Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
Not really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations.
If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
