Agenda item

Safer Plymouth Partnership Strategic Assessment 2014/15

Minutes:

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 –

 

1.

 

to support the recommendations set out in Appendix One to the report;

 

2.

 

to investigate further the concerns raised by the people who said they felt unsafe and establish whether this had links to alcohol/the night time economy;

 

3.

 

to check whether the health and wellbeing survey had included the student demographic as it may need to have weighting towards students given their number in Plymouth;

 

4.

 

that a further recommendation is added to reflect that fact that the assessment fails to mention the significant mental health issue in Plymouth;

 

5.

 

that the Chair of the Safer Plymouth Partnership Board would write to the OPCC/Chief Constable highlighting the importance of maintaining the integrated Police/Probation model by retaining the IOM team for prolific re-offenders and continuing a co-located multi-agency public protection team.

 

Supporting documents: