NEARLY £60,000 is to be spent by Somerset West and Taunton Council (SWT) upgrading CCTV street cameras – but none of it will go to Wellington.

Councillors heard there were nearly 100 cameras across the SWT district, many of them analogue and not up to modern standards.

They agreed to replace 11 analogue cameras with digital ones in Taunton town centre at a cost of £58,642.

But they said the six CCTV units in Wellington town centre, which were monitored and maintained under an agreement with Sedgemoor District Council, would have to be looked at once the new unitary Somerset council was created next April.

SWT community resilience manager Scott Weetch said the Taunton town centre cameras were ‘significantly beyond their recommended lifespan and starting to fail’ and the quality of images obtained from them was not good.

Cllr Roger Habgood, who represents many of the villages neighbouring Wellington, said he was both ‘disappointed’ and ‘dismayed’ that there had been so little work on the cameras in the three years since the the new administration took over the council.

He said: “Most of this has been kicked down the road for the future authority to take up the £250,000-plus problem that is still going to be there.

“I know the negotiations with Sedgemoor cannot have been that easy, but they are obliged to work with this.

“If we did £60,000 every year in the past two or three years, we would be in a much better place.

“The fear of crime is rising here, not diminishing, and partly because of this. I am disappointed to say the least.”

• Photograph shows CCTV cameras in Wellington.