Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent assessment has been made of the adequacy of CCTV in (a) preventing and (b) prosecuting crime committed on the transport network.

Everyone should be able to use public transport without fearing for their safety. As part of the government’s Safer Streets mission we have a commitment to reduce violence against women and girls (VAWG) by half over the next decade.

On the railway, we recognise that police access to CCTV is vital to being able to identify offenders and bring them to justice, as well as to prevent crime, which is why my Department has recently announced nearly £17 million of funding to provide greater direct CCTV access from railway stations to British Transport Police (BTP).

The project, to be delivered by Network Rail in collaboration with the rail industry, will enable BTP officers to have more access to real-time footage from across the railway and help to identify sexual offenders as quickly as possible without having to request this from rail operators.

Across the bus network, as at March 2024, the proportion of buses used by local operators in England that were equipped with CCTV was 96%, a significant increase from 44% in the year ending March 2006. We will be considering the use of, and access to, CCTV on buses as part of our work on the Government’s Safer Streets mission.