Overview and Scrutiny Committee - Tuesday 31 October 2023, 7:00pm

Overview and Scrutiny Committee
Tuesday, 31st October 2023 at 7:00pm

Agenda

Slides

Transcript

Map

Resources

Twitter

Forums

Speakers

Feedback

Votes

In order to view this webcast, please do the following:

Download Flash Player.

You can download it free at
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ (opens in a new window)

Please note: you will probably need to restart your browser after the installation of the plugin is finished.

Speaking:

Welcome to Folkestone and Hythe District Council's Webcast Player.

UPDATE - PLEASE NOTE, MEETINGS OF THE JOINT TRANSPORTATION BOARD AND FOLKESTONE AND HYTHE DISTRICT AND PARISH COUNCILS' JOINT COMMITTEE WILL BE STREAMED LIVE TO YOUTUBE AT: bit.ly/YouTubeMeetings.

The webcast should start automatically for you, and you can jump to specific points of interest within the meeting by selecting the agenda point or the speaker that you are interested in, simply by clicking the tabs above this message. You can also view any presentations used in the meeting by clicking the presentations tab. We hope you find the webcast interesting and informative.

Please note, although officers can be heard when they are speaking at meetings, they will not be filmed.

At the conclusion of a meeting, the webcast can take time to 'archive'. You will not be able to view the webcast until the archiving process is complete. This is usually within 24 hours of the meeting.

Start of webcast

Share this agenda point

Mr Jake Hamilton
Cllr Laura Davison

2 Declarations of Interest

Share this agenda point

Cllr Laura Davison

3 Minutes

Share this agenda point

Cllr Laura Davison
Mr Jake Hamilton
Cllr Laura Davison

4 Minutes of the Finance and Performance Sub-Committee

Share this agenda point

5 Cabinet Member updates

Share this agenda point

Cllr Rebecca Shoob
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr John Wing
Cllr Rebecca Shoob
Cllr Connor McConville
Cllr Rebecca Shoob
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Rebecca Shoob
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Mike Blakemore
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Anita Jones
Cllr Laura Davison

6 Folkestone and Hythe Community Safety Partnership Plan Update

Share this agenda point

Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Microphone A
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Microphone A
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Bridget Chapman
Microphone A
Cllr Bridget Chapman
Microphone A
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Anita Jones
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Anita Jones
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Jyotsna Leney
Cllr Mike Blakemore
Cllr Anita Jones
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr James Butcher
Microphone A
Cllr James Butcher
Microphone A
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Alan Martin
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone A
Cllr Laura Davison
Microphone C
Microphone B
Cllr Laura Davison
Microphone B
Microphone C
Cllr Laura Davison
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone B
Microphone A
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone A
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Ms Karen Weller
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone A
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone C
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Connor McConville
Microphone A
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Jyotsna Leney
Cllr Laura Davison
Microphone C
Cllr Laura Davison
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Folkestone & Hythe Officer
Cllr Laura Davison
Webcast Finished

Select an agenda point

Scroll with video

Disclaimer: This transcript was automatically generated, so it may contain errors. Please view the webcast to confirm whether the content is accurate.

1 Apologies for Absence

the Overview and Scrutiny Committee this evening. This meeting will be webcast live to the internet. For those who do not wish to be recorded or filmed. You'll need to leave the Chamber for members officers and others speaking at the meeting. It's important that the microphones are used, so viewers on the webcast and others in the room may hear you would anyone with a mobile phone, please switch it to silent mode as they can be distracting. I'd like to remind members that, although we all have strong opinions on matters under consideration, it's important to treat members, officers and public speakers with respect

welcome back members of the Committee and welcome to our guests this evening, thank you for joining us for this meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee we're gonna start with apologies for absence.

2 Declarations of Interest

Mr Jake Hamilton - 0:00:46

thank you Chair, we have one apology from Councillor Godfrey, thank

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:00:50

you, and are there any declarations of interest for this evening's meeting?

3 Minutes

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:00:57

nope okay, we're going to move on to the minutes then and we've got two sets of minutes first, the minutes of the meeting held on the 26th of September, are there any comments on those minutes?

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:01:14

thank you, Councillor McConville, for proposing the mother seconded.

everybody agreed on that agreed, thank you.

and the second set in front of us at the minutes of the Finance and performance subcommittee.

the meeting held on the 10th of October any comments on those, if not, could I have a proposer?

thank you, Councillor Butcher and the seconder.

thank you, Councillor wing, and one content with those.

thank you, Councillor McConville.

OK.

thank you, that's noted.

and we do have some updates following on from the last meeting in relation to the items that we discussed there, so I'm just going to

Mr Jake Hamilton - 0:02:07

pass over to Jake to give us an update on those thank you Chair, forwarding on from my e-mail last week I've been advised by officers that the levelling up slush Foca item they're hoping to.

collates the public consultation and the data in the Smith December, so they should have an update for us in January.

with regards to the housing appraisal, I'm hoping to get an update from officers next week, which are circulated to the Committee.

4 Minutes of the Finance and Performance Sub-Committee

5 Cabinet Member updates

thank you very much for following those things up and certainly

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:02:41

helpful, moving on then to item 5 Cabinet Member updates, we are joined this evening by Councillors, Mike Blakemore, the cabinet member for community and collaboration and Councillor Shoop, the cabinet member for housing and homelessness, and we're very glad to have you both with us and going to invite you both just to speak for five minutes or so about the work that you've been doing in your portfolios and then to invite members of the Committee to ask any questions that they may have so Councillor Shoe would you like to confessed thank you

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:03:20

thank you very much, so I want to go over first of all the buildings that make up our housing stock and talk about neighborhood management and independent living.

then cover of on housing options and homelessness and then finally just touch upon the HRA business plan.

so as regards the

the houses, the homes that make up our account, our council housing stock, we've got work going on to retrofit.

make a start on retrofitting the the whole of the stock, so this there's been two waves of government funding in the first wave, we we've started that and it should be completed by the end of December.

and that will see 125 homes.

retrofitted up to at least IPCC E P C C, including

got 16 homes at Ross House, which meet IPC A already.

the second wave procurement is underway that was completed, for we have a specialist contractors who will also oversee that the retrofit in terms of the design and options, and there'll be a retrofit coordinators or overseeing the whole programme that that contract runs until March 2025.

and that will see a further 300 homes retrofitted again up to at least IPC see and just starting the procurement phase for the installation contractors and that's planned to be completed and on-site by January next year.

the other big thing that's going on at the moment in terms of procurement is the housing and HRA repairs maintenance contract so that the the current contract is with Mears, and you'll be aware that's expiring on the 1st of April 2025 so that current contract covers responsive repairs and planned maintenance and it also covers work done on voids between tenants and some of the compliance work that needs to go on.

so obviously this is a really crucial customer facing service and we've had.

con specialists working on the options appraisal.

and obviously he had some feedback that King.

to USC last month there's also been a staff and tenant workshops of fed into the process, so there'll be a full report with recommendations to Council, and that's looking obviously at the value for money and the level of service that we want to provide to our council tenants and leaseholders.

so that works in its final stages and will come to through this committee in November and also to Cabinet.

and hopefully that the procurement will start later this month.

so moving on to neighborhood management and independent living.

one of the the big, big sort procurement issues there is the Telecare, project or lifeline is would probably.

better understand it, so the reports going to Cabinet in the middle of this month.

and that's to get agreement to consult with affected tenancy in our independent living schemes looking at.

increasingly, the service charges for the current Lifeline service.

and yeah, so we want to make sure that the we're recouping the full costs and the the news, the new.

the new Telecare will and will be more expensive, so this is due to the the switchover from the hardwired analogue systems any telecare system is gonna have to be switched over to a digital service by 2025.

so yeah, we've been working on a procurement looking at the different digital telecare systems.

looking to start the installation in 2024 and looking for to roll out we agree the revised charges are calculating those and charging those in the following year, 25 26

we've just finished the tenant wide survey.

that closed in.

on 31st of August and got 684 responses, and I know the team worked really hard to to get the the responses the response rate up, so I think that's pretty pretty good achievement.

so far that says De team still working on the sort of detailed analysis, but the headlines are that satisfaction has increased in all areas, except for maintenance of communal areas, which has stayed the same as last year, and complaints handling.

has that satisfaction has dropped there, but this is a trend that has been found across the sector, and I think there are some reasons behind that which will come out in the the more detailed analysis, so there'll be a full report coming to this committee in January just before the then be published in the January tenants' newsletter.

so moving on to housing's options work.

and homelessness and home housing strategy, so in this current year we've received a homelessness prevention grant funding totalling just short of 760,000 pounds.

and this grant enables us to provide the housing options and advice service, and that really focuses a lot on prevention work.

so it's LA it's working with people at risk of rough rough-sleeping, it's the work around providing a temporary accommodation.

it's working really closely with private landlords, encouraging them.

to make their accommodation available for homeless households or households at risk of becoming homeless, it's prevention work before people get to the the stage where they are threatened with actual homelessness, so trying to to work with them so that they can remain in the secure their current accommodation for as long as possible.

and with the hope, if they do need to to move on to alternative accommodation that you know proper, long-term accommodation can be secured so that they don't have to go through that temporary accommodation phase.

that the funding also helps with providing a service or financial assistance if that's gonna help with rent in advance rent deposits, if that helps households access pre accommodation in the private rented sector.

the funding has also helped with provision of accommodation, we have had some Ukrainian households, whether the homes for Ukraine replacement has broken down.

I don't think there's that many that have broken down, but that the funding has helped.

with those situations as well, it's also been used to give funding to the Rainbow Sinn Centre to help with the winter shelter.

and there's also been additional funding that helped acquire title of De 29 homes and district 15 of those specifically for Ukrainian and Afghan refugees.

and one of those properties for any other households affected by homelessness, but I should add that those

the the 15 will form part of our H R E in the long term.

in terms of people sleeping rough at the moment, in the district, around 20 cases, at the moment there have been verified.

so we've helped a number

of clients into accommodation over the last month, but there are, you know, people coming in arriving in the district.

rough sleeping, but the that we have the outreach team that continues to work with each of the clients and to try and find them some accommodation and some long-term or support solutions that they need.

temporary accommodation we currently have 35.

households in temporary accommodation.

which I note is an increase on this time last year.

some of the people currently in temporary accommodation plans move on plans are in place for 12 close households and the team has continued to work with the other households to to secure longer-term long-term accommodation.

so that's probably a good point, we're talking about a temporary accommodation, so I attended the summit this morning that was called by Eastbourne Borough Council, and that was had a huge attendance by Councillors and officers from across England.

I'm sure everyone's aware that the strain that temporary accommodation has put on a

the finances of some local authorities later.

and

the Liana was.

I have to say, having heard about the experience of

some other local authorities in the work that preventative work that we're doing here has does mean that the the numbers of people in temporary accommodation

that we have in the District is relatively low, although I know that's absolutely no comfort to the people that our in temporary accommodation, but I yeah, I really want to commend the work that the the teams are doing here.

so yes, we have the cost of living crisis continues, rents going go up, landlords are selling up, so you can't deny that these numbers may well continue to rise.

so I think that's something that we will well aware of the teams aware of.

and as an outcome of the the summit today.

yeah, I'm really looking forward to working with colleagues from across the country to put the case to government that, yeah, we local authorities, local councils.

need huge amounts of support financial assistance to to deal with the issues we're seeing across the country.

one of the issues that really does affect us here in the district is the the local housing allowance, which is.

nowhere near adequate to to meet you know the the rents that we are delivering in in the district.

so that's something that yeah I wanna be taking forward.

so finally, that brings me on to the H are a the business plan which has.

been drafted now.

that will be coming.

to this committee and a couple of weeks' time, and then it will be going to Cabinet.

so the the the plan really.

and are hugely complex, and I really want to again thank officers for all the work that's being done on that.

it's yeah, it has to underpin support the compliance for our existing stock, making sure that though you know we have decent homes for our tenants, it's yeah, we need to retrofit the existing council stock.

and I don't think any of us will disagree, you know we need to deliver new homes, be that building them acquiring existing homes, and I know the team has done all they can to to make the.

the business plan yeah, work for all those things that we desperately need it to do so, yeah I look forward to your feedback on that when that comes to you.

thank you very much Councillor Shoe, but I think the extent of that just shows the amount of work that there is in connection with with housing.

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:17:25

that that we're dealing with as a council.

are there any questions from members of the Committee?

or comments.

Councillor Weeks.

Cllr John Wing - 0:17:41

first, I think of Councillor Suha help out the council waiting this House that looking at the moment is a fairly stable, actually waiting list for housing.

off the top of my head, I think it's a roundabout 1,500.

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:17:55

this is Councillor Carter can correct me.

that's I'll check those figures.

I mean, yeah, it's we, there's no getting around the fact we need more homes, yeah, and I would not be surprised to see that number going up, but the team is acutely aware of it, I think we're all we're all acutely aware of it and we need more limbs.

Councillor McKenna thanks just temporary accommodation, as you

Cllr Connor McConville - 0:18:36

mentioned, that the the numbers you quoted there as a

people, families that are being housed within the district or those families that have been in the district but are being housed outside of the district as well, so is at 35 houses in total that we're supporting, or is, are you just quoting the 35 houses that were were housing within the district?

my understanding is that that

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:19:08

households that we are supporting where where, regardless of where they've had to be supported.

any other questions.

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:19:21

can I just ask about the lifeline issue, because that is something that's been raised with me by residents already where it would be the best place for people to get more information about about what's happening or for members to do that if they needed more,

I will double check on that, and let you know that'd be really

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:19:42

helpful, thank you, because I think it's something that probably is gonna have growing.

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:19:48

there'll be growing questions around it, so it would be useful to know thanks.

k if there are no more questions for Councillor Shupe, thank you very much and we'll move on to Councillor Blackburn.

good evening, everyone, thank you for inviting me to come along and

Cllr Mike Blakemore - 0:20:03

talk about the community and collaboration

portfolio. It's a great privilege to have that portfolio. I do think I drew a lucky straw when I got that one because it's a real pleasure, but it's also really important work. As you know, in our Corporate Plan we have our first service ambition is positive. Community leadership, with priorities to improve physical and mental health and wellbeing, to have safer communities and to support and empower our communities all really really important stuff. I'll talk to each of those three areas

obviously, as soon as I'm done talking.

you'll be hearing lots more about community safety

I attend the fortnightly community safety meetings, which gives me a real real-time insight into what's happening across the district, and we have separate to that discussed other issues as they as they have arisen and obviously those issues include anti-social behaviour, which is, I'm sure regularly raised with many of you.

and it's not always easy to fix, but we have a good collaborative approach there, which is definitely the right one collaboration is a bit of a theme running through through all of this, and it certainly came into play when we decided to bid at very short notice for more than 350,000 pounds of safer streets funding from the police and Crime Commissioner,

and you will have seen, we've just recently been given the OK to announce our success in that I do want to thank Scott over there for leading that bid, but also Inspector Wyles but Scott led the bid, it was a very much a collaborative multi-agency approach to it, he gave it some of your summer holiday to do that it had to be done at a massive rate of knots, but everyone pulled together and all of the partners involved of that contributed and we got a bit together which was ultimately successful.

speaking at the police and crime, commissioner, I do also represent the District Council on the Kent, police and crime panel, which provides very important scrutiny of the Commissioner's work and, as you'll know, that in turn provides oversight of camp place among the subjects we've discussed is one that I'm sure again has come up with you is around the new model of community policing.

and I know that many Members meet regularly with their beat officers, but we haven't got the officers everywhere at the moment and some of them, as in Cheriton, were sharing up the officer with Broadmead, but I don't know maybe, Inspector I was going to update us later on how that recruitment process is going so we can have a complete picture across the district but I think our own experience with them with having that.

that beat officer that community officer we meet with us regularly, and that's been a really really valuable step forward, even if it has meant that we've lost the police community support officers, sadly in the process onto health and wellbeing.

I know that that you'll all be as concerned as I am that many of the health measures locally are declining, whatnot that are poor within the district.

and overall, this district ranks 84 out of 317 local authorities, we know it include some of the most deprived wards in England, there are big gaps in life expectancy, a rather shocking statistic I saw is that.

life expectancy is 52.2 years among the 10% most deprived in the District and 70.7 among the 10%.

least deprived, so we have some really really big gaps.

within within the district here.

I was pleased to join a workshop back in July, which we facilitated and chaired it.

was led by Kent County Council and other partners to consider how we can best work together in future to improve the health of people in Folkestone and HIV, with a particular focus on the wider determinants of health from income, education, social support, safety, housing which Rebecca has been talking about and the environment and that focus on tackling inequality is really important.

also been involved in discussions around the Kent and Medway integrated care strategy, which are shared with some of you an earlier draft of that, and I recently took part in a symposium to develop that strategy further, and I think it's due to be finalised before the end of the year.

the same week I attended the launch of the Kent move together by active Kent, and Medway is all about physical activity, another statistic came out there, which was that we have one of the least active districts in Kent, which is considering how much countryside and see you and everything we have around us is a bit disappointing in many ways and also obviously not good as we strive to improve mental and physical health.

addressing many of these issues does require money which, alas is in short supply in most places, but perhaps especially at Kent County Council right now, but we do boast many strong partnerships and a community that is willing to pull together in search of creative solutions and opportunities well I wrote to Kent County Council on behalf of the District Council about the closure of the library.

they simply told me that they couldn't afford to carry out repairs were looking elsewhere for funding.

obviously we would like to see the library back open again, soon, and perhaps with some other use for that building alongside it, and we will shortly meet with some of those in the community who have got their own ideas about giving Graciela future, because we feel that it's important to hear those ideas out even if we as the District Council come directly change the situation.

I also wrote an open letter to the Leader of the County Council about the proposed cuts to youth services and we contributed a formal response to the consultation and use the council's communication channels to publicise our concerns.

these proposals have the potential to severely damage services for young people and also include removing funding from local youth clubs, including Shepway autism support group, which make an invaluable contribution to our community.

I was delighted to launch the District's very innovative, first of its kind mobile food service, which the District Council has worked with the Rainbow Centre to provide, and I also helped celebrate the first birthday of Hate poetry. Obviously, we would like to be in a situation where we don't need either of those things, pantries or mobile food services, unless we aren't there, so it's fantastic that we've we've developed those and they're providing a really really bright vital service and mobile food service is getting out reaching people so they don't have to face the rigors of the local bus service to travel to where the countries are and we can reach more people more conveniently.

I have also visited our three marvellous community hubs in Romney, Marsh Hyde and Folkestone out of net, with many other groups playing important roles in the district, including cycle Shepway, and I know that, along with my fellow portfolio holders, we've been really keen since,

taking on our brief to engage with as many of these groups as possible and to make the Council more accessible to them. With that in mind, last week I was delighted to chair the inaugural meeting of the Folkestone Community Forum, which aims to bring together many such groups in the town to take a forward. Looking approach. Give as many as we can a voice as Folkestone undergoes changes, including the brighter Folkestone transformation of the town centre and the community forum is a model we hope to see replicated elsewhere and indeed I know Councillor Butcher is involved and Councillor Martin is involved with getting a north Down's Forum off the ground to, and that's very much a living breathing example of how the council wants to work with and for the community

any questions, thank you, Councillor Blake, or are there any questions?

Councillor McConville.

thank you, Mike, obviously you you talking about.

a lot of initiatives, limited funding, obviously I mean we we have.

shared prosperity funding, some of which is meant to be going towards addressing cost of living issues to know if you could just say a little bit about that and where we are in terms of that programme of and where that's being used in and targeted choice is happening, it's going to help we will that life they live and breathe every day.

so there's two parts to that funding.

where in year 2 of 3 years, and so the mobile food vehicle, which has a 50,000 pound capital, spend out of that money that money is spent now and the vehicle is on the road, which is great. All of the wraparound support is being pulled together. There's some revenue that we're gonna be using to do the cookery classes. We are working with East Kent College as well on that, and so that side of it is just being sort of mapped out properly because what we want these people to actually go through a journey and be fully supported in terms of accessing the support, but then having the wraparound support and committing themselves to learning getting the skills up so they can stand in or stand on their own two feet and move forward in their lifestyle. So that's the next stage now with the work that we're doing on that, but alongside it is the household essential fund and that is being spent. I mean honestly this waiting lists for people wanting all the different items, so everything from air fryers to

a year or we utilise our community hubs to give those out as well, and what we're trying to do is we we had quite.

quite a lot of equipment and kit that we gave out during the time the hubs were running running the warm spaces, so the winter period is the time to start to to give this the equipment out because it's low energy, it's helping with utility bills and that kind of thing so the winter is when we were when we will be focusing more on some of that stuff so yeah we're going through that money wearing to we're halfway through it so.

and

my next, my next question I mean, are you with with the remaining funding for for the duration of the project or you, are you looking to include new initiatives, or are you just looking to fund the initiatives that are already in place and making sure they are successful?

yeah, we had to submit an investment plan to the UK SDF so we're tied to the outcomes and targets and

you know the the different pieces of work that we outlined that we were going to do there, there is an element of flexibility, so the additional projects that coming up with things like community gardens, on on the food side of things,

there is a small amount of flexibility and other kind of work that we can do, but majority of it is used to help meet the outcomes, so it's think things like numbers of volunteers that we're recruiting onto the work.

the amount of engagement that were in the reach that we're getting with the projects, so we've got to make sure we're meeting those targets and we might need to adjust projects around that, but generally the sort of remit is set out, as per the investment plan.

any other questions or comments.

let us ask, in terms of the warm spaces that were referred to there, obviously that's something, that's gonna come more into prominence as we go towards the winter.

is there information that can be shared around that, or how is that shaping up in terms of spaces for this winter?

I've just started to ask the questions of our community organisations so asking the community hubs what they are planning to do because they were very successful for them last time, so they created flyers and leaflets snogging the hub and that kind of thing, so once we put that information we put it up on the website and then get the get the word out, thank you.

Councillor Jones,

I just wanted to say thank you to both of you and his really thorough

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:32:11

reports, really great to know at what you've been doing and get a

Cllr Anita Jones - 0:32:13

better idea of what's happening in the district, so thank you that was great.

yes, I'd echo that really useful insights from both of you, thank you

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:32:22

very much indeed thanks for coming to the Committee.

6 Folkestone and Hythe Community Safety Partnership Plan Update

OK, we will move on to the main item for the agenda this evening, which is the Folkestone and Hythe Community Safety Partnership Plan update, and we have with Scott Butler, who is our community safety specialist, to introduce this item Scott, thank you.

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 0:32:44

the reason I don't want thank you for taking time out this evening to be able to see our Community Safety Partnership.

and attending the overview, overview and scrutiny, the reason for meeting today is that we are accountable to yourselves.

as a statutory duty states.

here you will see a slide that shows.

the core strategic partners.

so we've got representatives from Kent County Council.

Homestart can police and focus on hydrogen council, unfortunately others can attend tonight, but it's OK because you got the important ones.

so yeah, well introduce the my colleagues in a minute.

the statutory requirement of the comments sought about 1,009 98 and a police reform Act 2002 states that the Community Safety Partnership exists to ensure that partners collaborate to tackle anti-social behaviour.

our commitments are focused on the highest district council spokesman, hydrate districts and community safety partnership, but we are committed to working together to make the district a safe place to work, live and enjoy reduce anti-social behaviour, crime and disorder and build strong communities we are attempts by our local authorities by monitoring crime patterns through an annual strategic assessment as required in

statutory duty mentioned employer.

we also have a three-year plan that we are currently within.

which is a public document, and you can find that online.

and that just shows not policies and some of the things we're doing.

sorry, that is why you see the community partnership structure, which we have the rotating chair, it's a quarterly meeting and it's chaired between Rebecca possible in case you see Campbell, James, Wales and ourselves at Folkestone and Hythe.

we have the three-year safety plan that I have just mentioned, the sub-groups are key delivery arms of the priorities and the Community Safety units are the operational arm of the Community Safety Partnership, so both the police and ourselves of the Council have a Community Safety Unit.

our safe group, a safe subgroup.

Chas are tonight we've got with us as Rebecca button, integrated family service manager from Kent County Council, and Sam O'Connor, who is the CEO of Home-Start Shepway climate and community resilience, is Detective Inspector James Wyles CC, who spoke to the Kent, police and Gary Scott, who is a senior probation officer who could make it safe for him and then we lead on the community safety elements which is myself and Saville my colleague who was out still dealing with ASB cases this evening, which is why she wasn't able to send this evening.

so this is, as you'll see in the three-year plan, as it was set out, we made a couple of amendments to it for this year.

which you'll see here, we removed COVID recovery.

we've overwritten, we've extended violence reduction.

to include the vogue agenda and prevent awareness, and we've put more focus on young people.

was not the moved, reducing reoffending would just simply be aligned under the climate community resilience section and then we replace it to you.

so that's my skills.

Microsoft Word document edits involved in physician.

yes, the subtle adjustments that we made to the CSP priorities for this year, and that's what will be based in the next 2 year plan on, as well as having these key.

foundations.

every year we create a strategic assessment overview, it helps us to establish our priorities, our commitments make sure that we are on track with our three-year plan and identify areas of need, we can't go into the full detail of our strategic assessment for six months or pages and secondly we don't own all the data so we can't make it public but as part of the Kidderminster information sharing agreement we as parliaments can pull the taster together and make sure that we are on the right track.

I've put a pause for inflation from that that we can share with you from the

office of National Statistics.

so, as you're probably fully aware, the population breakdown for the health districts, a lot of our work does focus around focusing on urban area, and that's because nearly 50% of our population of our district live in our area is also the highest area for crime rate et cetera, while 15% of Kishi citizens live in Hyde urban area remaining 36% were live across the suburban areas and poor whereas,

you'll see climate data here, this is how the police report, the crime data, so we just nick their data for our strategic assessment, you'll see the data here is the total of all crime for all each Ward between the 1st of October 2021 and 30th September 2022 this was the most recent data sets that we could get for.

our strategic assessment that we do every annually between January March.

as you'll see, folks in Central Ward has the highest total climbs, with 2000 2,614 with North Downs has the lowest crime, with only 2 5 7 witnesses reported crimes, so obviously there may be other crimes, but this is what we are aware of and it is being reported.

deprivation data adds value to us and the Community Safety Partnership understands areas of need and also highlights where other agencies may have proven to be working.

so you've said you've already had this information before and it's probably not duty, so if it is, please pass some of this, and this is a fire dates, unfortunately the ward boundaries are historic because the care for us don't keep up to date with all our wards and our boundaries.

but it helps identify and highlight in the same areas you've seen.

in the darker areas of the areas of concern, and it's often the same areas, so it helps us to focus and prioritise the areas in which we're working. The same here is the deprivation map matches very similarly to hospital alcohol data and so it helps us to be aware of this helps us to work with agencies to support those in need in the areas that were working, so we take all this into consideration when we go into an area to tackle anti-social behavior that we're going in with multiple different agencies to be able to identify and support people in those areas with a multitude of different aspects.

our community safety action plan, this was developed in the our annual events where all our partners met together at the Quarter Health in March.

partners were it was not just led, sorry, it's not just ourselves at Barnet and the Community Safety Partnership.

it was partners bringing information and bringing priorities together, as things that they wanted to achieve and commit to this year together might be community safer, so our safety campaigns include the schools roadshow which we've delivered at 7.00 schools, and we've got the last one tomorrow.

working on night-time economy, focus with working with the police to be able to instigate the Best Bar None programme and the new Pubwatch programme.

we've been in a safe winter and safe summer programmes with lots of education and communication which handed out lots of.

community safety equipment and tools at a number of our safety helps them throughout the summer.

PCP enforcement has increased in areas of concern where targeted operations recently at Shorncliffe and the harbour, and a number of joint obligations will work in partnership with multiple agencies, including the police.

but the action plan there isn't public, and it's for ourselves to be able to hold ourselves and our partner agencies accountable for what we promised back in March to make sure we want to track has been updated since the e-mail that I sent out in your copy there, so there's some spare copies here.

as far as I'm concerned the ones at the top of the party ones where a council for the multiple agencies as you go down the list, it's what other people have said that they want to commit to that we're not overly holding them accountable for, but it would be nice if they do complete this as well.

the ones at the top of that thing that you've got in your document are the the party wants to us, we are keen to deliver the ship.

as Mike Coupe my portfolio holder, mentioned just now, we have successfully can now discuss, we've been successfully funded funded by the Home Office for our safer streets programme.

we proceed and of award of 335 and a half thousand pounds and, despite what the press may say, because folks going to see the highest amount because we've got the worst ASAP that isn't the case, it's because we asked for the most, I wasn't putting any Collinson online to say otherwise.

I'm very proud of the team and the partnership that we were able to pull the bid together in a very short time frame through the school holidays.

and I'm really excited by the project that will be starting almost immediately.

to deliver the outcomes for this, a lot of the work proactive work you'll see on the streets will run from the next financial year for a year, so these first six months is helping us to establish.

the purchase of the equipment to make sure that everything's in place, and there is some background behind the scenes working, and you'll see more proactive delivery of street-based work from April through to April, and we have to break it down like that so we could commit to the funding requirements from the Home Office.

you've seen this information, it would have gone out to all members from you and today and myself from Friday.

yeah, we're very proud of this and there will be more broken down information about what the budgets are and help be delivered to stakeholders in the near future, also the logos changed slightly as well since then.

our 24 to 27 three-year plan is currently in draft form, will be presented to court for them to either go to Full Council or to be able to be overs overseen by councillors before sign off before the March 2024 ends.

as I mentioned earlier, it will and the focus on our foundation elements will stay the same, with more emphasis on young people, health and wellbeing over the next two years.

and that's based on the data that we've seen from the strategic assessments and ongoing trends we see with wellbeing.

over to Inspector Wells for some updates on climate community resilience.

thank you, Scotland and good evening everybody.

Microphone A - 0:44:38

yes, the first slide hairdryers focuses on the Kent police control strategy, so this is effectively for the Force, our agreed set of priorities in terms of what we are seeking to deliver through our policing plan through our policing pledge. But I'm really just to give some focus and task into what we're doing, obviously that runs through our local delivery. In terms of the service we provide for the community safety unit, there are three really self-explanatory strands, exploitation, looking round, particularly organised immigration crime, which has relevance to us here just due to the some of the unique pressures that we face as a district child, sexual abuse and exploitation again will always be a priority within that strand.

high harm crime, sir burglary, again there were a number of national commitments, but also forcewide and local commitments on what we do around burglary, particularly around attendance which had dropped off as just part of a prioritisation process over recent years. And there's a real focus now making sure we get out to locations and victims of burglary to provide an enhanced service. Hate crime will always be a priority and alongside that, obviously cybercrime and complex fraud which are ever on the increase are and very much a modern crime trend.

and then finally really an area, a particular focus for us as a district is it is serious violence and abuse, knife crime, street robbery, domestic abuse and serious sexual offences, which will always again be a logical priority for policing.

all of this really surrounds our core golden thread really, which is violence against women and girls, and tackling that as as a thematic, but also child, centred, policing and making sure that we have that kind of spuds and centre and focus for all the activities that we plan in are and how we deliver our policing service locally.

so, as you all heard, probably ad nauseum in reality.

we've had a neighborhood policing review, hopefully that'll surprise this has meant quite a significant restructure of how we deliver community safety policing within the district and the force.

essentially, we've created on district three new teams.

so we have a child centred policing team.

again, that is fairly self-explanatory there there, to provide a range of problem-solving and youth engagement activities very much partnership focus to ensure that we can reduce harm and safeguard young people within the community.

a neighbour task force which is very relevant for our work within the Community Safety Partnership, because the task force is there to lead multi-agency problem solving or are looking to find the most effective solutions to our most complex problems on the district, the heart of the model really is the beat team or a return to a traditional neighborhood policing model where we have in theory I be officer 9th bit officer for every ward as a district we will have 12 beat officers for our 13 wards.

obviously has already been mentioned by Councillor Blair, we have moved away from PCSOs, which has been a difficult process for PCSO colleagues, because I wouldn't one second want to undervalue their contribution to the community policing through the years and we've been very lucky to retain a number of PCSOs within some of the specialist teams that we now have. So, for example, a child centred policing team and task force are blended teams which are combination of police officers and PCSOs so we are ultimately making the best use of both sets of skills.

but the beating really is kind of the flagship piece of the new model and making sure that we have visible, accessible police officers, walking their beats, being engaged with local community and responding to the problems that the local community raised for us to deal with alongside that we have a rural task force so that's a forcewide team albeit they provide a bespoke local service to us as districts as well particularly relevant for OSCs again we have three large rural wards in particular that require that focus or or historically have been a focus for our rural task force.

and overarching above that we have our prevention hub, which is where the majority of our legacy specialist, anti-social behaviour and licensing officers have gone to provide effectively strategic tactical advice on again those problem solving strands within those particular areas of business and also to support our activity in seeking court orders and the enforcement and best use of,

things like community protection warnings, so they're really to kind of guide and support the force in terms of a hub of specialist knowledge, but again we have a number of local Sparks' serious single points of contact that we can reach to when we need guidance on specific areas of problem solving within in particular licensing and anti-social behavior.

again, I've kind of covered that as we've gone along really, I think probably now be an apt time to talk about where we are in terms of recruitment, because again, Councillor Blake will raise that this particular point of focus, so we were very lucky. Our start point to start in quite strong position, obviously is big change of model is a big restructure and does require an increase in the number of police officers within the Community Safety Unit. So the ambition was to start the model with 50% of resourcing, and we were above that

which we know amongst the districts and force we were very lucky to be in that position.

been same as we had a seven out of 12 in post at the start of the model, which was a good, strong start Albie, there has been some change within that pool of several officers. We remain at 7.00, but there have been a number of changes which I will go into in seconds or maybe task force again, we will remain largely stable, we've lost one police officer or for two firearms, he's got the specialist firearms course, so we don't anticipate, we'll be seeing him again and we have retained two of our PCSO colleagues in particular Janet Bromley, who leads on our work with vulnerable adults, drawn from her previous experiences of bandleader intervention officer, so providing invaluable knowledge and again tactical advice within our task force where that vulnerable adult safeguarding and problem-solving sits best

and yeah, within our our choice of the Policing team we started with no one, so we didn't really have the best of starts there and we've had to Troy and Fojut if for want of a better expression, really you by utilising later knowledge within other officers but also asking to be officers to take responsibility or as they are the generalists within the model to try and provide that cover where necessary within the job centre police and work strands. However,

the kind of that logically leads to discussion really about. How are we going to fill the vacancies and we have a roadmap to uplift, obviously starting in that 50% mark when the model went live in early part of June this year, we had a planned uplift for September this year, another one for January, April and then September next year, with the aim to be 100%, resourcing by September of next year. In the most recent triage recruitment we were able to bring another three officers into the team, so we have PCSO Samantha, Maxwell, with our child centred policing team. She joins us from the missing child exploitation teams who bring a lot of specialist knowledge around working with vulnerable children, which has been a great start for us, but also PC Kerry Duncan again, a very experienced police officer who's come to us from the victim-based crime team with again so 18 19 years of policing experience, so two very strong officers that have hit the ground running, which has been great for us and already I'm seeing the tangible benefits of having them available to us and some of the problem-solving work. They're doing

for example, just just last weekend Sam was able to go out and issue one of the first knife replacement kits, so where we have young people who have been involved in knife crime, we have what called pointless knives effectively safe knives, we remove all of the bladed articles from the family home and replace that with a single safe knife for them to use for cooking and it's a really good scheme that we have been able to utilise effectively but again,

since September, they've already kind of got a feel for what's required of them, and already are leading the way in terms of that safeguarding activity, and that that that using that knife replacement scheme is a good example of the kind of benefit they can bring and that focused activity around particular individuals that need that help and support.

within the beating. We sadly lost Connie Farrow, not long after the model started, and that was just a family Beck's decision to leave policing, so nothing can necessarily to do with the the model per se. We would then very lucky to get a PC Bradley Lindridge, who came in and took over Broadmead ward, but within the latest triage model, if we were offered the opportunity to recruit Steve Puntland, at least, which was too good an opportunity missed, because again he's a very experienced officer who's been working in the police station for a long time and there was a real need to have somebody out in this Marsh was with a knowledge of the particular problems they face out there and to build those relationships with the community that were, but you know too would be no win, no agenda or lacking from somebody's perspective, we haven't been able to avoid that visible policing presence on the Marsh that it really needs so

that requiring horse haggling, so we had to transfer Bradley to Ashworth to get Steve Puntland down to the Marsh, but for those of you that probably worked with him, hopefully see the benefits of having Steve down there, because again he has hit the ground running and is already doing an excellent job. There. Steve will hopefully be the first of three officers that I want to bring into a practice rule beat team effectively to cover the mosh water and from the police station, because we just need that focusing attention, obviously from the the data that Scott's already shown us, we focused the sort of the pilot stage of the new model on the town centre, as are areas of dense population are area of highest crime. Highest harm is a logical place to test the capability of the model and has been very effective in that sense. But again, you know that at the same time, we recognised there was need elsewhere, particularly within the North Downs wards. Spin-out of PC George Brace's work out there and already doing are doing a very good job through what's been quite a challenging period on those wards

obviously bringing Steven to the Marsh to start rolling that model out more widely beyond just the town centre.

thank you Scott yeah, so again I make no apologies really follows, because women and girls will always be the priority for my team, what must say is our overarching problem-solving plan, so I can excuse the police acronyms everywhere, but Asara is a problem-solving model nothing more than that, but a.

we have a duty as police, really to make sure that we are tackling effectively violence against women and girls.

and a lot of that is around public confidence and the loss of public confidence in policing, particularly in this area of business. Really nationally, we've got a lot of work to do to regain public confidence in how we tackle violence against women and girls. So again, it's a very important piece of work. It is a weighty tome of a document document, some 10,000 words of plan and analysis of some of the unique problems we have as a district, naturally falling out that we have Pop Leisure, which is our activity, to try and tackle our costings and sexual offences. In particular, we had a particular focused issue with this at the start of the year, particularly our February, where we saw a significant increase in the costings

which were effectively that those events where a person, male or female, but presumably female, is cause to fear for their safety by the actions of another, not necessarily amounting to a tangible criminal offence in its own right, but might be indicative of a precursor to a sexual offence.

it is just a means of mapping, some of the more predatory behaviours we see within the community.

and we saw a big increase in the costing, so obliging was our medium problem-solving response to that particular trend I was able to bid into the Deputy Chief Constables contingency fund and secure an initial five grand of additional money to support some of the plans activity we had there we've already had some really good work tackling some bar,

biggest problems in the area, so we've already identified and arrested three of our highest risk sexual offenders on the district and all of that through funded activity from leisure, one of those had been outstanding for three months have been actively evading the police by living in the woods so it required a lot of focused activity to bring those individuals into custody and all three have now been remanded in prison custody so again a significant risk of community removed.

which I love workaround and practice deployments within the night-time economy are utilising both plain clothes and uniformed officers to try and tackle against predatory behaviours we see with the night-time economy to map those individuals that may be involved and to tackle a few specific problems that were identified through that activity. We've also done some work funding the progression of sexual offence case files to make sure that we get those submitted to the greater prosecution service in a more timely fashion.

those particular fences go to a particular office of the CPS and it is a very complex affair. They are amongst our most challenging case files to compile just because, understandably, the evidential threshold is required and the level of detail so we've directed some funding towards just expediting the submission of those files to try and improve our outcomes for investigations of sexual offences as well. And last but by no means least, we've been doing some work within schools again piloting this within the focusing academy, looking at healthy relationships and sexual education within the school, supporting that from a police perspective, but also trying to gain an understanding. Why is some of our young women feel unsafe in Folkestone? What the areas of concern will be and how we go about understanding that mapping it and tackling accordingly the analytical work we had done identified a particular area of focus around Folkestone Academy, so we've invested particular time in there to try and just pilot and understand how we can make a difference to understand the nature of the problem.

we've also run a number of Hawkins, Walk Vogue events just to try and engagement with women in our local community, some really good activity there on a number of different occasions, and we've made good use of online surveys as well, so I'll try and understand what the concerns are within the community and how we improve that feeling of safety.

alongside our VAWG activity, we have OP century, which always lands very well with the community a really good piece of work, largely in response to community driven concerns around road safety, so would deploy, based on the concerns that fed to us from the community, one of my personal favourites or piglet tackling cooking on the fifth which is,

is a low sophistication, low harm, crime in isolation, but it's part of a national organised crime trend involving over 500 individuals that have already been mapped, so whilst it may appear small scale locally, it's part of a national trend that requires again a coordinated and sensible response or persist is the work that we do with our partners around environmental and waste crime, particularly around waste carrying vehicles.

we also have a halogen alongside that which they're working in, with licensing team around taxis taxi safety in particular, which, within our safer streets, were identified through the PCC's safety survey data. An area of particular concern that we needed to focus on option look is our work again within the Community Safety Partnership as a partnership response, it's effectively clean sweep exercise led by our task force to targeting areas concerned. So our most successful recent deployment would be the state where we work there to do some work to rectify some of the root causes of recurring anti-social behavior at that location, and how we could really root it out through partnership, coordinated response and finally upset her which recurs again we've got this on the 19th of November a week of action tackling knife crime which again I think we will appreciate is a national.

epidemic at the moment that we really need to look at a holistic response to an office sector is our local source or forcewide support of a national operation to just try and tackle this particular areas of concern.

in addition to this, we've also got an update from trading standards earlier regarding our multi-agency targeted operation operation drama,

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:00:53

which we assisted trading Standards into closure or orders on retail premises.

this time last year for sale for the sale of illicit tobacco and sell tobacco to under waiting, so there has been ongoing work there and they feel they've been able to dissolve a serious organised crime group based on the work that we supported and can police.

after business needs to make, but I haven't seen days and annual leave so.

Microphone A - 1:01:17

analog drama is another really good example, because we are particular when we had a locally based licensing officer that was initially of the receipt of support and very effectively and again this shows the benefit that a partnership approach in CSP.

McEwan's voice. Again, those of you who have met before will probably be sick of this as a theme, but my community voice is supposed to be our two way, dialogue platform online. It's our means of communicating our core messages out to the community, but also an opportunity for the community to respond to those threats, and I would urge all of you to to encourage your constituents and partners that you work with just to make best use of my community voice. So we can all extract maximum value from it.

and Scott's just all adds its own here, just a few bits of our recent crime data, so I did a bit of a deep dive into town centre crime because that was there in particular focus for us. The Chief Constable wants to report on this and, generally speaking, it is reflective of the collective work we've done as a CSP to reduce crime within the town centre and it is very good reading and there's no two ways to do that no other way to phrase that really so within Central Ward

we've had a significant reduction of retail crime, so 18% nearly 19% financial year, 14% the rolling year, even more so in Harbour Ward with an 80% reduction in the financial year just under 60% in the rolling year. Again, you probably would have seen that the government are now looking to focus around retail crime in particular, and trying to produce shoplifting. So this is an essential area of focus for us and we've done really good job there. A lot that's driven by our targeting of the most prolific shoplifters within our community and the vast majority of our top 10 repeat offenders are now either in prison custody on police bail or awaiting trial.

we had significant reductions in all crime over the financial year with notable reductions in vehicle crime, and we had a bit of a series within Central Ward which reduced that by 83%, by taking out the core offender there, one male in particular.

in terms of the general approach, we've had a 25% reduction in victim-based crime. 20% in Harbour was 3% reduction in conquered society in Central Ward and 22% reduction in all crime recorded crime. Likewise, we've had a 70% reduction in all crime in Folkestone Harbour Ward, the only area we've seen an increase is an increase in crimes against society that's driven by a 133% increase in drug possession, but that's driven by having beat officers out on the street, putting their hands in the pockets of people that are carrying drugs, so we have had a big increase in drug possession, but that's a natural result of proactive policing within that Central Ward.

was quite crucial with that again is our focus on the outcome of that has been very much about education said the vast majority of our drug finds result in community resolutions, and particularly with our young people, it's folk takes the form of referrals to drug support charities to try and make sure that we have a educationally diversion re outcome to improve the outcome of that charter for that child and finally we've had significant reductions in anti-social behavior.

the highlight there really is in the wrong year in Central Ward, we've had 126% reduction in recorded anti-social behavior, so you know.

really the the improvements across the piece, there are quite profound and I think, reflected in many respects, the implementation of the new model and how that police presence through beat officers has been very effective is now called really to replicate that across the whole of the district, by rolling out the those beat officers across all of the wards to make sure we have the effective coverage and tackling the unique issues for the wards such as the town centre,

thank you, James, and then the last slide here is prevents one of the

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:05:04

statutory requirements as well, so as a community partnership we work closely with KCC and the prevent team to tackle counter-terrorism.

section 36 of the counter-terrorism

act states is a duty for all local authorities to ensure there is a local panel in place to access and provide support for people susceptible, not vulnerable, susceptible to being drawn into terrorism, this was a change in the last.

legislation just a couple of weeks ago, they changed that word.

we regularly hold general panels with people that are susceptible to being drawn into terrorism with Alphabet colleagues.

three more, that's been put out to me this week and we.

yeah, this is just part of the post that the package of Community Safety Partnership, and that's where our statutory duties lies for that, so it's worth mention.

so thank you very much for your time.

is today was just to show where all the statutory duties are that were the council for and that?

we cover it, we've got our professionals here from our different forms, if you've got any questions, thank you, thank you very much Scott.

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:06:22

thank you, it's better when I asked for the update and there are very useful information shared.

I'm sure we do have questions and comments, so I'll invite councillors to ask them.

Councillor Chapman.

Cllr Bridget Chapman - 1:06:43

thank you very much for that I represent, harboured and I've noticed a real difference in in the ward, and people are saying, then that using a difference and I'm certainly seeing a lot more.

police around, so that's really reassuring, thank you very much for that.

I am concerned, I suppose, it comes into that last section of prevent that there are not many people, but are two or three what I would call grifters in the community who are trying to incite racial hatred, particularly towards refugees.

I'm not going to name them, but I suspect if I told you some 90, you'd you'd be very familiar with them.

they do things like I have YouTube channels, they try to monetise it, they will post pictures of.

residents of Napier, barracks going about their business and Cheriton, not doing anything at all and post, and take pictures of them and post them as they look at these people. It gets very sinister, would you like your wives and girlfriends Diana bump into these guys and it's real incitement to racial hatred, and I just wondered if you could say something about how you're tackling that particular those particular individuals that are not they're, not many, there are real as a tiny number of people, but I think that they have a very chilling effect on community cohesion.

yeah, thank you Councillor and I think that is a highly topical,

Microphone A - 1:08:07

highly relevant comment, because there is something that we discussed within the CSP on a regular basis and

I think there is no hiding from the fact that we've seen a significant increase in tensions, I have a running community impact assessment which monitors.

the tensions within the community focused around, in particular, Napier, barracks and some of rather of Margaret accommodation, and we have seen a significant increase in incidents, and there's a definite

demonstration that rightwing narrative and extreme rightwing narrative is gaining traction within the community, there have been a few incidents in reality, often missed, reported and have driven, in particular, social media, a lot that commentary.

wherever we have.

an opportunity to take enforcement against a criminal offence, particularly high crime, that will always be a priority for us as a police force, not just as a as a district, but as a force and nationally we have a duty to tackle hate crime effectively and provide an enhanced service to victims of hate crime.

the issue that we have in terms of how we tackle the online narrative is particularly with the rolling with Miller versus homicide, there is a presumption in law to freedom of speech, even if we find that the nature of that speech abhorrent, it doesn't necessarily make it criminal or and the that particularly ruling gave us a bit of direction in terms of what would constitute inciting racial hatred and we have to work round that that threshold between someone expressing a view even if that is extreme in nature or and probably abhorrent to the majority.

and what becomes and constitutes criminal behaviour, but we will always be proactive in where we have the opportunity to deal with hate crime and to do so as robustly as we can. The other issue really is about how we improve community cohesion and tackle the root causes of that narrative because it will be for us the most effective approach that it is a problem-solving one to remove the opportunity for them to to have that platform, which is how we've discussed it as a community safety partnership, particularly within our our Napier, multi agency meetings, but also thanks Scott and I have discussed at length with Jess Harman, one of the things that I am very keen to take forward is the opportunity to launch the charity Hope not Hate, to try and do some work with us within the district to try and tackle the root causes some of those narratives.

the problem we have is also often self-defeating to try and directly challenge those narratives through our media team, because are we doing it is is then validating it, giving it a further platform. So we have to look at almost ignoring and turning our backs to the narrative. We're trying to get to the root causes of what's driving that and challenging those those incorrect perceptions where we can, and that's often about a targeted approach and not necessarily police led. We can do the enforcement. We have the opportunity to decipher where quite a blunt tool, and this is where we, as a board partnership, and some of our voluntary sector, can come into play in terms of taking a coordinated approach to removing the root causes. But it's a very difficult issue and one that's very relevant for our district because of some of the unique pressures that we face here, with just a number of migrants that are accommodated here and how that impacts on public perception in particular,

we can't avoid the fact that sometimes we have large groups of migrants walking together, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're taking the wrong, but unfortunately, that that falls into the lap of a particular type of narrative, and again it's just tried to do what we can to create and and espouse a positive message and support what we're seeking to achieve.

thank you if I can just make another point in our, I spent quite a

Cllr Bridget Chapman - 1:11:38

long time working with Kent reconstruction network, and one of the things that we found most transformative was giving people opportunities to meet the people that they were so afraid of, because that's transformative you know it's one thing when you're told repeatedly by local grifters that there's sort of gangs of

armed men.

waiting to impose Sharia law on the UK, and it's quite different when you meet awkward and they support the same football team as you and you share a similar taste in music, so the more opportunities I think we can find to to bring people together we can disabuse people of those notions.

unless exactly the community cohesion piece that we're seeking to

Microphone A - 1:12:20

achieve, will look into purring friends of Napier into the Community

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:12:22

Safety Partnership conversation and add value that way, so it's not her, the politics isn't something that's going to go away anytime soon, although with her confirmation that shutting down the hotel this week it's wanting to,

include our community into what we're doing, involved and segregate them.

thank you, that's really useful conversation, any other comments,

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:12:47

Councillor Jones.

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:12:51

thank you, so I've been having a lot of discussions recently in Hayes about the well the closure of the East club and and I know there's a lot of concern in hindsight, this will increase anti-social behaviour. You talked a lot about your prevention and obviously the key is to give young people something to do. I was wondering what opportunities there are through this route to support, perhaps keeping those youth clubs because they are so valuable. I'm sure it's the same for the other areas in the district, but obviously I've been focusing on HIV in that respect.

would there be funding or support from this partnership to help that,

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:13:35

because obviously it could be a huge loss, we don't receive any, we don't receive most of its funding?

for the partnership as a whole, we were able to bid into a police Crime, Commissioner pot which is 30,000 pounds, which I'm sure you guys can know, doesn't go very far.

but we can we're always looking for bigger pots, which is why we're able to put it into the safer streets, pot and anywhere that we are able to develop out of that that we can utilise best practice will be used across the whole district and not just in the area that we will work in.

however, the saying that we've also been working with the violence reduction unit team, who have just commissioned sports connect to deliver detached diversion or youth engagement across the whole district, they will look into just two pairs Park and Co, and the Memorial recreational grounds.

but through conversations with them using data, we were able to insist that they go over to Romney Marsh and late, where there is a lack of youth intervention support as well, so.

it's those conversations that we identify and developing together, unfortunately, where KCC are cutting back these services, we will do our best to support and fill those gaps, but we haven't got an endless supply of money either.

now I realise that I've had a lot of conversations with the Salas

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:14:55

Green who run groups, I've seen HIV and beyond, and as I think what are young people gonna do, and it's going to cause a bigger problem which you don't need secretary, it's really a huge question, everybody's minds, and that's gonna happen in March, so that's very soon. So if we can think about things like that, I think that would make a big difference and I'm sure it's the same focused and I'm sure it's the same on the Marsh as well. We would happily support any sort

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:15:22

of fundraising opportunities that any of those groups work are looking for. We can supply the data from strategic assessments and add

the grassroots and the the passwords that are needed of the number and support from any local charities and commitments and youth groups are looking to fundraising.

we can add some values and weight behind that with the Community Safety Partnership, we have a champions and petitions against Kent Close and Tansey services, unfortunately it's not necessarily such as at best a statutory duty and funding needs to be cut, and they say,

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:16:04

Jyotsna Leney - 1:16:06

just to add to that Councillor Jones, there is a local children's partnership group that runs across the district is chaired by KCC, and I've asked that the closures and the impact and alternative services be a standing agenda item at that meeting, so we can talk about what alternatives there are, how do we link in with schools, children's centres and other places that are already open and,

to some transparent, so I will look at other ways of providing services in Lincoln with our sports providers, that kind of things I want to keep the conversation, live and running at every all CPG meeting that we have, so you know we're not giving up on it we will be pushing the pushing issues through, so let us have any concerns and we can raise those

and I do I do attend those meetings, so I am going to talk to me and I'll take it to those maintenance.

Cllr Mike Blakemore - 1:16:59

thank you, yes, we had a really good presentation from a young person

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:17:02

who attends the Highways Hub, explaining how valuable it is to the young people there and what they have no idea, what they're going to do after March, and we will see a rise in anti-social behaviour which is gonna cause a lot more problems for the district, so I think we need to take this very seriously.

thank you, Councillor Jones, Councillor Butcher.

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:17:25

thanks Chair and thanks for the presentation lots for us to take on

Cllr James Butcher - 1:17:28

board and I was interested in the crime totals by ward, it's page 32 or my.

pdf, because I was surprised to see that just presented as raw numbers rather than per head of population, because when he starts to look per head of population, North Downs East, which is the ward I represent, it seems current disproportionately high, so it's slightly higher than the Marsh wards twice as high as neighboring North Downs West about three times as high as highbrow and I just wondered.

would it not be more helpful to present that data per head and also whether he had any thoughts what's going on in North Downs East?

yeah, we've got good answers to both, that is really good.

Microphone A - 1:18:09

in terms of the the published data, that that that is just how we as a force present that data that's our analytical team, and that's how they presented, I think a lot of it is about showing just the basics and not trying to over complicated because it's going to be available to everyone.

in context.

for them to view yes, they probably would be some value in putting in per head for that be a corporate decision for the Force I can raise that with the analytical team, but again that's just how they choose to present their data but it does lead into exactly what you're saying in terms of that picture because again, if you look at North Downs West compared to North Downs East for example, you've got doubled population in North Danzey, so naturally you're going to have a high degree.

of crime there, but also we have a number of unique issues, in particular within the Hawkinge area which forced a bit of recent focus, particularly with young people, are and crime associated with our adolescent cohort and a number of particularly young people that we've had to do some targeted activity with to try and reduce that offending. And again you know, it'll be no surprise to anyone who's ever lifted Hawkins that you know it's Halloween tonight we have additional resource on, and the majority of that resource is mortgage, because it tends to be for reasons that are it's already clear a mecca for young people that comes with associated anti-social behaviour and other crime types. One of the things we need to look at is violence within young people within the Hawkinge area, and that is a focus for us at the moment. It is part of a default tasking for us, because we've identified that we had an emerging trend, there are, and again we had some concerns about particularly young people

and some of the root causes of those problems within their families as well. So we are doing a lot of targeted activity at the moment through our child centred policing team, but also within the task force to try and reduce those crimes in the area. Because you are quite right, it clearly stands out as somewhere that needs attention and focus. We're very lucky to have George brace or, as the B officer up there, he brings again a lot of policing experience, but also given his background in some of the roles he's done previously are a different approach in terms of that problem, solving and understanding his inability to get into to the detail of the problems.

so Uribe is an issue we're aware we should and we do have a clear and coherent plan for how we're going to tackle in try and reduce it, but again it's very much focused around young people there, and that's why we see that crime in that former.

yeah, thank you and just sounds with the Town Council during the day, and they were mentioned in Jordan obviously very appreciative of what

Cllr James Butcher - 1:20:32

he's doing, which is good to hear as a continuing job right, but no to

Microphone A - 1:20:39

George's real asset and say join us at the start of the new model and again it hit the ground running so yeah we're very pleased with what he's doing already but always room for improvement.

Councillor Martin,

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:20:48

thank you Chair, so first of all.

Cllr Alan Martin - 1:20:54

great presentation, and I echo what you said about Steve I met Steve for the first time last week and I'm really excited about the stuff is already doing around the the ward and on the Ivy church, WhatsApp chat last week there's great excitement as someone actually spotted a policeman in in Ivy Church which was which was great even at a car superb.

so we've we've Stephen Board, I think we're really excited to see what we can do in the community and to.

process, some stronger links, I guess, and create a better understanding and do some education to ensure people are reporting crime properly, and one in particular, I think for me in in inlaid, but I think it's a general, it's a general issue,

so I'll be really keen for us to have more of the sort of community sessions that you've been running, such as the one I attended at the Marsh Academy or earlier this year, and I think you know beyond the obvious of isn't it's a good thing is a good thing to do. I think it's really I think it's really impressed pressing that we do that because I think particularly inlaid there's a real sense that people are some people feel their reporting crime and nothing's happening. Some people who aren't reporting crime other than on Facebook, and I'm aware of a number of Facebook sort of channels that are being set up amongst residents, and these things are being discussed online and quite often I don't think they're actually being reported properly, which obviously doesn't help

you you, you guys out, so I just want to, I think it'd be very positive if we can get the community out.

you can articulate why you report, how you report, what then happens when you report, I think it's also important that they

they have an opportunity to.

feedback some of the frustrations that they've witnessed themselves on on reporting, because I've in my short learning curve as a councillor, I've gone from not knowing how to report myself to encouraging everyone I speak to to report and then actually experiencing some of the real friction that people have.

the reporting stuff and it it isn't, it isn't easy, and I now fully understand why people.

don't always feel like reporting through the through the proper channels, so I think it'd be great if we could, as a community and lead, get all of that out on the table, I think they have the benefit of ensuring that us as Councillors on the Marsh can support you in making sure that you're well equipped with good reporting and good community engagement to ensure that we can respond to to crimes.

but I'm also slightly concerned if we don't do it, we we we might have a slight rogue element.

developing and people will start trying to resolve these things themselves.

yeah, thank you, Councillor, I think he hit the nail on head perfectly, then I think there's there's no illusion in my mind that we see significant under-reporting from the Marsh was them, and I think that is because historically, you've had a lesser police service out there by virtue of no lack of intent, but just the realities of the availability of officers to draw the town centre, where most of our crime volume happens, most of the harm that occurs in district happens within the town centre and obviously the police station is here in the town centre. Whilst we do have a police station at Leeds, not all of our

local policing teams are those to deal with the response work have officers based at the police station, so yes, there is always compared to the rest of the district, probably a lesser police presence, or on the margin, and that affects confidence.

we are aware of of instance where we find out after something's happened where people have tried to resolve it themselves, particularly feud with him between particular families that seemed to recur and we find out about it only when it escalates to quite an extreme level, so there are issues that we recognise that there are and again for me that's why it felt so important that we got the right officer there as quickly as possible and Steve is a step in the right direction. He's not the the the the panacea because ultimately there is a broader issue there and it needs more than just one person, but it's a step in the right direction and is also the right person with the right knowledge in the right place, and I think that well, as you said, I recognise that Bally or Andrew quite right, Scotland, I've spoken about it in terms of our local engagement. Meeting the one we had at the Marsh Academy was great and a really good forum for discussion as part of that recognition of the need to have a disability. But we've got our next ones in Hawkins, but we're looking to roll into another one almost or an additional 1 4 on Marsh, again just to try and have that form and get that discussion.

continuing.

really just to make sure that people do have confidence to report in terms of the concerns she raised about the reporting mechanisms, you're absolutely right, there is an unprecedented level of pressure not just within Kent but nationally or on the the police reporting mechanisms if anyone's had the misfortune to try and dare one or one you'll probably be on the phone for up to 40 minutes just because of the number of people that are calling that line at any given time, so the demand is unprecedented and increasing.

we are as a force with, with our limited financial resources, working hard to keep pace with that, but it is a continuing challenge.

we always then would signpost people to the other means of reporting, such as live chat and the online reporting tool, that again may isolate some members of the community that there are less technically confident and one that presents an issue as well, particularly when that might be some of our more vulnerable within the community as well, and even the online reporting tool can be quite time-consuming. So we as a force recognise those issues and the barriers they create and and their ability to undermine confidence in policing by people not wanting to report, and when people aren't reporting, we don't have a true picture of what the problems are, and then we can't or are arguing for the resource distribution. We need to tackle those issues and again with a limited resource that we have. Admittedly, we have the highest number police officers, we've ever had as a force, but we still have a huge amount of demand and we have a limited amount of resource, so we need to be targeted with how we use that and the way we target acts by understanding what the problems are, and our understanding comes from reporting, dialogue and community engagement. So it's on us to try and prove that public confidence to improve community engagement and encourage people to report, even if the tools for doing so are as good as they could be,

yeah, that's that's great, thank you.

any Councillors who have not spoken want to come in Councillor McConville.

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:27:39

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:27:42

phew a few things on the priorities Scott.

obviously, you've you've put from the last for the last years one where you put reduce offending.

you've now put it as reduced reoffending, which to me seems like a very completely different.

things, so it is, is that does that meant to be reoffending, so is there now?

a specific priority in terms of targeting offenders and programmes associated with that, to stop them reoffending, or is it still just really just trying to reduce the offending? Overall, we plan to produce all offended, but we're now working more with probation and to be able to tackle and work with those who are leaving that off in probation and working with youth. Offending teams to do more work on tackling reoffending, not when doing less work around offending, because there's still more police officers on the beat as a

increase but.

yeah, we're now doing more productive work into tackling reoffending, as well as over-lending, and specifically just youth, reoffending or or or all managers of of reoffending, so any anyone really coming out coming into legitimate probation services in the district, yes, we're working closer with Gary Scott who is our senior probation officer.

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:29:08

who attends a CSP, so when they come up with the safety plans we're linked into those were the police officers are more proactive on the basis that they get to know individuals.

and should be able to tackle the

retail crime was a recent proactive work that the police have been doing, but there has been more work we've been doing with the development of a new project with young people to try and break the cycle it's working with young offenders to be able to,

get them back into education, employment and training.

that happens on a weekly basis down at 3.00 hills, and it's identifying young offenders predominantly.

who need to just be Les VHCCs, you'd be motivated, better, get back into the system as such.

see it, there are a couple of budgets that we've been working on to tackle, offending and reoffending in both adults and our street population, community and all offenders, as well as young people, is

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:30:20

excellent priority and affect sympathy with the action plan.

not quite sure.

it's obviously RAG rated Red, Amber Green, but I mean, could you just explain how that rating works, as it is that the likelihood of delivery, or is it the the complexity of of the action, or what what does read?

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:30:46

so it's very much just for me, a succession of completion, so that is nowhere near where I'd wanted to be at this stage as far as we're still required it was ago.

Amber, is often on track and in either is usually part delivered green, is that we've successfully delivered what we intended, but the budget might still be ongoing anyway.

the priority areas are those in the top section.

as far as for Community Safety Partnership and the priority ones, as you go down there as different education sectors and training and things that other partners are promised but not necessarily essential to the delivery of our policies are just nice to have, which is why I've put it on there because we are accountable to it but we're not fully or cancelled to the public.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:31:38

broadly make sense, as that's helpful just pick up on it on a on a couple of the of the action points, one was sort of raised earlier, the integration of the migrant community

and it obviously says that it's requiring its own specific action plan.

to deal with that. So I didn't know there's a there's an update of, but when the action plan would would need to assume it needs to be done by March and and would we as Councillors have a chance to sort of get a bit more information specifically on on on that item? Obviously, it's something that we're all very concerned about. It's a bit more sensitive, which is why it hasn't necessarily gone into the document,

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:32:23

but there are ongoing conversations, we have a multi-agency meeting with Napier barracks on a fortnightly basis if it's not, that's what at least, it seems like. We also meet with south-east Kent partnership migration group Joyce, we give us more information on that, but there's a lot of work between

different agencies, including prevents and friends of Napier, to deliver projects and tackle some of the concerns, but it wasn't necessarily suitable just to mention in hedges the fact that we are doing work and we can't necessarily publicise everything with it.

and you did set out early so that this fund, just above, that

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:33:07

improving prospects for youths and funding allocated to to the boxing clubs, so Shawbury is very, very happy about that, but I mean, could you expand, maybe on you mentioned a little bit before to a neat question but you know any other any other.

things that have been trained in terms of dealing with that specific action point yeah, so that was in and around some of the diversion

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:33:36

work before the Sports connects funding was confirmed by the violence reduction unit we secured 4,000 pounds from the police Crime Commissioner to be able to tackle anti-social behaviour and,

some of the serious violence was happening in rural Pears Park, so we have done some background with doesn't map in in some of the young people, and we prepared them into a boxing sessions at 51 that are funded by us so.

opportunities for them to go in.

have some engagement with the boxing sessions to take out some of the other question in anger when work with some young youth workers so yeah.

that helps play up some assumptions that was on the streets that we funded through some of our PCC funding.

and then the last one, a taxi safety.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:34:34

in sort of reading between the lines, it's more potential to utilise taxi driver knowledge regarding drugs, sex working et cetera, et cetera, so it reads more like a more you want to bring to taxi drivers more into a collaborative discussion about crime reduction, that'd be fair assessment, yes, if what we've seen that works well as a puppet

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:35:01

scheme which is bringing all the licensed venues together to better understand.

individuals are concerned that they will have in and to be able to utilise education enforcement powers to be able to tackle those concerns that we've now got and establish Pubwatch for them.

we like the idea of doing something similar with the taxi drivers as well, they know where all the bottles are, they know where the trucks tins are they often end up doing a little bunding without necessarily realising.

it is about promoting some of the emergency core services that can be utilised by taxi drivers and some of their local knowledge were also running safe as a taxi scheme as part of the safer streets project, which is making sure that members of the public are members of the community know what a licensed taxi is, how you can hail a cab where the safe areas are to be able to picks up from will be doing more work around lighting signage etc. In those taxi ranks and having marshals patrolling those as well in the night-time economy.

and a leaf that has been created by our licensing team about set caps how to use caps where to find capsule the difference between Hackney and

the other ones.

yeah, that was very much a licensing led project, they wanted to lead on and we've just held them accountable to them.

an extension of that that would make a lot of sense to me.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:36:34

another group of people that have extensive knowledge of the local area, people that work for Just Eat UberEats Deliveroo.

probably a lot harder to coordinate than taxi drivers, because you know that if there was some way of bringing those and often a lot of them are taxi, drivers, moonlighting, doubling up, etc etc

and again.

they hope that if you if you had a chance to utilise some of that local knowledge as well, that would that would go a long way.

I mean, I understand, understand the point of like marshalling taxi ranks and all that, but as someone who's frequently out in the town until 1 am on a Friday and Saturday night there just aren't any taxis at that minute I mean the taxi, the taxi ranks,

empty and most people know not to wait not to wait around for them, they call and they stay, where they are until until the taxi comes and gets, and so it's not the hopefully that that picture will change, but it's a real, it's a real tough time for taxi drivers at the minute we've noticed that and it's from our understanding conversations with

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:37:41

taxi drivers, the reason they're not outwards for their own safeguarding purposes, so they often would rather use the pilot Saturday nights to do in the deliveries and hubris and things, so we identified that that may be an area of expertise that we could tap into. But if we use taxi drivers first, we can cross that border and build those relationships as well.

and we've included taxi marshals in the safer streets to be able to safeguard members of the public, leaving night-time economy to ensure they get safely to taxis, but also to be able to have taxis have a safe space that they can report mechanisms and concerns we will look into install dashcams.

into taxis unfortunately allowed as part of the bid.

some of that to realign some of the funding for that so.

that is part of the policy is to be able to increase the communication between taxi drivers in our partnerships, and they have a safe mechanism that they can report concerns or they can have a place to go if they don't feel safe

at the same time, as not just safeguards in the member product or safeguarding the taxi drivers as well, therefore hopefully increasing the number of taxis out in that time.

I have some more, but I am happy to pose for if anyone else wants to come in.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:38:57

can I say if I wanted to come in very quickly on the unsafe taxi points that I think is.

Microphone A - 1:39:02

the important point raised that when we looked at the PCC's safety survey data, there was a clear concern within the local community around the safety of that area of public transport. So across the piece in most other areas, that safety survey, folks them and how I performed very well and looked community feel very safe in and around the town, but in particular that that wasn't replicated within the taxi. Use of taxis part public transport, so that was why it was highlighted as a particular area of concern, and so requirement is this too, so I assume that one is that it is the maximising the opportunity to gather information from or and encourage reporting from taxi drivers. We're lucky through the the safer streets, funding that we have a number of training and education programmes, including about domestic abuse, violence against women and girls, which, again, historically taxi drivers, have been a crucial part of that picture and understanding what's going on reporting those offences? We have active bystander training as well, so we have a number of very relevant bystander training programmes and that will help those within not just the taxi drivers, but those within the delivery industry as well, because again, as you quite rightly point out, they're kind of in and out and about within the community they have those always nice where we wouldn't necessarily have them otherwise so it's making sure that we draw as many of those individuals into those training programmes as possible to some maximises opportunities to have them supporting the community.

going back to some of the points that the Scot made earlier, that we have a recent context example where it's actually driver helped us locate two members of a local county line and that we're dealing drugs from an address in Folkestone. So it was a taxi driver that pointed out that two young men Bunk affair told exactly where they were and we found them in there running a counter drug lines, so it shows the value of those those the those professional drivers within the community and how we, as a community safety partnership, need to maximise that knowledge. We utilise it as effective as we can, but also just to tackle that specific concern that seems to arise with the community about the safety of the taxi service we provide and the town

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:41:06

thank you, I just just want to ask whether there are colleagues from the subgroup on safeguarding and domestic abuse wanted to highlight anything to the meeting, will come in on any of the points that have

Microphone C - 1:41:16

been raised, I just took them out with taxi drivers we did some training for over 200 taxi drivers that the taxi companies all bought into around child sexual exploitation so that's

obtain with that, and that was really useful and, like say, domestic abuse, awareness for taxi drivers in cars.

criminal, exploited young people as well.

some of that. You know about the domestic abuse champions. So yes, we

Microphone B - 1:41:45

have a team of domestic abuse support practitioners, who are we've trained the champions, so we've got domestic abuse to only the DA champions who will go out and train the public, so we we, we, we're rolling this out at the moment and what we will do is they'll have a champion within their their organisation who would be able to signpost and alert to it actually came to them, and then there was a domestic abuse issue. They would be able to say to them. This is what you need to do. This is how we need to deal with it. So you'd have a specialist within and we've we're looking at and currently in talks. I think there lies Clifford, try their staff, so you'd have one person with it within your work in teams that would do that, we're rolling that out, so we've got the seven super champions at the moment that a role in that piece, those pieces have worked out so and anybody businesses, local businesses,

local organisations can access that training and it's free as well.

would it be possible to share the details of that with the with the

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:42:48

Microphone B - 1:42:50

committee account April would signpost people to taking part, and that's as a good initiative, but there is that there is a link that you can access if you were sure your IQ or one of your colleagues to become a champion so I can share that with you and then we can return to trend small pupils operate five,

our aspirations that every company in Folkestone Hyman district has a

Microphone C - 1:43:10

domestic abuse champion who can signpost and through that changes are missing this tie it links to other things as well criminal exploitation of young people, sexual exploitation so it's not just specific for domestic abuse and what I'll do wanna really plug is are Safeguarding Roadshow which has been an absolutely fantastic thing we've done we've done at the least give footfall.

for a few years, but we we thought we'd take it on the road and we've gone into all our secondary schools and talked about all variety of safeguarding, says in presentation around violence, reduction knife crime, prevent hate crime, positive relationships are domestic abuse.

and

online grooming, and it's been what I really want to say is our young people are year, 9 have been absolutely fantastic and I think no, they get a bad name, I think our young people and to see 200 Year 9 13 year olds dancing and doing the conga and then listening to really serious things about knife crime and young people who might be killed has been phenomenal and it's been really successful, so I just wanted to plug our young people because they are our future.

and you know sort of Lincoln, we did a youth survey, so they told us where they felt unsafe what sorts of things they'd given us feedback on where other things services, I'd like to see, and of course the new survey talked about youth provision as well and things like that so that we all feed into and say this has done the rounds or keep surveys well it's all of that will feed into but yarns being and if you think that's over 1,000 young people have been brilliant.

consider them plugged, thank you very much.

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:44:59

Councillor Wheale, Councillor Elaine Martin, did you want to come in at all, otherwise it's back to Councillor McConville, apart, too?

show.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:45:15

thank you thanks for that, but you are always going to, I was going to ask how the road show it sort of worked in the change of direction from from previous years, so it's good to know that it's working well, he knows sometimes you need to take people out of their comfort zone to sort of get that sort of engagement says it's good it still happens in.

in in the schools where they are didn't know it.

you update some some things that hopefully are still going on, you still have a one-stop shop 4 4 4 4 all that sort of what happens there are few a little bit about that and that you know that any sort of key focuses for that may be moving forward.

adult safeguarding week and if anything there you know all the.

normally we'd get a separate report from from what you like, what you have all been up to, so it would be some verbal update to be would be really helpful.

yeah, the one-stop shops are running and face to face and flexible years, and we get, and I split, between two six, sometimes eight individuals there, we have noticed a rising older clients, that's been that's been noted over the last few sort weeks but as it is very busy it's very busy quite complex cases had quite a few homeless.

applications going through people fleeing but yeah, it's been very good, though to say, but yeah, we're still working with our partners, we are looking at the protocols and good practice so we just reviewing those to make sure they are up-to-date, and you know all the the guidance is that you know we will work into the same guidance across the county with his so that's all been in place and we're working with our partners to ensure that we've got the right people back, so we we we appreciate that not not every organisation can be there and I think through COVID we've learnt that we can do phone contact appointments, you know there's different ways of working now

but that's obviously, for our key partners there that can do that in some advice, which is where we're there, we have the the, it's a service there and you know sort of the the early help workers and then obviously we were worried that we work by partners, police, housing and and all the rest of it but so we certainly cut for a wraparound service really,

and another pleasing when we when we spoke last time.

we were sort of, there was a big focus on the the upcoming World Cup that happened last.

December, you know that we'll we'll worry about a big spike in domestic abuse, I don't know if you've time to sort sift through that that I mean was that was that realisation, sort of justified and and has anything been put into place, sort of had already been lessons learned out of that or was that over the numbers just pretty much as as they were and there wasn't there, wasn't that increase that was was proposed or suggested

Microphone B - 1:48:27

yeah, I mean, I think Jones better than May, but there is definitely in there pigs' all sorts of events and things, and I don't think that's changed.

I, I think.

Microphone A - 1:48:37

we didn't necessarily surgery and the Qatar World Cup, but it was a fairly unique World Cup, I think, given the time of day and not the matches were played at the general reduced interest in it for a number of reasons. It was a fairly unique World Cup. We had a obviously divisional, broaden sofa for these divisions, problems commander for communities and partnerships and went to the planning, meetings and discussions, and they weren't, certainly from a police perspective or any noticeable increase that we expected because we have said it before and we usually do seizure in a World Cup, but we didn't see as much during the Qatar World Cup, but I think that was down to the vagaries of that unique tournament in many respects. A lot of early matches before people could really get themselves, steaming drunk and

in England did relatively well, and that often affects sadly, the the the the the the the outcomes for the partners that were affected so yeah, we didn't necessarily see it this time round, but it is definitely a trend that we're alive to because it is a recurring theme through any major sporting event.

as Scottie and then yeah, there was a couple of points for yourself, James.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:49:41

firstly, it's good to see our piglet it was, it was a discussion last year

and sadly, I know I know of many restaurant owners and things that are still having to struggle with.

oil theft and cost of living the price of oil is actually going up, they actually say they're actually losing more abide by having it stolen, so it is good to see that as a focus, another key their focus there was considered quite a priority was catalytic converter theft, so I don't know how high on the radio that still is, you know you know is there is there anything as specific as as as one of the four looking at that nationwide or,

yeah yeah, you are quite right that that is a significant national trend remains one.

Microphone A - 1:50:29

it has been a bit bizarre for us as a district because it tends to come in small clusters, so we'll have nothing and then we'll have a series of offences that are in one or two nights and then nothing for four months and we haven't seen any thefts for quite some time now that suggests coordinated targeted activity, bargainous crime gang and they're clearly mobile we did have a local operation running in six successful outcomes so our chief constables crime squad,

convicted two individuals for offences relating to Catholic convert festival and a series of offences we did some quite prevention work, looking at some of the more vulnerable vehicles mapping where those vehicles were we had catalytic info of compared to marking schemes we had a smart cat kits to to chemically mark the Catholic verses and just gave some general crime prevention advice to the owners of vehicles that more vulnerable to being targeted.

offset or to promote, as I say, we haven't seen or haven't been that badly affected over perhaps the last 12 months.

but as I say, it's a spike in crime trends, so it could occur at any time, I would, probably, when it does occur, will probably see a cluster of them, but we have had some success in prosecution and successful crime prevention and at the moment we haven't necessary cinema cameras at that.

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:51:46

and I would worth mentioning as well we did see an increase in high political vehicle theft, and we did a little promotion around that as well, with similar sort of being educated people that are vulnerable and susceptible to it, and we had lots of community safety partnership.

body bags made up of people, so their keys into it, to be able to prevent that, that Hospice told him from St James's to put more information that as well.

Ms Karen Weller - 1:52:13

I just wanted to add as well with regards to the festival we'll a lot of and I'll work as she crosses over to our environmental protection side of things and my officers engaged with the locations of shops that are experiencing this either we tried to put cameras out to places that are being hit more than once and generally it's used oil that is actually then collected and we then work with those to actually make certain that they have.

a a waste collection put in place and that if they have, we then check to make certain that that's actually still running and that they are also then expected to put their waste oil in certain areas, either locked away or not just left outside waiting for somebody to take it way, so it doesn't cost them anything to get rid of it, but we then have the knock-on effect of potentially that oil being used and then empty canisters with a substance that needs to be checked and then it's a cost to try and get that removed. So across you know it's a black partnership working. There's also the internal different departments that work very closely together to make certain that everything is being checked

possible dreadful, no sorry.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:53:29

you mentioned county lines.

chairman, I am pretty sure I know the incident you're referring to yeah, one of my questions was under the new sort of community neighborhood model.

get rid of things like previous things that were considered quite important, so you know, county lines and the drug issues we have definitely, if I said, would all work all across the district things like cocooning.

so, although sort of those those sort of key priorities when it went to that, whether they fit under this, this new neighborhood policing model will again, when they are in many respects, fit across the piece

Microphone A - 1:54:11

because of the different impacts of that crime type say it drives not criminality, particular retail theft is directly connected to our councils drug offending

cuckoo indirectly relates to our vulnerable adults and their exploitation at our work, collectively going through the district vulnerability panel, to try and map and understand and problem-solve around there's more vulnerable adults.

but the short answer is the bid team are there to do the community engagement and most of our county lines activity comes from community led intelligence and, where we're out speaking to people gathering intelligence and information that leads to a better understanding of where the county lines are operating we do as part of our specific problem-solving activity around county lines drug supply we do a programme of cookery Safe and Well checks and we had a success again during categorised stratification week we had a dive of targeted action this week for last the sort three weeks ago.

we had a day of action and we located are practically a county lie within the dress with a vulnerable adult that we'd gone to specifically to see what they'd been cooked and they were, so we are proud to be doing that work. It seems very much of the big thing in terms of just developing that broad pitch within the community, but also for our task force to work with our county lines, drug team with partners to really build understanding and target those launched. We have a good understanding the county lines that are active within the district, but it's a very, very dynamic picture and it changes an almost daily basis so that community intelligence is called at the core of tackling that problem.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:55:50

thanks very much sorry just in response to that as well, we have our district contextual, safeguarding meeting where we talk about young people.

Microphone C - 1:55:54

locations, etc. I am thinking of being criminally exploited and we work very closely with their missing child exploitation team Kingston, so it is a real multi-agency.

task force, I suppose you could call home.

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:56:12

but if because I mentioned it because it becomes business as usual, so you must be able to think of us as anti-social behaviour, but the police are leading on it form an enforcement and information gathering safeguarding and youth intervention are working with supporting young people when the CSA is the day-to-day operational ones that,

we meet with a number of different partners, whether it's Yavin passes or might feed something to us or Pubwatch or someone said something we identify and map groups of concerns we see which properties they go into, we work together as a partnership to do closure orders, I think we've done six in the last year shutting down properties most of which are linked to county lines and drug dealing and yeah, so we forget some introducing the priorities there and a kind of community resilience, but it's just becomes our business as usual.

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:57:11

thanks for that, and I guess my last one last point is, as I said at the last couple of years.

for me, one of the most beneficial aspects of knowing about what's what's going on in as as a councillor.

was there a sort of semi, regular, briefing sessions where you, especially if you wanted to find out board specific information and obviously that there's been a chain of staff and that it would be nice to know that that that engagement work is still ongoing, I know there's events in the wider community but obviously you want to information sharing and everything that those 30 Councillors that,

we know that no, there was very well now they have good sources of information, so I'd still hope that one day we get we get something back up where we can have those regular communications from me, you Eastwood canopy road wreck.

I used to I used to pretty much every every six to six to eight weeks, I'd get an update of what's been going on, otherwise I'm only getting second-hand third-hand information via the Leeds Guildhall Street, for example, if we'd had some sort of briefing or just not all the details but we could we could combat false information being put out online about what's going on etc etc so I think there's still a big benefit for for having some sort of communication with with elected members.

on a regular basis thanks yeah and I think from a police perspective,

Microphone A - 1:58:43

the point from the wider partnership. That's that's something we aspire to achieve, and I think for asthma police perspective and speaking quite sort of unilaterally. In that respect, we've been focused on bedding in the model, but a key expectation from officers is that regular newsletter on their ward, and that's saying we're working on now to make sure that we consistently deliver that what we do have, though, is a monthly ward surgery or on every ward, every month and straighten up to an incident Guildhall Street we had the coffee with a copy of in in. That was on the same day where we had the opportunity to kind of speak to the community, that it would be a riot. This is about Scott, and I obviously talk about the issues that come up within the community that are relevant for the partnership on a regular basis and likewise, particularly through the the the the district, actual safeguarding meeting the district vulnerability panels, serious organised crime panel that we, these various forums, we have for discussion. We raise lots of things that again, the police and value of briefing out. I think that's down on us as a CSP to make sure we are sharing information more effectively with with those that need to hear it

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:59:45

that is why we implemented our local congressional races against those who have established report them back, they didn't happen as well through COVID for many reasons.

but we aim to hold them quarterly, we've been doing that they, we told them about the districts, it's not just focused and it gets them,

but the idea is, we cover district wide issues and then we make it localised as well to the areas that we're seeing those consents, so the next one is at Hawkinge at 6 p.m. On Thursday, the 9th.

we are also looking to re-engage another one it leads properly in December, which definitely isn't three months afterwards and we've just mostly Swann was held.

just at the end of summer at 51, unfortunately the attendance isn't great so although we promotes it three weeks ahead we share with Councillors it goes out through our comes when it's disappointed when we only get to see people attend as more practitioners are the newer members of the public so we're still motivated to deliver them but we just need some support space shorter by people who are attending.

that wanted to hear the messages.

Cllr Laura Davison - 2:01:00

thank you very much. I just a couple of quick things as we draw the meeting to an end. I think unless any other Councillors are desperate to come in and but just on the point about those meetings that used to take place regularly with Councillors, I would echo what Councillor McConville said. I think they were really useful and one of the good things about them was that they were online meetings, so they were flexible in that regard and they were easier in some ways for councillors to join collectively, so they were quite efficient, so I think we would welcome those coming back, even if it's not as regularly perhaps as it was originally. If there's a

I appreciate its additional resources and my other, but just two quick questions where one is there a date for the winter, well event.

as yet, because I think the one that was held at Volcker, if we're thinking about something similar was was really good, we had coats that people could come and collect, so I just wondered about that

Jyotsna Leney - 2:01:52

choice now they're going to a different area this time.

they're not repeating it in Folkestone, so where are we in our district at all? That's a shame, it is a shame. It would be lovely to have had that repeated in some ways if we had to build up to it. We could've in the summer started those conversations and done something localised, but I didn't know until very recently that they're not going to repeat it in the same location. They want to take out a family at 1.00 to Ashford and other areas, so they're gonna be doing it on a rotational basis, so we'd have to try and buy for some of their NHS resources and things and but there's one UK, there's a number of local people that we know that we could do something small scale, maybe through one of our community hubs. I'm sure we can do something little bit late in the day now to organise something specific, but maybe our community hubs can can do still do something sort of in each of the areas. I think that'd be good, yeah, I can't raise up with them. Thank thanks, and just the last point I think just

Cllr Laura Davison - 2:02:48

you might have covered this already sorry in response to that, we've

Microphone C - 2:02:53

been obviously not having winter out but for adult safeguarding week, the 24th November. If that's the for holiday, we're gonna have our usual sort of adult safeguarding installed in the Bouverie town centre, so it won't be a winter well, but we'll get all our agencies

Cllr Laura Davison - 2:03:11

that thank you, you might have covered this already Scott, I'm not, I'm not sure because it was quite a long time ago now earlier in the evening or Councillor Blakemore. I don't know if you want to come in, but just to remind us with the plan, the next formulation of the plan. How that will come back in front of Members will will that be coming to this committee and when

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 2:03:30

so our draft of three-year plans already in action it's been scheduled to go to CL T.

and then it seems there has decided as to how they presented, which level when it comes to yourselves, so I don't know.

Cllr Laura Davison - 2:03:49

any complaints, a holding letter at this stage, or is it too early to say?

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 2:03:57

it goes to members of art that just does not show us to have its full Council or not.

yeah

Cllr Laura Davison - 2:04:05

OK, thank you watch this space, I think, is the answer to that one.

if there are no other comments or questions from Councillors, and we do just have a recommendation to note the report, and I think we'd all like to thank our guests for coming today, so are we all, in agreement to receive and note the report that's been in front of us agreed, thank you very much thanks everybody for.

spending the time with us this evening and thank you Members goodnight

Overview and Scrutiny Committee - Tuesday 31 October 2023, 7:00pm - Folkestone & Hythe webcasting

Overview and Scrutiny CommitteeTuesday, 31st October 2023 at 7:00pm

Agenda

Slides

Transcript

Map

Resources

Twitter

Forums

Speakers

Feedback

Votes

1 Apologies for Absence

2 Declarations of Interest

Mr Jake Hamilton - 0:00:46

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:00:50

3 Minutes

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:00:57

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:01:14

Mr Jake Hamilton - 0:02:07

4 Minutes of the Finance and Performance Sub-Committee

5 Cabinet Member updates

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:02:41

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:03:20

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:17:25

Cllr John Wing - 0:17:41

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:17:55

Cllr Connor McConville - 0:18:36

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:19:08

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:19:21

Cllr Rebecca Shoob - 0:19:42

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:19:48

Cllr Mike Blakemore - 0:20:03

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:32:11

Cllr Anita Jones - 0:32:13

Cllr Laura Davison - 0:32:22

6 Folkestone and Hythe Community Safety Partnership Plan Update

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 0:32:44

Microphone A - 0:44:38

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:00:53

Microphone A - 1:01:17

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:05:04

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:06:22

Cllr Bridget Chapman - 1:06:43

Microphone A - 1:08:07

Cllr Bridget Chapman - 1:11:38

Microphone A - 1:12:20

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:12:22

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:12:47

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:12:51

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:13:35

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:14:55

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:15:22

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:16:04

Jyotsna Leney - 1:16:06

Cllr Mike Blakemore - 1:16:59

Cllr Anita Jones - 1:17:02

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:17:25

Cllr James Butcher - 1:17:28

Microphone A - 1:18:09

Cllr James Butcher - 1:20:32

Microphone A - 1:20:39

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:20:48

Cllr Alan Martin - 1:20:54

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:27:39

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:27:42

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:29:08

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:30:20

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:30:46

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:31:38

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:32:23

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:33:07

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:33:36

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:34:34

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:35:01

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:36:34

Folkestone & Hythe Officer - 1:37:41

Cllr Connor McConville - 1:38:57

Microphone A - 1:39:02

Cllr Laura Davison - 1:41:06

Overview and Scrutiny Committee
Tuesday, 31st October 2023 at 7:00pm