Respect
Respect and antisocial behaviour
RENEW aims to provide suitable housing choices in confident and sustainable communities. An important part of this is the wider ‘neighbourhood offer’, which includes developing local community pride, where social responsibility and mutual respect is a high priority.
Perceptions of crime and safety levels, for example, impact on the confidence of communities and the health of local housing markets. The Government’s Respect Agenda, which places an emphasis on tackling antisocial behaviour and maintaining good quality local environments, remains important for RENEW, particularly as it links into wider community cohesion, community empowerment and quality of life agendas. It complements work led by RENEW’s local authority partners around civil renewal and developing improved and responsive public services for their communities.
Housing Market Renewal (HMR) pathfinders Such as RENEW, are all expected to help drive forward measures that support the Respect Agenda. Between 2006 and 2008, RENEW directly invested £1 million into capital projects in conjunction with working in partnership with local authorities, Staffordshire Police and registered social landlords (RSLs), towards the Respect Agenda. This was in addition to provision agreed for area refurbishment programmes, which also have a ‘respect’ element to them.
Smart intelligence on ASB to inform actions
RENEW strengthened its evidence base on Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) and crime by obtaining raw crime data, dating back to 2003, from Staffordshire Police. The data was mapped and superimposed over RENEW’s boundaries so that in addition to identifying ‘hotspots’ for positive intervention, possible displacement from RENEW activities could also be tracked and tackled.
The data has also been used by RENEW to prioritise interventions within the 2008/11 Business Plan.
Simple and effective communication with the community
RENEW has a strong communications strategy, which includes its strategic approach to community engagement. In each Area of Major Intervention (AMI), RENEW has developed a network of Community Steering Groups (CSGs), and Residents’ Friends - providing independent housing advice - and neighbourhood workers. This network has been supplemented with newsletters, open days, drop-in advice surgeries, special events for the hard-to-reach etc. This approach has provided a platform for the ongoing successful engagement with residents throughout numerous masterplanning exercises, which have continually developed and refined plans and local priorities.
RENEW provides all its partners with a monthly briefing, which contains details of all the current key activity undertaken by RENEW and its strategic partners. This is distributed electronically to almost 2,000 people every month and includes responses to anti-social behaviour. RENEW funds community engagement teams within Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, to assist with communication and engagement with local communities and has developed clear communication protocols to ensure clarity between RENEW and its local authority partners.
Through its engagement with communities affected by the housing market renewal programme, RENEW has been able to identify and respond to a number of neighbourhood management concerns. For example, in the Middleport area, RENEW invested significant resources in responding to concerns about anti-social behaviour associated with vacant properties.
Respect action weeks
The Respect action weeks are organised by the Stoke-on-Trent Safer City Partnership and involve dozens of different organisations from the public sector, along with businesses and voluntary groups. Over the last three years, RENEW has supported and provided resources for this work across Stoke-on-Trent.
For example, in December 2008 the Respect Action Week in Meir brought together partner agencies targeting rowdy and inconsiderate behaviour, ‘mini motos’ and nuisance neighbours – which Meir residents have identified as their top three concerns. Throughout the week, a mobile police station was open to residents to raise concerns. The programme of activities included healthy eating events at the area’s children’s centre, a sports exercise class, library storytelling, and a graffiti artist at the youth centre. It also involved local high school pupils visiting a residential home, followed by a lunch for older residents at the school.
Designing high quality, safe neighbourhoods that support public life and community interaction
Several AMIs are currently subject to detailed planning processes to ensure that re-development produces high quality neighbourhoods that residents want to live in.
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the Police Architectural Liaison Officer and Urban Vision are all actively engaged in a process to ensure new development and area re-modelling ‘design out crime’. Residents are actively involved in this work via community steering groups.
Renew Community Safety Project
RENEW working with Staffordshire Police and Stoke-on-Trent City Council has identified eleven areas within the City Centre South, Etruria Valley and Middleport and Burslem, where housing is sustainable but where there is a risk of high levels of crime and/or anti social behaviour having a long term affect on the local housing market. To combat this, the community safety project provided new locks for rear doors, replacement doors where the existing ones were not secure, new locks for accessible rear windows and in some cases, front entry gates. There are currently 373 properties included within the scheme - 258 within Phase 1 and 115 within Phase 2.
RENEW Warm and Safe Project
The Warm and Safe Project supports people living in properties in the AMIs and General Renewal Areas (GRAs). All residents have a free home visit and access to a handyperson service, free of charge. This project includes the offer of energy advice to any household within the RENEW boundary and provision of security measures to individual households, such as security lighting and access to loans or Home Repair Assistance to improve security.
Where larger repairs or renovations are needed, residents can be considered for the Kick Start loan project.
Knutton and Cross Heath
‘Alley gating’ was first undertaken in Knutton and Cross Heath in 2005/2007 and is now being delivered as part of public realm programme for 2007/8. The public realm strategy work identified by Taylor Young includes pathway schemes, moving recycling facilities that are the focus of ASB, alley gating and tidying up cleared spots, while residents formed alley gating group to manage and maintain area.
Meir
Within the 2006/08 intervention programme, RENEW has funded a programme of environmental improvements that include the provision of alley gates. Great Places Housing Group was appointed as the lead RSL for Meir. Great Places is moving forward with detailed resident consultation over plans to role out a number of alley gating schemes across the area.
Etruria, North Shelton and Hanley South, including City Waterside
Around 1,000 poor quality houses are included within the clearance programme for the area. Due to their age, design, layout and condition many of them provide inadequate security for many residents. Through delivery partners Beth Johnson Housing the direct modernisation of individual homes has been carried our including works to the general environment and specific property improvements e.g. boundary walls. In certain cases they also connect to the specific security projects mentioned above.
RENEW fund two temporary community centres, each with a neighbourhood worker. Each provides a focal point for contact with local community and the police, including the opportunity to exchange information and to feedback crime prevention and intervention successes.
Coalville
RENEW is working with the Compendium Group to regenerate an ex-coal board housing estate. As part of the regeneration work, RENEW is providing funding to support a community development worker and estate caretaker. A Community Development and Neighbourhood Management Group, made up of the residents’ association, Riverside Housing, Compendium, Staffordshire Police, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue, RENEW and the city council meet bimonthly to tackle and resolve issues that arise. Main agenda items are Maintenance of Open space, ASB, Youth Programme and Housing Management.
Fegg Hayes
RENEW is working with its RSL partner, Staffordshire Housing Association, and the city council’s neighbourhood management to deliver an environmental scheme in Fegg Hayes village.
To compliment housing refurbishment that is planned both on RENEW and SHA properties, there is a need to look at the wider environment. Each street is connected by long alleyways that run between the houses. Boundary treatments along the alleyways are sporadic - in some cases there are over grown hedges and trees, in other cases the boundary treatments are absent or in poor state of repair. The alleyways currently feel unsafe and are known to be an area where antisocial behaviour takes place.
Providing a uniform and secure boundary treatment would not only uplift the environment, but will also provide greater security and improve visibility along the alleyway, which will discourage antisocial behaviour.
The proposal is to install targeted boundary treatment works in order to address the wider environmental and security issues in Fegg Hayes village. There are120 properties along terraces that would benefit greatly from new boundary treatments.
The type and level of work would offer an ideal opportunity to appoint Project Management Training (PM Training), a local social enterprise, given the benefit it would offer to the organisation and to their trainees. In the current financial climate, many trainees are losing work placements, since construction work has slowed. This is affecting bricklayers, particularly. The boundary wall project would therefore help to provide continuity for trainees in an uncertain climate. PM Training was established 25 years ago and has trained more than 8,000 young people for successful entry into industry.
They run two main projects – ‘Homeworks’, which consists of 18 teams of young people working in construction and horticulture. Homeworks provides a progression route to employment for approximately 175 young people each year. The other main project is ‘Pathfinders’, which is an alternative education project for year 10 and year 11 pupils at risk of social exclusion. The young people learn new skills and gain work experience along side attending school.
Robust action to tackle ASB and its cause
Most of RENEW’s partner social landlords now apply the Respect Standard for Housing Management. During the summer of 2006, all front line housing staff employed by Aspire Housing attended a full day Respect Academy run by the Department of Communities and Local Government and in December 2006 it signed up to the Respect Standard.
RENEW has supported Stoke-on-Trent City Council and registered social landlords to respond quickly and effectively to pockets of ASB across the area. Examples include in the Middleport area, where a community task force using a local employment training agency and dedicated local police and housing management staff, carried out a major clean-up of derelict sites where anti social behaviour was taking place. The task force responded immediately to isolated incidents of vandalism or anti-social behaviour.
Reassuring the community through a visible uniformed presence and other confidence building initiatives
RENEW has directly supported an increased uniformed presence in targeted areas, and will facilitate the ongoing presence of uniformed officers in key strategic sites by provision of suitable accommodation along side other neighbourhood based staff.
An example of ‘joined up local services’ piloted in Burslem, including joint city council and police patrols, has been a major success. It has resulted in much closer working of the various joint agencies, which will secure the ongoing benefits of this pilot.
Multi-agency approaches at strategic and neighbourhood levels
RENEW’s work with Neighbourhood Management Services and Stoke on Trent’s Area Implementation Teams helps maximise resources from Staffordshire Police and registered social landlords to ensure ‘respect’ initiatives are targeted to the causes.
RENEW has recently been invited to join the ‘Healthy Meir’ task group, which aims to bring together agencies working in the area to ensure service delivery is informed by collective and individual needs. This will benefit the programme in several ways, including enabling access to hard to reach groups, but also ensuring the design of estate access etc recognises the need for pedestrian access to offsite facilities.
