PUB landlords are piling pressure on the authorities to get Salisbury’s CCTV system back online – seven months after it was switched off.

The cameras have been out of action since June 2016, when Wiltshire Council pulled the plug so it could sell the control room to developers.

Despite assurances that a new, £500k fibre-optic system would be installed by Christmas, the council now says it “should go live by the end of June” — a full year after the cameras were originally switched off.

Salisbury PubWatch has launched an online petition, demanding to know when the service will resume.

A statement on the petition website says: “At a time where the government are cutting back on police numbers and rarely do we get a ‘Bobby on the beat’ it is unacceptable for the CCTV, the protection and support the system provides, to be a pawn in a game of county and local council chess.”

The petition says crime in Salisbury has risen “dramatically” compared with the previous year.

And official police figures show a 16 per cent increase in reported crimes in the six months to December 2016, compared with the same period in 2015, rising from approximately 13 offences a day to 15.

But this is still significantly lower than the same period in 2011 when an average of 18 crimes a day were recorded, the highest of any six-month period over the past six years.

The Wiltshire councillor representing the city centre, Atiqul Hoque, said previous estimates that CCTV would installed by October 2016, then Christmas 2016, then January 2017, had been “misleading”.

Steve Godwin from Salisbury BID said: “It’s taking a lot longer than anyone envisaged”.

At the time of writing, 70 people had signed the petition at gopetition.com City clerk Reg Williams said: “Contractors are up at Bourne Hill working away as we speak and we await a completion date.”

Wiltshire Council said the equipment had been purchased and the preliminary work on the control room had started. Once commissioned, the new system will be transferred to the city council.

Wiltshire is in the process of transferring to the city council a package of services and assets such as the Market Place, children’s play areas, grass cutting and street cleaning, and the new CCTV system.

To find the petition, click here.