Agenda item

Jessica Bailey, Community Safety Team Leader led the first half of the joint power-point presentation and introduced the subject for debate. She explained the various definitions for key terms of the new anti-social behaviour legislation. The new legislation came into force in October 2014 and provided some statistics on current performance regarding anti-social behaviour incidents in Thanet between October 2014 and December 2016, which are highlighted in the power-point document attached as Annex 1 to this minute item.

Ms Bailey said that the Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) incidents had gone down in Thanet. Other councils have also reported a similar trend. Benchmarking against other councils, Thanet appears to be doing well. She further made the following points:

·  There had been 5 applications made since October 2014 under the Community Trigger and 1 met the threshold and 3 recommendations were made;

·  Civil Injunctions were introduced in February 2015;

·  Under new legislation (civil injunctions), positive orders can be made to support individuals who had problems with substance misuse;

·  Community Protection Orders can be issued by council officers or the police;

·  If a CPO was breached, a Community Protection Notice (CPN) would then be issued;

·  59 CPOs issued to date that relate to neighbour disputes, illegal encampment, street drinking, absence of tenancy management, fly-tipping, rubbish contraventions;

·  There has been a 90% compliance to these orders, which is quite positive;

·  Only 6 cases progressed to full notices.

Trevor Kennett, Interim Head of Operational Services gave the other half of the presentation and focused on enforcement actions for rubbish contraventions and street enforcement. He made the following comments:

·  Officers were using the new powers creatively to overcome historic problems that Council has been trying to address for some time;

·  Council was continuing to work with businesses;

·  Police had made 2 premises closure applications that for a period of 3 months over the last 6 months;

·  Police were no longer required to consult before issuing Police Dispersal Orders;

·  To date 76 dispersals orders had been issued since the new legislation came into force;

·  Stakeholders with a vested interest can request for a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSP). These orders can only be issued by councils and the Police can assist with the enforcement. Dog fouling, Dog Control Orders and Designated Public Places Order come into this category.

Next Steps

There were some transitional challenges that need to be addressed. Council would have to embrace multi agency working approach in order to avoid duplicating work across agencies. Council had been given three years to introduce the PSP orders.

TDC was currently working on that setting up the system for enforcing these orders. Members were advised that there will be a district wide ban on dog fouling and that most districts had pout such bans in place. One way of ensuring the effective monitoring of this ban is to introduce mandatory micro-chipping for dogs. Boston Borough Council had introduced micro-chipping and Dover District Council had introduced a district wide dog fouling ban.

In response to the presentation Members made the following observations:

·  The new legislation would help address the ASB in some streets that had experienced this problem for a while;

·  PCSOs were doing an excellent job and needed continued support by ward councillors;

·  They were concerned by the high number of ASB incidence in the district, whilst acknowledging that high levels of deprivation contributed to this problem;

·  Resources that are proportionate to the level of deprivation in the district should be made available to Thanet to tackle ASB.

Members thanked officers for the presentation and agreed that this presentation be shared with all other councillors as part of the Member Briefing topics. They also requested that the slides be forwarded to all members of the working party.

The clerk was asked to circulate by email all the topics that were still to be reviewed by the working party.