Taking action on community safety

Cllr Sara Conway on what Barnet Council is doing to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour

The entrance to Hendon Town Hall — Hendon Town Hall

Community safety is a key priority for residents and Barnet Council alike, and for our wider partnership with the police, fire service, and other local stakeholders.

The last four years have seen renewed focus, investment and delivery of improvements and innovations for Barnet, and that has brought results.

We upgraded the CCTV system, which in 2022 when we first took control of the council didn’t work 70 per cent of the time, and wasn’t monitored 24/7. Now it offers more than 900 camera views around the borough, including 33 mobile deployable cameras, as well as two mobile CCTV vans. We will be adding another 27 mobile cameras this year to help in the fight against crime, anti-social behaviour and fly-tipping.

The CCTV system has been able to log more than 7,400 incidents in the last year alone. The enhanced and expanded CCTV is a major asset in the fight against criminality and anti-social behaviour, and has supported a range of arrests and prosecutions; even locating wanted offenders who had previously evaded capture.

Since 2023, summer park patrols have been directly delivered by the council’s community safety team, which enables more effective enforcement as they can give out on-the-spot fines, known as fixed penalty notices, to those engaging in a range of anti-social behaviour.

Summer park patrols run from 4pm to 8pm on Fridays and from 10am to 8pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Officers took action 77 times on anti-social behaviour in parks over the last year.

This year we have added community safety pop-up hubs in a range of parks to give greater presence and the opportunity for increased engagement with residents.

We have also strengthened the community safety infrastructure by introducing Barnet’s first borough-wide public spaces protection order (PSPO) across all public spaces in Barnet.

The first PSPO, which has been running since December 2022, enables action against alcohol based anti-social behaviour, distressing other residents, misuse of fireworks, spitting or littering, open fires or barbecues, among other types of anti-social behaviour, and has been renewed.

The community safety ‘pop-up’ hubs model we introduced continues to develop giving the public face-to-face engagement with council officers to discuss and report anti-social behaviour. They are also sometimes done in conjunction with local partners to raise awareness on key issues including violence against women and girls and hate crime. They ‘pop-up’ in shopping centres, parks, as part of our fly-tipping campaign, on school routes, and community and faith spaces.

Barnet is also the home of the Met’s first ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ programme, a pioneering approach to tackling serious organised crime. Similar strategies are now being pursued in locations across London.

The initiative enabled a fundamental resetting in tackling crime in the area with more than 400 arrests, a 50 per cent reduction in burglaries and a 33 per cent reduction in anti-social behaviour.

There remains an ongoing focus on the learning from this area-based work continuing to shape and improve our wider pro-active partnership work to help prevent crime, encourage reporting and ensure we work together as collaboratively as possible.

For complex cases of anti-social behaviour, we are meeting with partners on a regular basis, including the police and other agencies. We have reduced the time between these meetings from six-weekly to fortnightly to ensure action and efficiency continues to improve.

We have also introduced targeted innovative new projects with four-year funding from the Greater London Authority, including the victim care hub, and the ‘Change 4 U’ ‘programme.

Change 4 U brings together key council and partner teams aimed at working with ex-offenders to help begin a new start with this support intended to also help reduce crime and anti-social behaviour.

We also remain committed to the ward walks we introduced – with planned visits to each ward in the borough once a year with local councillors, council officers, including highways, and the police to identify and tackle specific and persistent issues together as part of our proactive ‘learning by doing’ approach.

We know that we need to keep on innovating and building on our work to ensure that Barnet is as safe as possible.

So, we will continue to enhance the CCTV estate which has been so effective at strengthening Barnet’s capacity to take action against crime and anti-social behaviour.

We are expanding the range of offences under the Public Spaces Protection Order to include loitering in a manner that may be reasonably perceived to be causing (or likely to cause), intimidation, harassment, alarm or distress to another person in six wards identified by police as places where action is needed.

We will look to see how we can use AI and technology to further tackle crime and anti-social behaviour.

The wider challenges facing Barnet over the past year in particular and no doubt going forward are complex and unprecedented due to the impact of international conflict on community cohesion and safety locally.

Working together with partners and continuing to bring new projects and initiatives to Barnet we will continue to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour in the borough. Thank you to all the teams working so hard across our partnership, and to every resident who is in touch – your voices are always heard, valued and help shape our work going forward.

Sara Conway is Barnet Council’s cabinet member for community safety, community cohesion, and ending violence against women and girls

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