Neighbourhood Action Groups - County Council has Wrong Idea

Speech by Cllr Alan Armitage delivered to County Cabinet on Tue 16th Oct 2007

I am speaking on behalf of my colleague Cllr Altaf Khan, since he is unable to attend. I have the benefit of 18 months experience as an active member of the Oxford City Centre NAG. I am also reflecting the views of Cllr Roz Smith, who has been involved with two NAGs in East Oxford, Cllr Bill Bradshaw in his role as a member of the Police Authority, and Cllr Zoé Patrick, a member of the Wantage NAG.

Fundamentally, we feel that the report of the Scrutiny Review Panel is severely flawed and over-complex, and we recommend that the report is referred back and the Panel asked to do two things in particular:

• Reduce the number of recommendations very substantially, with a focus on providing real support rather than imposing extra bureaucracy;

• Explain how they think the county council as a body can contribute to the work of NAGs (at present there are a great many actions requested of other parties, without any quid pro quo being proposed from the county council).

The Police involvement in NAGs at the grass-roots level is of course central to their effectiveness. And the new PCSOs are ideally placed to provide the kind of Neighbourhood Police presence that the general public wants. The intention of the policing boards is to avoid getting PCSOs bogged down with paperwork. They are supposed to spend over 95% of their time on the beat. But this report seems intent on taking them off the street so that a range of new reports can be produced. This is wildly misconceived and needs to be rethought.

NAGs are Action Groups, therefore the only reports which matter are the list of actions agreed at each meeting, who is responsible for completing them, and when they are completed. To ask for annual reports of various kinds is just not appropriate - the action lists and outcomes should be available on request, without putting any additional load on the members of NAGs. And, by the way, the Police are not necessarily responsible for producing these. In the case of the City NAGs it is often the City Council. If senior Police officers themselves produce internal reports on how NAGs are doing, no doubt these could be provided to county representatives under existing partnership arrangements, and would probably need to be covered by confidentiality provisions.

Outside Oxford City, NAGs are envisaged to be informal groups of concerned local residents, not people such as councillors who are there by dint of their elected positions. No doubt several councillors (parish, district and county) do want to get involved, but it is not appropriate to assume that it would be a good thing for more county councillors to get involved. It's members of the public that NAGs need to attract, and they often need help in doing so.

So far as training is concerned, the Police in Oxfordshire have been well geared up for some time to provide this. It is more than a little patronising of the report to request TVP to "offer training to all groups whose services and resources could support NAGs" (recommendation 10). It is similarly unnecessary to recommend that the county produces an information pack for councillors (Recommendation 1) when TVP long ago produced excellent guidance documents like this one: "Neighbourhood Policing - Partnership Guide".

Lastly, there are things which the county council could be bending its mind to, in order to help NAGs. But there is nothing in the report about prioritising and dealing with requests from NAGs. For example, there is an outstanding issue with extending insurance of personnel operating speed control equipment so that NAG members can use them - as the cabinet member for Community Safety knows. Outside the city, speed of traffic is invariably one of the top couple of priorities for communities. At the moment, the county council is seen as the major blocker to progress. Other councils in the Thames Valley have solved this problem, but not Oxfordshire County Council.

In Oxford, the main priority is usually dealing with drug pushers, and so issues like improved street lighting are the priority. County councillors can get things to happen using normal fault reporting mechanisms within the council. But among the other things NAGs would like to see are introduction of gating orders for passageways, and progress on this has been so slow as to be virtually indetectable. The Deputy Leader will know what I mean.

So this report does not form a good basis for going ahead, it shows a deplorable urge to add layers of pointless bureaucracy, and doesn't start to address how the county's officers can really help NAGs deliver a reduction in crime and in fear of crime. It needs to be referred back for further consideration.