September 2005.

We now have a situation where a meeting is being convened by the police to establish just how the money can be found in order to re-issue the contract.

S Webb

Leader, Chippenham Town Council