Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, in what proportion of rail‑related criminal investigations CCTV footage was requested but could not be used due to issues including image quality, equipment failure and insufficient coverage.

The British Transport Police made 9,986 requests to rail operators for CCTV in 2025/26 but they are unable to provide a breakdown of whether the footage was usable or not as it would require extensive manual searching of data records and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

The Department has provided Network Rail with £17 million to connect station CCTV to BTP systems, enabling greater real-time access to footage across the network and reducing the need for requests made direct to rail operators.