Making the city safer together

Fly tipping and rubbish dumped on the former B & Q and Matalan site on Station Road East ENGEMN00120131014132052

The city council doesn’t work in isolation to serve the public, we have a number of partners and I thought I’d use this column to explain about some of the work we do together.

You may have heard about ‘partnership working’ on the news, and we work day in, day out, with other services so that we can unite our efforts to keep people safe, and improve our city.

Nationally, this joined up working is recognised as the best way to help our communities thrive, and to combat the issues that matter most in today’s society.

In our city the group of partners include the council, police, health agencies, fire, probation and social landlords.

We are called The Safer Peterborough Partnership (SPP).

The SPP board meets regularly to drive our activity, and we recently agreed the four priorities that will take us up to 2020:

. Building Resilient Communities.

. Offender Management.

. Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence.

. Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) and Environmental Crime.

The first three areas were identified following a detailed needs assessment, where we used hard data collected from all partners to identify common issues.

Number four was really key because this is what you raised in public surveys as a concern in your communities. ASB and Environmental Crime (e.g nuisance behaviour / littering / flytipping).

I’ll keep you updated on the SPP over the coming months as we develop our plans to combat these issues - we will be launching exciting projects, activities, events in all of these areas.

Help clean up our city.

To start us off, we are on the case of littering! I recently met with RiverCare, a local volunteer group who organise littler picks to improve the appearance of the River Nene running through our city.

The enthusiasm and care the volunteers have is inspiring, and they have asked me for help in mobilising others across the city to widen this activity.

We are on the hunt for similar groups to help with this. If you are interested contact us on [email protected]