A COUNCIL is earning tens of thousands of pounds a year by spying on other parts of the country.

The closed circuit television (CCTV) monitoring centre in Darlington Borough Council's town hall is one of the most advanced in the UK -and its reputation is spreading.

The authority is being paid to monitor CCTV images from car auction sites in towns and cities across England.

The scheme has attracted much interest, and the Darlington control centre has linked up with cameras as far away as Bristol, Wimbledon and Colchester.

The cameras are all at car auction sites, protecting the compounds where cars are stored.

If an alarm is triggered at the compounds, an alarm sounds in the control room and the images appear on screen.

Council staff then alert a list of contacts, describing what they can see and recording it.

The auction sites pay the council for this service, amounting to a substantial income.

Other towns that pay for the service include Washington, Yarm, Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, Haydock, near Warrington, Rotherham, Mansfield and Northamp- ton.

There is plenty of capacity for more towns to get involved, and Gloucester and Leicester are due to join the scheme this year.

A Darlington Borough Council spokesman said: "We are the only authority in the North-East, and possibly the country, to have this sort of arrangement with the private sector."

The spokesman added: "A lot of the stuff we have done over the years is really cutting edge, and people have been coming to Darlington to look at how our CCTV system works."

He said the scheme was all part of making the CCTV centre pay its way.

He said that, apart from false alarms, there had been about 12 incidents.

He added that CCTV operators had helped to get the right people to the site as fast as possible.

Acting council chief executive Paul Wildsmith said: "We try to grow the business.

"We say we will take extra work on as long as it is not to the detriment of the community.

"Clearly this is an expensive service to run, so anything that reduces that cost to the taxpayer is a good thing."