Question
Although Wokingham Borough is generally a safe place to live. There has been a spike in the number of Burglaries recently.
What can be done to reduce the number of burglaries in and around the Borough and particularly the Earley and Lower Earley area?
Minutes:
Question
Although Wokingham Borough is generally a safe place to live. There has been a spike in the number of burglaries recently.
What can be done to reduce the number of burglaries in and around the Borough and particularly the Earley and Lower Earley area?
Answer
The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act places a statutory duty on Local Authorities to work in partnership with the Police, Health Bodies, Probation and the Fire Service to reduce crime and disorder in their local areas.
Much of this work is carried out through the Community Safety Partnership, a high level body that takes a strategic approach to crime reduction by developing and implementing action plans, holding the police to account on performance, commissioning crime reduction related services and operations based on intelligence. Working in this way has helped Wokingham achieve and maintain the lowest crime rates in the country.
There has been a recent spike in residential burglary in the Thames Valley, and Wokingham Borough has been particularly affected. Currently the increase is around 12%, which is the fourth highest increase in the area.
To address this the Council is working with the Police to: communicate crime prevention advice enabling residents to better protect themselves against becoming victims, using any regulatory powers in particular to improve the security of flats or houses in multiple occupation for example, making sure that lighting in communal areas meets the standards and supports the Police in their investigations by sharing relevant information.
Burglary reduction is a priority and performance is monitored at the fortnightly Police Tasking Meeting attended by the Community Safety Partnership Manager as well as the bi-monthly Community Safety Partnership Board Meeting.
Supplementary Question
Residents are particularly concerned about the spike in burglaries. Will you work with me to ensure that funds are available to erect new street lighting and trim the hedgerows in urban areas such as Earley and Lower Earley should the police feel that these measures would assist them with crime prevention and as we are short of time tonight a simple yes or no would be fine?
Supplementary Answer
I am not going to commit specific funds to this because I am not sure that is necessary to prevent this but I think that we should go to the Community Safety Partnership and ask them what are the things that they deem necessary for the prevention of these crimes.
Like you have raised specific things in your ward I also have seen a specific rate increase as well in my ward and it is actually particularly in new housing which I think is particularly odd. I think that one of the things we need to concentrate on is people understanding how they can secure their own homes and I think we need to take precautions around alarms. People are deterred from breaking in when they see an alarm, when they see good locks on windows, when they see cameras. There are lots of different methods that people can employ and lots of them. Hedge cutting is perhaps one of them but that is not the only thing and I think we can explore these things together and some of that doesn’t include the Council spending lots of money on it. So I would like to have a discussion outside this meeting about how we can tackle this.