By Cllr Jason Brock
Last week brought the welcome news that the Council has been awarded £429,000 for initiatives aimed at enhancing the safety of public spaces in the town centre and improving community engagement.
Together with additional top-up funding direct from the Council, the money will go towards targeting issues such as anti-social behaviour, theft-related crimes and violence against women and girls.
I am entirely sure that residents will welcome this new investment and it will lead to visible improvements in our town centre, including upgraded lighting and new CCTV.
It will also be used to provide a new Community Safe Hub, which will operate both as a drop-in centre for help and advice as well as a new and permanent home for the first aid and welfare services which currently operate out of the Minster on Friday and Saturday nights.
Tackling violence against women and girls is a priority for the Council’s community safety work, and we’ve been disappointed that the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner hasn’t made it one of his priorities too.
So, importantly, this funding will go beyond universal measures and provide targeted work to improve safety for women in Reading. This will include dedicated safe spaces, creating safer routes around the town centre, better and expanded training for staff in late-night venues, and work to support women who are victims of crime.
Similarly, we recognise that providing better opportunities for young people is an important part of enhancing community safety, so we’ll be working with voluntary sector organisations including Starting Point, No5 and Reading Football Club Community Trust. This is to ensure that young people aged 18 to 25 have a voice in developing safe and inclusive spaces and community activities, in addition to expanding successful mentoring and outreach programmes.
As welcome as this funding is, and it will make a difference in the town centre, we have to set this in the context of the challenges that Policing and broader community safety work face more broadly. It will not surprise anyone to know that front-line and neighbourhood policing doesn’t have the resources that it had in the past. Recent Government commitments to increase Police numbers don’t reverse the cuts made since 2010 and our Thin Blue Line, nationally and locally, is far thinner than it really should be.
More recently, the Police and Crime Commissioner opted to cut funding to Reading’s Community Safety Partnership by more than 50%, placing enormous strain on efforts to join-up the work that goes on in Reading to prevent and tackle crime and anti-social behaviour.
Against that backdrop, the Partnership is currently consulting on its new strategy and I hope that residents will take the opportunity to feed into it as well as the Domestic Abuse and Safe Accommodation Strategy (both can be found online via consult.reading.gov.uk).
The Council will always do what it can to promote community safety and tackle crime, and we know that partnership working is integral to that effort.
We’re lucky to have local Police officers who are committed to that collaborative working too, alongside the Probation, Fire, and Health Services.
I dearly wish that Government would recognise the need to fund such vital work properly, especially if we want to continue to embrace a preventative – rather than a responsive and reactive – approach to tackling crime.
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council and Labour ward member for Southcote
