Closed Circuit: a batter solution

We all know how much housing associations love a good drone (in the flying robot sense – not the boring, pontificating sense, obviously). We also know how much housing associations love closed circuits (in the surveillance sense, not the hilarious diary column sense, of course).

So a company pitching its wares to Inside Housing this week may well be in luck. It is offering social landlords the chance to buy flying camera robots for surveillance.

It “predicts that drones could become a part of all our lives in a much more direct and important way – by patrolling our neighbourhoods in search of criminal activity”.

If this sounds like a horrific dystopian nightmare to you, it gets worse. Apparently “drones can check out any guests before they get to your door, asking them a few questions to work out whether they’re friendly, and guiding them to your door only if they come in peace”.

What happens if guests are deemed not to be “coming in peace” isn’t clear, but we suspect these CCTV robots may go down in history as the starting point of the impending war between man and machine.

Everyone loves chips. Especially, it would seem, tenants of North West housing association Regenda – so much so that the landlord has been handing out free deep fat fryers to its tenants. Why? To improve fire safety, obviously.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but the housing association insists that swapping residents’ old chip pans for brand new fryers will help cut down on fires caused by cooking accidents.

Closed Circuit is pleased Regenda is chipping in to the fire safety agenda, but we do wonder if there might have been a batter solution.

With fire safety the words on everyone’s lips at the moment, Closed Circuit visited a block in central London which has been linked with fire issues in the past.

Old signage in the building shows the slightly more stiff upper lip approach the fire authorities used to take towards fire safety. An old notice on the wall, due to be replaced with its modern equivalent, reads: “If this building has to be evacuated during a fire, act quietly and do not attempt to pass others.”

Even in the grip of an emergency, it seems manners came first back in the day.