BIG Brother will be watching - and criminals in Newton and Earlestown had better watch out.

CCTV coverage in the town is to be boosted with a slice of a £400,000 budget to improve surveillance across the borough.

In December, the Newton and Golborne Guardian asked whether CCTV cameras had made the area a safer place in which to live.

Councillors and residents expressed concern about the effectiveness of the closed circuit television system - which watches over Market Street, High Street, Mesnes Park and a number of schools.

The failure of the cameras to capture any evidence during an armed robbery on Bridgford Estate Agents in November heightened people's fears.

Newton councillor Neil Taylor said he believed the cameras were an 'under-used tool' that may not have been monitored closely enough.

But now the new council has decided to act.

Deputy council leader Suzanne Knight said: "The problem with a lot of the CCTV cameras is that they were out of date, some of them weren't working properly and they weren't recording what they should have done.

"This money will modernise the whole system.

"The locations of the cameras will be looked at - we will look at crime statistics and where crimes have been committed and if cameras need to be relocated or pointed in a different direction then they will be."

The Newton councillor added that the revamp has been needed for 'quite some time'.

The council say the cash injection will upgrade a number of out-of-date cameras into state-of-the-art equipment and will go a long way to providing significant results in reducing criminal activity within the town. The closed circuit television cameras blinked into life across Newton in December 1998, thanks to funding from the Government's Single Regeneration Budget, donations from Newton businesses and the Eyes Over Newton initiative.

Each year the people of the town must provide a further £10,000 to pay for staff to scrutinise the service and its state-of-the-art cameras, which are able to zoom in on potential flashpoints and isolate details such as a car number plate to assist police investigations.

Initially monitored at Newton police station by officers and volunteers, a team of monitoring officers, based at Wesley House in St Helens, now watches the cameras around-the-clock.