Criminals and thugs in Ammanford are getting away scot-free because nobody is watching.

Growing street violence put a Pontaman man in a coma last month, but the town's CCTV system appears to remain an afterthought for the authorities.

A recent meeting of the council's social justice scrutiny committee decided that employing someone to monitor the cameras was too expensive to be justified, even though latest figures proved that without live monitoring, the town's cameras are little better than useless.

According to statistics released by the Community Safety Partnership (CSP), recorded footage from the four cameras in Ammanford town centre has been used in just 31 court cases during the past 18 months - less than one a fortnight.

Combined footage from Carmarthen and Llanelli, the only other towns in the county with similar systems, is used in around 31 cases every month - at least one a day.

The figures show that of all the court cases using CCTV evidence heard in Carmarthenshire during an average month, just five percent involves the unmanned Ammanford cameras.

The statistics prove that without live monitoring - actually having a real person watching the action, as happens in Carmarthen and Llanelli - CCTV cameras are little more than a hugely expensive waste of time that does little to prosecute criminals, let alone deter them.

According to a CSP report presented to the committee: "CCTV is considered to be an essential tool in the fight to reduce crime and disorder."

The report recognised that while CCTV systems in Llanelli and Carmarthen were helping to fight crime, the Ammanford system was different.

"The systems are providing an effective crime detection and safety-enhancement function," said the report.

"The Ammanford system is less efficient, due to the absence of proactive monitoring."

While providing recommendations to improve the Llanelli and Carmarthen systems, the report gave Amman Valley criminals a green light to run wild.

"Current monitoring arrangements in Ammanford, where only intermittent monitoring by police officers in response to incidents takes place, should continue in the main but consideration be given to providing some coverage," it said.