Agenda item

The PCC to provide an overview of the Police & Crime Plan and respond to questions

The Chair invited the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Sarah Taylor, to speak about the Police and Crime Plan for Norfolk and answer any questions.

The PCC responded to questions the Committee had sent in advance (attached as Minutes Appendix A). In response to a query from Cllr Boyle, the PCC outlined the priorities as set out in the Police and Crime Plan and said District priorities were set in the District priority meeting, held every quarter. The last meeting focussed on ways to target Anti-Social Behaviour across market towns in North Norfolk. The PCC explained that many of the questions posed to her were operational which was not her area of expertise.

In a follow up question by Cllr Boyle in relation to funding and redundancies the PCC said the Police had been experiencing cuts year on year for the past 14 years, so to some extent it was business as usual. The Police, the PCC believed, had responded extremely well to those cuts, maintaining that public safety would not be compromised which the PCC took as being very reassuring. That meant in terms of high risk, high harm crimes the Police were actively keeping us safe. However the Police simply didn’t have the capacity or resource to deal with the low harm, low risk crime that people see on a day-to-day basis. Norfolk and Suffolk had a shared space for funding that had been set up over 10 years ago to achieve cash savings and efficiencies. Norfolk had already realised a lot of efficiencies that other areas were only looking to achieve now, so going forward, the targets set by Government were not possible as they had already been reached. A new Policing Minister was now in post and the PCC would look to take that point forward with them.

Cllr Boyle asked how Devolution and Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) would affect the role of the Police. The PCC believed it wouldn’t significantly impact the Police. The Police would still be there and operate independently, and their role would not change. The effectiveness of partnership working with such things as victim support and community safety had the potential to be significantly disrupted by Devolution and LGR. The PCC warned the Committee that they needed to be aware of the scope of that disruption. The PCC function would be incorporated into the Mayoral function from April 2027. No additional funding or resourcing to facilitate that transition had been provided by the Home Office or central Government. The PCC office had to absorb an extra £200k of work additional to the business-as-usual function. As a result, the PCC office did not have any intentions they could consider beyond the short-term. The PCC asked local Members to engage with the problem as those partners with whom the Police worked, would disappear (the District Council, the County Council, the Integrated Care Board (ICB) etc), and to work with community groups to bridge that gap and increase community resilience.

In response to a question by Cllr Boyle about new recruits, the PCC was very confident that the numbers of people eager in joining the Police force was extremely good. Those new recruits were from an enormous, diverse, range of backgrounds. In follow-up Cllr Boyle queried the challenges in policing a rural area such as North Norfolk. The PCC explained they were the same as with any rural area, the travel times it took to get to incidents were a challenge, as were the costs involved, with such work as firearms licence administration meaning the costs to visit each licence holder were substantially more in a rural area like Norfolk due to the travel times involved. North Norfolk had a long stretch of coastline where needs changed seasonally, and this could present a challenge. PCC assured the Committee the Constabulary were very used to covering those challenges. Blue light response times in Norfolk were good and they were looking to improve still further.

Cllr Fletcher asked what was being done in regards speeding and inappropriate driving in our towns and villages. The PCC said she could see that how road safety was handled in Norfolk was different to other areas. The overwhelming amount of her correspondence and interactions with the public were in relation to road safety. She felt there was a gap between public demands and reasonable expectations and past priorities. She had become really engaged in the problem and into the best practice of policing our roads more safely. The Police should, and do, enforce speeding but in doing so speed limits must be set appropriately. She would have liked more political engagement and a more preventative, consistent, approach to speed limit setting by Norfolk County Council (NCC). The PCC warned that the size of the task was phenomenal due to the largescale of the road network across Norfolk. The PCC acknowledged the many Speed Watch volunteers across local community groups who often get verbally abused whilst trying to keep their streets safe. Those Speed Watch teams issued thousands of letters to speeding drivers every year and they did make a significant impact. The PCC was frustrated that the devices Parishes used to measure vehicle speed, were not getting the data they needed to implement change. The PCC would like to see a more highly useable data set being generated from that equipment. As that equipment sits on roads they are classed as assets of NCC and therefore NCC would have to approve those changes, and the PCC urged Members who sat as a Member for NCC to advocate that change or to at least advocate for change for their local parishioners.

The Chair asked what strategies were being used to reduce drink and drug driving and how effective were those strategies. The PCC explained the Constabulary had started a new reporting tool, for members of the public to report anonymously when they knew of, or had witnessed, someone driving under the influence of drink or drugs; the tool would be live by Christmas 2025. Norfolk Police and partners also supported the National campaigns to get better roadside testing for drug driving which was, sadly, on the increase.

The PCC responded to the Chair’s query around the number of beat police officers. The Government had a National Policing Guarantee which was in the first round of funding with hopefully funding available every year. That money could only be spent to deploying officers into the local neighbourhood. Norfolk had a small Constabulary, so funding is relatively small, so it had resulted in an additional 31 new officers that year. There would be a gap between seeing the funding allocated to then seeing Officers on the ground and the Chief Constable would decide where those officers would need to be stationed. The PCC and Chief Constable did speak frequently about neighbourhood policing as are fully aware it was an important issue for the public.

The Chair asked what the Police’s role was in reducing domestic violence. The PCC said that was a very substantial piece of work for Police and their partners. With LGR and devolution and any potential disruption it was critical people are safeguarded, and a working group were looking into how they could ensure this service provision continued during the period of change. The PCC did not want Norfolk Integrated Domestic Abuse Service (NIDAS) to fall away, as it was funded through the PCC office and various District Councils, as this would add a significant burden to the Police. A Task and Finish group had been put in place to see how those contracts could be safeguarded during that period of Government reform. There were peripheral concerns around continuity of funding, and this was not something the PCC could solve on her own and asked Members to engage. Police relied on Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH), NIDAS, the NHS and partnership working. The number of people affected by Domestic Abuse (DA) in Norfolk was substantial, the scale of the challenge for the Police and its partners in the area was very significant and PCC did not want LGR to diminish all the hard work that had gone into supporting victims so called on NNDC to provide any support they could going forward.

Cllr Cushing asked what resources and numbers of Norfolk police were deployed to preventing and investigating online crime. The PCC explained that it was difficult to give exact figures on specific resourcing, or how services were deployed in tackling high level crime. It was smaller in Norfolk than across other forces nationally and this was something the PCC would like to have seen change. She had talked to the Chief Constable (CC) during her term about online, and offline, crime. It was not in the PCCs or CCs power to be able to go out and recruit more officers to specifically deal with such crime as obviously financial resources were depleted.  For cyber offending there were 4 members of expert staff solely dedicated to the area with an additional 35 investigating staff, or generalists, which would include multi-skilled people within the Constabulary available to be called upon to investigate when needed. That gave the CC more flexibility on how to deploy their staff which the PCC believed gave the Police more balance which was to our benefit. PCC had some sympathy for those who would prefer the Police had specific teams set up to deal with specific areas of business but believed it was a misconception that if a specific team wasn’t set up the work wasn’t being done.

The PCC asked the Committee to consider Norfolk Safeguarding Children Online Team (SCOLT) who dealt with the threat of online child exploitation. They were dedicated in keeping children safe. The team did phenomenal work, with the digital requirement being massive with potential of thousands of files needed to be stored securely. The costs and resourcing were significant all amongst budgeting constraints.

The PCC wished to highlight the significant emotional burden of trauma for those answering calls and those first on the scene and the stress put on officers and staff in many number of roles which, understandably, resulted in those people needing to take a period off sick. There was a need for better support and resource of those officers and staff. This was a human cost, not just a financial or a resource issue.

The regional response to crimes, like cyber, was very good with the resource they had but the Police still had more to do.

Cllr Housden asked about the speeding issue, and speed limits in his parishes, and said when he challenged Highways their standard answer was that it had always been like that, and he asked should the PCC and her fellow Commissioners not be lobbying Government on that point. The PCC agreed speeding was a massive issue and there was a significant amount of work being done nationally. That was being done in a politically balanced way, and that there was a common joining up of perspectives. Cllr Cushing asked if there were other methods that could be used to counter speeding. The PCC said there were differences between Highway Authorities, and many referred to speed limits as in accordance with National Guidance but there was no reason therefore, that Norfolk could not do something differently. It was within the powers of Members of those Authorities to change how they considered speed limits as it was only guidance and not standards. The current model in Norfolk did not facilitate road safety.

Cllr Brown asked the PCC if she would support a change of policy, similar to that originally trialled in Wales when they set 20mph limits across their villages. The PCC agreed that everyone had a right to enable their need to travel without fear of dying or sustaining serious injury. Difference in speed did make a difference and was the primary thing that could be done to make accidents more survivable, but it was not everything. Norfolk was an area that had a rising number of fatalities from road traffic accidents and that was not what the PCC wanted to see. Requests for 20mph zones were likely to succeed if submitted at local level via the Highways Agency (HA) rather than by national Government as the HA knew how that road was used. Speed limits should have been appropriately set to reflect local context, and the views of residents should be taken into account. Any new policy should enable that to happen. The PCC would not support any type of blanket coverage, as in the trial in Wales, but could learn the lessons from that and she would have supported any policy that brought about positive change.

The PCC was happy to respond to any further questions or requests for info via her office.

The Chair thanked the PCC for her insight into her role and state of policing in Norfolk and agreed Council could possibly look to ensure partnership working continued. As far as the Committee remit would allow, in terms of advocacy for changing the speed limit policy on mass, Scrutiny was not necessarily the correct forum, but this session provided food for thought.