I've written before about how life on a council estate can recreate some of the collective experiences that people previously found most powerfully at work. We're getting a sense of that common feeling just at the moment, in response to the council and its housing wing, which is just in the middle of trying to impose some 110 closed circuit TV cameras onto the estate.

Two large meetings have been called, the estate artist has produced posters against the scheme, large numbers of residents have signed a protest petition: it feels like a campaign that might win.

The cameras are almost perfectly designed to annoy as many people as possible: they're positioned so they will be able to scan into flats at night. They'll take up much of the little green space that we have. The organisation charged with bringing them in seems to be incapable of speaking civilly or responding to correspondence: how then could we trust it with £300,000 of tenants' money and £500,000 in public funding?

What I've learned in the campaign, which I didn't know before is quite how spectacularly useless CCTV is at its claimed purpose: fighting crime.

There have been two major Home Office reports into the effectiveness of CCTV. One was published in 2002, the other in 2005. The first of the reports found that CCTV was largely ineffective at reducing violent crime and crime against domestic properties. Evaluating 22 CCTV projects already in existence in the UK, this study found that a number of other, cheaper strategies, were more effective: for example, increased street-lighting was significantly more effective than CCTV in cutting crime, as well as being considerably cheaper in both capital and income terms.

The 2002 survey concluded that the normal success rate associated with a CCTV scheme was a reduction in local crime figures of just 4 percent.

The difficulties of CCTV have been particularly evident when it was employed in city centre or in public housing. Three out of thirteen studies identified by the Home Office as studying at the impact of CCTV in residential areas actually showed significant increases in the incidence of crime following the introduction of CCTV camera schemes. In one of these studies, crime actually rose by 46 percent following the introduction of a CCTV scheme, and that particular study was conducted in 1999, when crime rates across the country were falling (Home Office Research Study 252, Crime prevention effects of closed circuit television).

The 2005 Home Office report again found that to place cameras in residential areas was the least effective use of CCTV, 'with crime going down in some areas and up in others'.

Increased camera density was found not to improve CCTV efficiency. The report identified that CCTV showed some tendency to displace crime from areas with cameras to neighbouring areas without.

The second team of Home Office researchers again judged that CCTV was the wrong approach to fight crime: 'The majority of the [CCTV] schemes evaluated', the authors continued, 'did not reduce crime and even where there was a reduction this was mostly not due to CCTV' (Home Office Research Study 292, Assessing the impact of CCTV).

Sceptical research hasn't yet stopped the CCTV boom. I believe it's still true that three quarters of all capital spending on crime prevention in the UK goes on CCTV cameras. Only a month ago the papers were reporting that our society has more CCTV cameras than any other in the world. How nice then to be living on at least one estate where people are against.