IT QUITE beggars belief that Southampton City Council truly believed there was nothing amiss when it agreed to allow footage from its CCTV cameras to be used by a TV film company.

Whether or not they had thought the deal through and just hadn’t conceived of the fact they would be passing over residents’ private moments, or if the authority simply believed activity undertaken in a public place was fair game to reveal, its actions were shoddy.

As this paper reports today, there was an inevitability that the cameras would capture activities that would then go on to embarrass residents when shown on TV, in this case a couple having sex in a lift.

While this paper doesn’t condone such activity and can even agree that showing the film was, as Ofcom decided, in the public interest, that does not mean we cannot see that the release of such material by the council is a betrayal of the very people it is supposed to be serving.

The irony that this is the same council that, correctly, campaigned against a documentary company using the city to film the controversial Immigration Street programme will not be lost on many.

What could they have been thinking of ?