A LEADING surveillance expert gave warning yesterday that London was facing a “security nightmare” after Government officials said that there were no plans to fund much-needed improvements to the capital’s ageing closed-circuit television network.

A spokesman for the Home Office said that it would not make public money available for improvements to surveillance systems, despite mounting concerns that many camera networks have come to the end of their natural lifespan.

The spokesman said: “There is no longer a system in place to hand out grants for CCTV networks. There has been no funding available since the last initiative was wound down in 2002.”

The decision to rule out new funding comes amid the biggest security threat to mainland Britain since the Second World War.

Anti-terror police reviewed thousands of hours of CCTV footage to help to trace the movements of the July 7 suicide bombers, as well as to identify suspects in the attacks a fortnight later.

Footage from a number of surveillance systems was also used in identifying the Soho pub bomber in 1999.

It is estimated that the UK now has more than seven million CCTV cameras, including at least 500,000 in London. A recent report suggested that a Londoner on average might expect to be captured on CCTV more than 300 times each day.

Many surveillance systems can trace their existence back to 1994, when John Major, the Conservative Prime Minister, introduced a £30 million programme to help local authorities to install camera networks.

Peter Fry, head of the CCTV Users’ Group, an industry association that represents local authorities, said that those systems have reached the end of their working lives and urgently need replacing.

“We are fast approaching a crisis situation,” he said. “A lot of local authorities are struggling to find the capital to replace ageing systems and are reliant on grants to help to ease the strain.”

Mr Fry said that new money needed to be made available to buy state-of-the-art software that can identify suspect packages, as well as unusual flows in pedestrian traffic, such as someone walking the wrong way though a Tube station passageway. “A lot of networks are more than ten years old and are at the end of their useful life. It is imperative that the capital be found to replace them,” he said.

This year the Government published a study by the University of Leicester, which found that CCTV surveillance in public spaces did not significantly reduce crime.

The survey, led by Martin Gill, the university’s Professor of Criminology, evaluated the performance of 14 CCTV networks covering a variety of public spaces including town centres, car parks and residential areas.

Professor Gill found that the level of crime fell in just one of the areas, concluding that operators had “encountered real difficulties in using CCTV to good effect.”