BIG Brother is not watching people in Colne - as he is only paid to work three hours a week.

And it has been revealed the town's 14 cameras - which cost more than £50,000 - record just one per cent of crime.

The shock news came to light when Colne councillors asked Inspector Richard Clare about the effectiveness of CCTV. And instead of praising the system he was forced to admit just 53 out of 4,254 crimes recorded in Colne and Barnoldswick were captured on the cameras.

But he stressed CCTV was a deterrent that was impossible to calculate.

Insp Clare said: "I was very surprised. I thought they were picking up a lot more incidents. The CCTV office said Pendle pays for monitoring of three hours per week per camera."

And he revealed crooks can strike in the time it takes a camera to pan from one side of the street to the other.

"It takes two-and-a-half minutes for a camera to pan and a person can wait until the camera leaves, smash a window, take stuff and when the camera comes back there's a nice picture of a broken window," he explained. "It's an example of how difficult it is for these cameras to catch things."

CCTV was installed in Colne in April 2003 and cost £51,000. Council leader and Boulsworth member Alan Davies said: "It is three hours per camera per week and there are three dozen covering Pendle. That's over 100 hours a week.

"This was always our fear. If they are going to be monitored properly then the control room is not big enough - there are only five seats in the place."

Mayor of Pendle and ward member for Horsfield, Coun Dorothy Lord, said: "What really disappoints me is we got the cameras because of the damage in the main street. Since we've had them many windows have been broken and not once have the cameras picked them up."

Burnley had twice the number of crimes last year than Colne but its CCTV cameras picked up six times more images. Insp Clare said the difference came down to a radio system used by businesses to alert police being widespread in Burnley.

But Pendle Council's community safety manager, Geoff Whitehead, said the authority spends £41,000 a year monitoring Colne's cameras and picked up hundreds of incidents not included in recorded crime figures.

Last year, cameras in Colne were trained on 939 incidents after calls in from the public, they also picked up 606 separate incidents and police requested to view footage 167 times. Mr Whitehead said: "We see it as a valuable tool. The figures are misleading. A lot of things are picked up which don't go on to become recorded incidents."