It’s almost as if they’re seeking to replace these with technology. They’ve purposefully neglected social services and will continue to do so, to lower the bar for AI and grant themselves an excuse for the poor “substitute”. And this isn’t at all restricted to the UK, in The Netherlands we’re in the midst of it too: the same exact playbook. Modern surveillance cameras (like Axis’ for example) have NPU’s built in, or camera footage (even from legacy analog cameras, by use of encoders) is linked to either an onsite server, a cloud-service, or a combination of the two, facilitating the functionality. I hardly believe AI to be the limiting factor here, storage of footage is another story however. But I think they instead strategically place facial-recognition cameras, while the other cameras simply store abstractions from the footage. Of course if one of those cameras senses an event, which it recognizes might be of elevated relevance, it might store the raw footage. An example being: railways doing face-scanning for “depression detection”, instead of implementing ‘platform screen doors’ of course…