MONMOUTHSHIRE county council could soon join forces with Caerphilly council in a bid to cut crime in their town centres.

Monmouthshire applied to the National Assembly for £4.5m to provide their own closed-circuit TV camera system, monitored from County Hall.

This would have enabled coverage of eleven the council's schools as well as town centres.

But although their outline bid was successful, they were told the maximum grant they could have was £440,000 - a tenth of their original figure.

Officers had to go back to the drawing board to come up with an alternative and much cheaper scheme.

Councillors on the resources and customer services committee opted to go in with a scheme alreay operating in Caerphilly.

Caerphilly county council will provide the monitoring service for Monmouthshire at a cost of £36,000 to cover the four major towns 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

The scheme will allow six cameras in each of the four towns to transmit pictures back to County Hall for relaying on to Caerphilly.

Councillor Alan Breeze said the partnership with Caerphilly was the best option available to them. He added: "I hope the system will be mobile so it can be moved to hot spots.

"There are sound reasons for teaming up with them. Working in partnership is the way we want to go, and town and community councils have said they'll work with us in this."

Councillor Duncan Anstey said: "We didn't have a snowball in hell's chance of getting £4m from the Assembly.

"We need a mobile system because the difficulty with cameras is that it dispenses trouble elsewhere so we need cameras which can follow the problem." Councillor Chris Wood-house backed the move to go for a joint system with Caerphilly.

He said: "The good thing about taking this option is that we have a good operator. Newport council have been very successful with their CCTV system."

Members were told the monitoring costs will be surcharged to town councils who back the scheme. Costs will be reduced if schools and private industrial estates come on to the network.