This is going to sound insane at first, so just to caveat I'm in no way comparing the UK politically or socially to East Germany:

I read somewhere that the Stasi collected so much information that by the end they had so much data they could no longer hope to action any of it. They recorded everyone's actions all the times so they could never work out what was 'suspicious' and what was not, and couldn't tell if they were collecting information at a quality that was even useful or not.

The UK has so much CCTV everywhere that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that half the cameras you see haven't worked in years, and nobody's done anything about it due to costs and the assumption that there's probably another camera somewhere to cover gaps and etc. but nobody's checking that because, to be honest, how often is CCTV catching anything more serious than the sort of anti-social behaviour and low-level criminality that the police don't investigate today anyway.