·         Rob Sowden – Item 3a

·         Robin Carton – Item 9

·         Matt Douglas, Senior Contract Manager for the Contract Package Area – Item 12

The Chair welcomed all parties and asked everyone to introduce themselves.

Agreed the minutes of the meeting held on 16 October 2014, subject to the following amendment –

Minute 9 (3) - NPA to read NPS and CRC to be added to the task and finish group.

Further to minute 4 of the last meeting, Sarah Hopkins reported that the comments made at that meeting had been incorporated into the draft and the document was now resubmitted for agreement.

Further observations included that –

• a refresh of the Plymouth Partnership Plan would be required in order to build in the key strategic recommendations set out in the Strategic Assessment report – this was something the Board could consider at its next meeting;
• the assessment revealed some interesting statistics about who felt safe.  There was a clear theme emerging around how disabled people felt during the day and younger people, particularly women, at night – it may be worth considering how those characteristics could be addressed (equality impact assessment);
• one of the groups which appeared not to have been captured in the assessment was foreign students.  The University was aware of concerns raised by international students who had been verbally assaulted and had expressed fears for their safety at night;
• the assessment made no mention of the statutory duty on Prevent – one of the recommendations should respond to that;
• the Police were changing the way sexual offences were being recorded – whilst sexual offences were currently combined with violent crime statistics, the two were now being separated out;
• mental health was an increasing problem –

o   the mental health service was severely underfunded in Plymouth

o   there were 27,000 people in the City with common mental health problems, none of whom were being treated;

o   213 people arrested last year had been detained under mental health assessment for an average of nine hours

o   the University reported that large proportion of the student population had various levels of mental health issues who were struggling to get appointments/support;

• as part of the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner’s (OPCC) strategic alliance review, the police were looking at resourcing turnaround.  This could have a knock-on effect to the recommendation to retain the IOM team for prolific re-offenders and the established co-located multi-agency public protection team should their preferred option be to move policing out to neighbourhood teams;
• the Partnership ASB Sub-group and ASB Champions Group met bi-monthly and not monthly as set out in the report.

Agreed –

The Peninsula Strategic Assessment 2014/15 was noted.

The Board considered the Police and Crime Commissioner’s intentions for the Police and Crime Plan 2015/16 as presented by Ian Ansell.  Members were advised that, following the review, there was no intention to change the six priorities, however, there should be an increased focus on the following areas with the current six priorities -

§  Child Sexual Exploitation

§  Sexual Offences

§  Cyber crime

§  Prevention bias

§  A refinement of the Criminal Justice Priority

§  Local Priorities / Neighbourhood Engagement and Policing

§  Strategic Alliance

Members were advised that the consultation would be closing on 16 February and any comments should be sent either to the e-mail address provided in the report or direct to Ian Ansell.

The Board welcomed the refresh proposals and noted the report.

The Board considered the paper submitted by Sarah Hopkins setting out the commissioning intentions for 2015/16 in respect of funding allocated by the Police and Crime Commissioner in order to address crime, disorder and community safety issues.  Members were advised that a 2.1% reduction on last year’s allocation had been applied and the amount provided for 2015/16 equated to £417,258. 

The proposed priority areas of allocation, which had been determined in line with the priorities identified in the most recent Safer Plymouth Partnership Strategic Assessment, the Peninsula, Strategic Assessment, the Police and Crime Plan as well as current performance in Plymouth, were as follows-

In response to concerns raised over the amount of allocation from the Police and Crime Commissioner, the Chair commented that it was at least positive to note that Community Safety Partnerships would be continuing for the foreseeable future and, given the financial challenges faced by everyone, it was still possible to achieve results with less.

Agreed –

Ian Ansell reported that, since his last update –

• Public Health England had rolled over the contract to existing service providers for a further 12 months;
• due to the fact that there was no certainty of continued funding for the therapeutic services that wrapped around SARCs, for which there was an extensive waiting list of over six months, the Police and Crime Commissioner had offered to part fund the service to keep it going;
• CIRCO had announced that they were withdrawing from all Police medical examination services and contracts for a replacement service were now being sought – the bidding round on this had closed and it was now in the assessment phase.

Whilst the short term fix from Public Health England was welcomed, concern was expressed over the following –

• it being late in the year to be unclear about commissioning arrangements;
• asking the provider to fundraise considerable chunks was not very sustainable;
• the acute paediatric service being geographically inappropriate should the number of SARCs be reduced.

In response, Ian Ansell accepted the concerns raised around funding issues as many service providers needed more than 12 months’ notice of future funding in order to plan.  He stated that once the Clinical Commissioning Group were on board and discussion had taken place around the number of SARCs etc, a further report would be brought back to a future meeting.

The update was noted.

Ian Ansell reported that since his last update everything had now come together in what had been quite a complicated process -

• police officers had received the required training and every victim would now be assessed in terms of their individual needs;
• once those needs were established the victim services unit would refer them to the network of services providers for which a directory had now been established.  For Plymouth victims that directory comprised MIND, PDAS, Plymouth Family Solutions, PDREC, The Zone and Victim Support to name a few;
• the service would have flexibility and capacity to arrange bespoke provision should it be require, particularly in terms of any language or cultural needs;
• all of the IT requirement were now in place and accommodation needs in place;
• an alternative option was available to victims who did not wish to make use of the victim services system.

Members welcomed progress made and noted the report.

The Chair welcomed Robin Carton, Head of Public Protection Service, who was in attendance to inform partners of a pilot scheme between Plymouth City Council and Devon and Cornwall Police to tackle community wishes to protect their local amenity and environment through collaborative enforcement.  The principles of collaborative enforcement were –

• don’t walk by
• shared problems and shared solutions
• a readily recognisable Plymouth enforcement presence
• structured information gathering and sharing
• shared intelligence and analysis
• joint tasking based on evidence
• joint priorities
• co-terminous boundaries

The pilot, which would comprise two separate projects, would run initially for 12 months and would be reviewed at months six, nine and 12, with regular 6-weekly update reports to the project board and portfolio holders.  The two projects would be –

i)             Community based project – St Peter and the Waterfront neighbourhood

ii)            Problem based project – New ASB powers

Each project would have a set of work-streams to work through one after the other –

• identify problem
• understand cause of problem
• identify solution
• design solution
• deliver solution

The governance arrangements for the pilot would sit under the umbrella of the Safer Plymouth Partnership Board and the project board would be accountable to this group.  A further report would come to the next meeting of the Safer Plymouth Partnership, at which time a nomination would be sought for a representative from the Partnership to sit on the project board. 

Sarah Hopkins gave a brief introduction to the performance report.  Members were advised that –

• the report had been produced using the OPCC’s performance measure approach;
• with regard to the performance measure relating to closing the overall gap in crime, there had been an overall reduction of 0.5% compared to the period last year;
• there had been a 9% increase in violence with injury crimes;
• domestic abuse had seen an overall reduction of 5%;
• asb had seen an overall reduction of 2%;
• with regard to monitoring of serious acquisitive crime, there had been a 2.7% increase and if this continued to rise it may be worth considering establishing a performance measure for this crime
• all of the 400+ racist, disablist, homophobic and faith incidents reported were followed up with a one-to-one survey to ensure as much information as possible was recorded.  Whilst victims were not specifically asked whether or not they were students, it would be evident from the information gathered.

Whilst the overall performance picture was not perfect, there was a lot of work going on to address the issues raised and, despite this, it was pleasing to note that performance against the Partnership’s cohort nationally had improved taking its positon up from 7^th to 5^th.

The performance report was noted.

This item had been added to the agenda following concerns raised at the last meeting about falling numbers in members – a significant reduction from 2,000 only three years ago to approximately 300 presently.  As apologies had been received from Lorraine, the matter would be deferred to the next meeting.  In the meantime, Members should give consideration to how small community groups could be encouraged and supported to become involved.

Top priorities with no identified lead/report:

·         Tackling Sexual violence, assault and exploitation

·         Reducing Violence with Injury (excluding domestic violence)

·         Reducing Serious Acquisitive Crime (domestic burglary, theft of and from motor vehicles and robbery)

Further to members’ agreement to each take one of the Partnership priorities, look at it and report back, the Board considered the latest reports submitted.

The report –

§  advised that the CDDG was the lead group in respect of ASB and took a holistic, multi-agency approach to its reduction, carefully monitoring and analysing reporting data to identify behaviour patterns;

§  set out the current provision in Plymouth relating to tackling and preventing ASB;

§  identified gaps in the current provision.

The report was noted with thanks to Heather.

Richard Skipper advised that Richard Wakeley had agreed to lead on the priority focusing on tackling domestic violence and he had agreed to look into tackling sexual assault.  With regard to tackling sexual violence, he had found –

·         that it was a significant problem in the City, particularly amongst the student population

·         that pockets of work were being undertaken by various groups but this tended to be in isolation and was not co-ordinated

·         there was no over-arching strategy for dealing with sexual violence

·         statistics varied and could be misleading

·         sexual violence and exploitation could be linked to the city’s evening and night-time economy

In response to the concerns raised, the Chair reported that he would add the issue for discussion at his next portfolio meeting with a view to raising its profile and moving it forward.

Safer Plymouth Partnership welcomes:

Matt Douglas, Senior Contract Manager for the Contract Package Area

The Chair welcomed Matt Douglas, Senior Contract Manager for the contract package area, who was in attendance to provide an update on Transforming Rehabilitation and the contract management function.  Members were advised that whilst the service would be similar to its previous form there would be a number of changes in the background such as –

§  creation of a new Directorate within the National Offender Management System (NOMS) – Rehabilitation Services Contract Management (RSCM)

§  implementation of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 which makes a number of changes to the release arrangements for offenders serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months and for those serving sentences between 12 months and two years;

§  introduction of a number of different interventions aimed at reducing re-offending, including –

o   post-sentence supervision focussing on the rehabilitation of the offender to support them moving away from crime;

o   use of the same provider to support introduction of the offender into custody, provide them with resettlement services before release, meet them at the prison gates and continue work in the community

§  introduction of a complex payment mechanism, including payment by results (PRB) which means payment will only be made where there is evidence to demonstrate there has been a reduction in re-offending

Members were assured that these changes were supported by a well-resourced governance approach which would be monitored to ensure successful delivery of the contract and that delivery of these services would be fed into the Partnership’s priorities.

In response to questions raised, it was further reported that –

The update was noted with an understanding that the item would remain on the agenda to ensure the changed bedded in well.

·         New Prevent Duty and consultation*

Plymouth Plan Update

The Board was advised that the Plymouth Plan had just entered its next phase of consultation which would run until mid-March.  Members were encouraged to respond both through their individual organisations and to let Sarah have their thoughts on a partnership response.

New Prevent Duty and Consultation

Peter Aley advised that the Government was consulting on the new Prevent Duty detailed in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill which was currently before Parliament.  The duty required certain bodies, including all County, District and Unitary Local Authorities, when exercising their functions, to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.

The guidance being consulted upon set out steps that providers in different sectors should take to show leadership, understand the risks in their area, work in partnership with others, and ensure staff have the knowledge and confidence to identify and support vulnerable individuals.

Members were encouraged to look at the consultation which closed on 30 January 2015.

·         16 April 2015

·         Dates for 2015/16 to be arranged

• 16 April 2015

Dates for 2015/16 to be arranged