Transcript

Adejare has been elected as vice chair to Lebanon-Hackney Scrutiny Commission for the remainder of 2024-2025, so congratulations to councillor Adejare, who should hopefully be joining us. So next, agenda item two, welcome and apologies for absence. So today's meeting will be a hybrid meeting, so it will be a hybrid meeting, so welcome again to everybody to Living in Hackney Scrutiny Commission. So this meeting is being recorded and live-streamed now, it's a public meeting. Please, can you all keep your microphones on mute throughout the meeting, and this will prevent audio feedback. If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand to get my attention, and I'll call you in to speak. The chat function must not be used to have conversations with other participants, or to provide personal information. All chat is recorded as this is a formal meeting. Please only use the chat function to alert me that you wish to speak, to raise points of order, or to report tech problems. Officers will assist you. This is a formal meeting of Hackney Council. Please note the press may be in attendance. The rights of the press and the public to record and film the meeting will apply. So, we have received apologies from councillor Joseph, and we have received apologies for lateness for councillor Selman. Are there any other apologies for absence? Okay, nope. Perfect. So, some commission members will be joining us virtually, and these are members of the Children and Young People's Commission. So, we've got councillor Gordon joining us online. And I believe that we'll have councillor Conway joining us online as well. So, agenda item three, urgent items and order of business. Are there any urgent items? Nope. Okay. Agenda item four, declarations of interest. Are there any declarations of interest? Okay. No. So, agenda item five, trust and confidence in local policing. The commission is keen to hear about the delivery of the trust and confidence in policing action plan, which sets out the actions to be undertaken in partnership with local communities, the police and the council to build trust and confidence in policing for Hackney residents. Building trust and confidence in policing is one of the strategic priorities identified in the community safety partnership plan, and the discussion is seen as timely, given that it has now been two years since the action plan has been in place. As part of the scrutiny process, the commission also held a focus group with community partners to understand their views on the progress made, and what they might like to see happen going forward. The summary of that discussion is included in the agenda papers. So, attending from the Metropolitan Police Central East Borough Command Unit, we've got James Conway, Central East BCU commander. Attending from the community safety, we've got Councillor Suzanne Fajana Thomas, cabinet member of community safety and regulatory services. Gita Sabraha Maniam Muni, director of environment and climate change. Gerry McCarthy, assistant director of community safety and regulatory services. Maurice Mason, community safety manager. Jason Davis, acting head of policy and strategic delivery. Attending from Wicca's charity, we've got Sam Bossadeh, director of operations. We also have the following children and young people scrutiny members joining us for this item, as the issues under discussion are of joint interest. So that's, like I mentioned previously, Councillor Sophie Conway, Councillor Margaret Gordon, Councillor Sheila Susso-Runge, and Councillor Midnight Ross. I would like to welcome you all to the meeting. So, please can we also note that we have had apologies from Detective Superintendents Brittany Clark and Mike Cagney from the Central East BCU. Natasha Plummer and Gwainan Jones from MoPAC. So, MoPAC have been closely involved in the new Hackney community policing scrutiny pilot alongside the BCU and Council. And they have kindly sent across a briefing note on this, which is included in the agenda papers. I'd now like to invite James Conway to begin his presentation with supplements, which supplements the submission included in the agenda papers. Thanks. So, I'll maybe just spend 10 or 12 minutes or so just giving you a bit of an overview of where we are. No specific questions. I'll probably get into a little more detail. And I want to leave a bit of time for Councillor for John Thomas to give some updates as well on behalf of the Council. I mean, there's two slides really, but I'll try and put some meat on the bones of some of the work that we've been undertaking over the last two years. The first one really shows the journey. And I suppose the thing to emphasise right at the heart of this is that the development of the Trust and Confidence Plan really had the voice and the views of the communities here at the heart of this. I will forever be grateful, particularly to the Council, for the very strong support in the aftermath of Child Q in standing up the initial activity to look at what I suppose was year one of the Trust and Confidence Action Plan. And in particular, a very powerful group that formed in support of the police and the wider partnership and delivery of that was the working group made up of members of the community, members of the public who acted as core advisors in crafting that initial plan. If you recall two years ago, consultation and co-production with the public was very much at the heart of that original action plan. And I think, I mean, I've characterised it here in scrutiny before, I think very much that first year was almost the emergency first aid that we needed to do in terms of Trust and Confidence Police. So a large part of the demands from the community in terms of what they wanted from us as the police were things like a change in tone of communication, a move away from defensive posture, particularly in regards to Child Q and an openness to acknowledge mistakes and problems that existed in the way that we were delivering policing. And then much more active engagement with the community in building up a new model. And we've reported in previously on the progress that was made in that first year against the sort of aspects that were produced at that stage. A year or so in, I felt we arrived at a level of maturity where there was recognition that we had made some of those initial changes, but this was very much the start of the journey. And I think what we and the public felt was that we needed to move into a second phase, which was looking at the tangible change that we could affect really and how policing was delivered here in Hackney and in my other borough and tower hamlets. And that coincided with a shift of, I suppose, ownership of that task, which had been largely shouldered by council colleagues, I think probably because something of a vacuum from the policing side of things and a shift more towards that being handled by policing and as driving our own change from within. However, maintaining a strong voice of the community and strong voice of partners in that structure. So we moved around a year ago to a into a change board, a trust and competence board, which sits as a core part of the leadership of the VCU, the basic command unit here in Hackney under my chairpersonship, but maintain that strong community co-production and scrutiny of our activity through the shadow board. So I'm very grateful some of some of those on the call, in fact, have maintained that have been on that journey with us moving from what had been the working group community working group supporting the first year of activity into a shadow board supporting that second year of activity. And that remains a really strong part of the of the drive as we as we continue to to move on with that action plan. The plan itself, I'll move on to the next slide, if I may, for those managing that, really sits around these specific areas of specific projects and change projects. And again, these weren't things that policing grew up. These were we at the tail end of the working groups activity. We ran a series of workshops to say, what do you think of those areas that you want to see tangible changes from policing? And these were the areas that the working group co-produced with us. And we've really transposed those into specific and structured pieces of projects, a change project that we're delivering within the VCU. And I'll just give you a quick flavour of that. Probably pause there and then Susan, Councillor John Thomas, will say a few words and then probably explore some of these maybe in a little bit more detail in the questioning. So personal and foremost, you wouldn't expect really anything different given the fact that the the origins of this Trust & Covenants work really locally lay in Child Q and the response to the Child Q challenges. So stop and search six square and centre of our approach and our change. You've heard a chair you introduced a moment ago, the centrepiece of that is the new version of Scrutiny, which we've been piloting for about a year now with Council and with Mopac. This is a first in London looking at a model of scrutiny in which a genuinely reflective group of community members hold us to account, both in testing the data around the police use of stop and search, but also case specific examples, really getting quite a lot of granular detail, reviewing officers' body-worn video, reviewing police, the sort of material, the statistics, the documentation that policing produces around instances of stop and search, and guiding and advising and discussing with my officers how we might make improvements to the use of stop and search locally. And this will be a bit of a theme as we run through these different headings. So successful has that pilot been that this is now part of the centrepiece for co-produced police and Mopac plan to move this model as the basis for a model of scrutiny across the whole of London, not so not just intact across all 32 boroughs. One of the other strengths of this scrutiny model has been extension beyond simply just stop and search. So looking at wide use of policing powers, use of taser, use of handcuffing and a wider array of police power activity. Within this project as well, expansion of some of the early work. We're very grateful for the contribution and strong voice that young people have had in this work, but some of the brilliant early work with young Hackney in constructing know your rights access materials for those who are either concerned about stop and search or may be subject to stop and search on the street, and the development of a QR code that's now provided in Hackney and recently expanded to Tower Hamlets to anyone who stopped on the borough who would like access to that facility. Then a card's offered to that individual as a QR code that can access not police material, but young Hackney produced material to guide that young person on the rights that the public have when police stop and search them. We've also seen significant changes to the strip searches that was at the start, the type of strip search that was the heart of the incident involving CharQ. We refer to them as MTIP searches. It's just a technical term for a specific type of strip search that was used in that instance. We, again, led the way across London in changes to policy that were then affected at the pan-London level, significantly increasing the threshold and the authorisation level for that type of strip search. Recognition, as I talked about some time ago, a year and a half ago in my public letter of apology about Child Q, recognising the overuse of that type of strip search amongst children. And I'm happy to say, although we still feel that it is a tactic that may be required in extremists, that we haven't had a strip search on a child in Hackney since Child Q or since those changes to policy after Child Q came into effect, as testament to the changes brought about here. Last aspect on stop and search, the change of the use of the tactic and the doctrinal changes that we've been affecting locally, and that is looking to use stop and search in a much more precise targeted way, particularly with a focus on reducing knife carriage, knife crime and therefore violence within Hackney, rather than some of the use of broader powers, for example, against drug possession and other areas. Those are still valid and there's a valid and useful policing purpose as an investigative tool for tackling drug crime. But if I characterise the policy shift, it's been to dial down some of the more voluminous use against drug challenges and dial up and increase the use effectively and precisely in areas which are suffering knife crime violence against knife carriage. So we've seen in overall terms over the last two years a notable reduction in the total use of stop and search, but a significant, nearly doubling in the amount of positive outcomes. So i.e. searches where we found something as a consequence of the search, which if we wound back the clock to around 2019, the percentage of police stop and search is where something was found that resulted in an outcome, so a weapon or evidence of a link to a crime, sat around 22% in 2019. We're now, I mean, in this four-week period, we're up to over 40%. So dialing down the total volume, but through more precise use, increasing the effectiveness of that tool in terms of what we're finding as a consequence. So that's a very quick answer through the project work around stop and search. And that is a piece of project work that continues. We're still engaged in some really focused activity with community members looking at disproportionality with the stop and search. Again, something we're working very hard with council colleagues and others to improve the instance of disproportionality. We have seen improvements. In fact, that reduction in total volumes has been accompanied by an improvement in disproportionality, but absolutely no resting on laurels. We know and we can see in our data that disproportionality still exists in the use of police stop and search here in Hackney, as it does across the UK. We're working hard to understand that. It's a difficult issue to dissect and understand. Some of what we thought were the more simple explanations don't seem to hold water as we've analysed them in more detail. And we're working very closely with the central MET, with the Behavioural Science Unit, with the central MET, again, to try and understand what's driving that disproportionality with the aim of reducing that. And obviously, if we can, removing disproportionality with my use of our powers. The other four areas I'll give a slightly lighter canter through and I'll go through really in order of maturity. The second one, and I'll give this a light touch because this has been subject of a scrutiny session in its own right just a month or so ago, is the changes that we're making to education and to schools policing here in Hackney. Again, we are leading London in a pilot model of a new approach to schools policing. We've recently agreed over the last couple of weeks that that will be a model which will look to expand and increase across London as a basis for schools policing. At its heart, it has a change in approach from schools officers traditionally being involved and present in the school itself. Though I would say over time with a slightly confused remit or remit that's become more clouded over the last 15 years, we've reasserted that remit of those officers who have responsibility for working directly with the schools, embedded them much more closely within to our neighbourhood policing teams, provided a much clearer chain of contact for school leadership teams to contact police if they want tactical advice on a concern that exists within the school, so they can talk to an officer with a clear understanding of policing, but also with an enhanced understanding of the education setting. A refocus of that policing activity away from some of the internal activity within the school, and a focus much more on the home to school journey and protecting our young people on that route. We work closely with young people and the schools to construct what we are describing as protected corridors. Those are high use routes and streets on the home school journey, or transport hubs where we've been delivering, piloting, delivering enhanced policing presence to reduce risk exploitation criminality that young people might be coming to victims to in a home school journey. And the third element of that has been moving towards the ward teams, that's the local neighbourhood policing officers themselves becoming a lot more involved in the life cycle of the schools. So we have significant events in the school calendar, it's the ward teams getting involved in those, so we're improving the opportunity for non-confrontational, non-policing settings where the ward officers, the local police officers can get to know the young people in their schools that are in their ward areas. The other three areas, comms and engagement, we are still some way from what I would say as a high standard here, but we've been working very closely again with council comms teams looking to improve the way in which we communicate policing activity with our communities. So some of that has been leveraging what is quite significant council communication channels, so across social media, but also printed documentation and others that the councils have access to, working again more closely with local media, but also expanding out our social media presence, improvements to the type of information, the way we're communicating on X, and also recently expanding into Instagram, which might seem like we simply stepped into sort of 2012 in social media terms, but from policing perspective this is sort of, you know, progress into new social media platforms, and we would like to go further on from that, but at this stage we're just mindful of the sourcing implications of strutting ourselves over multiple platforms. What we call child first there really is centred around again a London first pilot here in Hackney and indeed in Tower Hamlets of piloting diversionary activity for young people when they first come into contact with the criminal justice system. So one of our concerns and concerns of the community has been that the youth justice system is running with significant delays, that quite rightfully young people, if they are involved in lower levels of criminal activity, or maybe the first instance of involvement in criminal activity, quite rightfully should be looking at diversionary activity to support them in turning them away from any further involvement in criminality. But that's often waiting until they arrive at a youth court or later in a criminal justice process before they're signposted to that diversion activity. We have felt for a long time we can make that decision much earlier, in fact right back when they first come into contact with policing and maybe a police custody suite. And so we've been piloting on behalf of the Met again, Wider Met, a model of decision making where we decide at that point of coming into police custody, can we signpost them towards diversionary activity and make a decision to take no further action at that stage for their criminal activity. Again, as I say, pilots here in Hackney, but significant interest more broadly across London, eyes on what is still at this stage of pilot, which is running live at the moment, but which we hope, if successful, will be a spearhead towards rolling that out more broadly across the Met. And the last piece, and probably the least developed, is the mental health pilot work here. We're working closely with colleagues across the ICB and hospital trusts and mental health trust in northeast London, aiming to build on some piloting that was undertaken in the city of London, whereby mental health professionals and nurses are deployed, possibly with, maybe without police officers, to those in crisis, recognising that often when a person is in a mental health crisis, that a police officer is not necessarily the best or most effective individual to go and confront their challenges. And yet, as it stands at this stage, often a police officer is the only person with a 24 hour service response, who is able to respond, but exploring whether we could pilot delivery of mental health professionals into that instance rather than police officers. That, as I say, is at an earlier level of maturity, not quite developed into a pilot, but discussion and co-production with the mental health professionals is making good progress. All of this wrapped up in skills and training, so that's the last project here, which really has been focused predominantly with training, internal training for officers around stop and search. We're just about to go live in the new year on a series of modular training just for our local officers here in Hackney. We call it 10 at 10. This is where officers will do about 10 minutes training each week for 10 weeks. So rather than traditional police training model of sending officers on a long, full one day course, which we know actually the sort of the drop off rate in terms of retention of that knowledge is quite high, but it's a repetition of building on that knowledge over a 10 week period of sustained training. We've again been co-producing that with community groups looking at areas that we want to introduce into that training. And it takes the form of a sort of TED talk style video and questions that those officers watch and then debate amongst themselves in small groups across the VCU going forwards. And really, again, it's something of a pilot, but it's something we're really keen to explore and see whether that model of training provides a better impact for officers, equips them better to make the changes and nudges which we're seeking to encourage. So I'll pause there, a very quick canter through what is the single largest piece of locally delivered change here in the VCU. But I'm happy to take further questions on detail, but we'll hand over to councillor for John Thomas. I know you might want to say a few words as well. Thanks. Thanks so much. And thanks for scaling through some of the work that have been done. I think one thing you mentioned that is important for me to repeat is that voice of the community, because many of the work that have been done by the VCU, together with the VCU has been supported by voices from our community as someone who's living Hackney for 35 years. I know the challenge is when it comes to policing and the relationship with our community, as well as the disproportionality, the racism around when we're talking about policing and black and global majority. So it was important to me when I came to this role that something needs to change around police trust and confidence and accountability. We started that work, three gyms here, but type Q happened and it accelerated the work we started back in 2020, when I first became the cabinet lead. And when child Q happened, it was the council that first reacted to that by bringing the community together, saying that we want to work with the police, not as a council, but as a community. And we had a trust and confident group within that group, there was an action plan from the group, not from the council, not from the police. And there were five major areas where the group said they want to see improvement. That was around anti-racism, police leadership, culture and practice, collaboration and engagement, disproportionality and community monitoring of stop and search and finally police training. But thanks, James, for the leadership, I can say none of those five areas, we have really progressed things. When it comes, of course, of course, there's still a lot to do, but when it comes to engaging the community, very pleased there's still more to do, as I've said, in terms of being able to go to the community and have conversation around policing in the community. So one of the things James D. One of the things James D. mentioned is you might be aware that the MET launched the London Race Agenda Plan in September as one of the pilot, the six borough pilot hackney's, one of those six pilot boroughs. and we had our first meeting last week. The room was packed with young people wanting how we can change things in happening, working with the police. So all in all, like I said, it's got a lot to do, but proud of the work we have done, as James mentioned. We have, as a borrower, as a BC UN, we are piloting the out-of-court disposal order. We are piloting the community scrutiny panel for the Union of London, as well as piloting the schools' officers' model as well. I will stop there just to touch on the other things that we have supported the police to do and deliver in our borough. Thank you, Chair. Okay, so thank you for the presentation. I'd now like to invite commission members to ask any questions that they may have for our guests. Please, can I remind everyone that we have a very tight agenda this evening, so if we could keep questions and responses concise and focused, it would be much appreciated. Please indicate, members, if you want to ask questions. So I've got Councillor Sousa Orungay. I'll just ask my question and then I'll call you in, then please indicate, other commission members, if you have any questions. So my question is, a consistent theme of community concern resolves around disproportionately in the policing of black and minority ethnic communities and particularly young black men. One significant blocker has been a lack of detailed data on disproportionality. What progress has been made in compiling and sharing a clear data set around this and working to better understand the key drivers of the disproportionality? Yeah, thanks, Chair. So as I say, I mean, first was to really openly acknowledge that level of disproportionality. And we've one of the early pieces of work that we conducted with the scrutiny panel and group and indeed the working group as well in the Trust and Confidence Plan was to share a research we conducted locally. Now, this was just focused on stop and search. So disproportionality sits across many areas of state activity, we can see it in school exclusions, we can see it in health contributions as well. But we've predicted, focused on stop and search, but for fairly obvious reasons, that was something that the community were very concerned around. So we've shared that data originally with the scrutiny group and with the working group. We're still processing and trying to understand the drive. So we can see the disproportionality of what we can't understand are the immediate drivers behind it. So some of, we had around seven or eight hypotheses that we tested against that data to see which of those were sort of bearing true. And there are, I suppose, there are arguments on many, there are many conflicting views about what drives disproportionality. There are a lot of strongly held views about what drives it. But it's fair to say not many of those are adequately explained by the data. So for example, some people will argue it's about, you know, don't worry about the population census data, you need to look at the sort of street population data looks like. So who's present on the streets versus who's present in the population. And that will give you a clearer picture of whether disproportionality exists. The problem is, as we test that, we have to test it quite rigorously in an early academic way. We still see levels of disproportionality existing even when we take that into account. But we're having to go through each of those. And this is where it was important for us to link in with our central behavioral science team because it requires a level of sort of academic rigor and regression testing that goes beyond our skill as sort of officers to understand it, sort of academic sort of data analysis really that's required here. So we're still working through that process. What is clear is that we don't, at this stage, we don't have just one driver of disproportionality or one type of disproportionality, I don't think existing within our use of police powers. So whilst it's undoubtedly clear across Hackney and Tower Hamlets, that if you're a young black man in particular, that you will experience a level of disproportionality, some policing powers that is significantly greater than if you're a young white man. However, there's other factors which become even more important there. So the gender factor, being a male, is a greater factor in disproportionality. Being young is a greater factor in some of that disproportionality than some of those other aspects. So this is a complex, complex picture that we're trying to understand and trying to understand what drives it. So we have the data, we can display a kind of crude level variation of that level of disproportionality. What we're not quite ready to do because we haven't finished that, our own analysis and understanding, is share that kind of assess output of that data at this stage. So sorry, that's quite a complex answer, but I mean, this is a wickedly difficult issue for us to try and dissect as you enjoy your work. Okay, and with that, thank you, James. And then I guess with that disproportionality, is that reflected across the various social economic classes or is it mainly with like working class? So we don't have that, we don't collect that level of data to be able to understand that. So we get our level of data from us, for example, stop and search is essentially, you know, gender, if it's disclosed, you know, age, again, if it's disclosed, ethnicity, both apparent and self-defined and a few other things, we don't get sort of an assessment of class and so forth. What we do see is the way that policing powers are used does in fact, does impact disproportionality on some of those factors that said, gender, age and ethnicity. We also know policing powers used in certain parts of the borough more than in others, but then this enters you into an interesting debate, which is, is there an acceptable level of disproportionality where we see crime disproportionately impacting on some parts of the borough than others? And whereas I would be concerned if we were focusing, for example, drugs enforcement and drugs crime on certain areas with a particular high level of disproportionality, because that isn't a sort of a crime type that's recognised as affecting some communities more than others. Weapon crime and violence, we absolutely see knife crime impacting some communities and some parts of our borough are significantly, significantly greater than others, to the extent that some of our wards in Hackney face next to no knife crime whatsoever. And in some of our wards in Hackney, you're almost 20 times more likely to experience weapons and knife crime and violence. So therefore, it would seem appropriate that you would see a focus of policing tactics designed to reduce that problem taking place in those areas of the borough. That disproportionality in a sense of location is one of those factors which further complicates that understanding and how we tackle disproportionality on ethnicity and gender and age and so forth, because obviously representation of communities is not equally distributed across Hackney. So focus in one area will also potentially entail some communities come into contact with that policing power more than others. Thank you, James. Councillor Suso-Ronga. Thank you, Chair. Just two very quick concerns, I think, to Commander Conway, please. One, in respect of central recruitment practices, which can affect the level to which local police can influence or not, this case may be, levels of representative diversity in the workplace. And the other quick concern is around cyclical promotions and posting rotations and how that affects, in terms of leadership, accountabilities, and also how that affects in terms of good continuous relationships at local level with safer neighbourhood teams. Thank you. Yeah, I got both those here on recruitment and then the promotion of rotations. Yeah, thanks. So, I mean, I think you pointed out recruitment from the Met is centrally managed, so I don't have a control over the recruitment into the Met. What we can do and what we have been doing locally, and again, strong support from the council on this, is our outreach work to try and encourage recruitment from our local communities here in Hackney. And I'd be very grateful. I mean, you're great ambassadors as counsellors for this point. We desperately want the Met to be more of a presence of our communities. The best way to do that is to encourage young people across Hackney, across our communities to consider joining the Met, please. And I know we've got very good links in with education, particularly some of the colleges here in Hackney. We've had a good outreach activity over the last couple of years in here in Hackney. And I would also add very strong cadet structure and set up here in Hackney, which we see a regular sort of flow of recruits from our communities here in Hackney coming in to join the Met. But your support would be greatly received for any further activity we can do to push policing as a career option for our young people here in Hackney. Where we do have a bit more control is on rotation and particularly, not necessarily promotion, again promotion is centrally managed within the Met, but we have control over acting promotion. So, you know, you might go through the Met central process and apply to become a sergeant, go through all your tests to become a sergeant. If I have a gap as a sergeant, then I might be able to post in one of my PCs, you seem to be qualified to be an acting sergeant. And we have about a year ago, again, coming off the back of the trust of confidence work, refreshed a localised policy to make the promotion to acting roles fairer. What had traditionally happened was if I was, say, one of my inspectors and I had a gap at sergeant level, I would pick someone to be that acting sergeant. We've taken that out of the hands of our individual officers because we want to be assured that we haven't got any bias or any other or fairness issues affecting that. And we now run a process which creates a cohort of individuals across the VCU who are interested in acting in supervisory roles. And we run that through a central process where we can monitor points like disproportionality and levels of representation. So where we are able, where we've got control over local practice, we can make changes. That's not to say the Met isn't making wider changes to recruitment and promotion practices. It's probably subject to a whole other scrutiny session if we wanted to get into the details of that. But there's, we see that both articulated, particularly, Councillor Fadon Thomas mentioned the London Rate Action Plan. But if you dive into the action plan, you'll see a whole chapter of that focus specifically on recruitment and retention and ensuring more representation and eradicating disproportionality in those areas. The third area that we're also working hard to remove disproportionality is in use of police misconduct activity. So again, we see a higher level of non-white officers facing police misconduct allegations. And we're working hard as an organisation to understand and reduce, through a range of mechanisms, to reduce that disproportionality in the misconduct piece. So when we talk about disproportionality, this is not just something we think of in terms of the use of police powers on the streets, not just something we think about in Hackney, but at a Met-wide level, we're looking and committed through New Met for London, the Commissioner's plan when it came in, to eradicate that level of disproportionality across the systems in the Met. Thank you. I mean, we have a very good lead, a very good Cabinet lead in Councillor Susanna Fadon Thomas, which is really, really important. But it is very, very important at local level, particularly with sports clubs, youth clubs, CRAs, that there is a good, sustained relationship with safer neighbourhood policing and community support officers. And I want to stress that here and now. And Chair, if you'd like to minute that, I'd love you to minute that. I cannot underestimate how important that is to the local community. And years and years ago, we used to have any time we ran in a state-based youth club, we used to have local safe neighbourhood team phone us up, say, how's everything? Are you running a youth club tonight? And that, I know you might say you don't have the resources for that anymore. But that was very valued and very important. So I just want to express that at absolute grassroots level. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And listen, there's no lack of commitment for a return to that model of neighbourhood-based policing. Our investment in, returned investment in our neighbourhood teams has been with the aim of building that hub. Yes, the Met is suffering some resource challenges, the like of which we haven't seen really before. Next year will be particularly challenging in terms of financial settlement. But the Commissioner and down to us at a local level, our commitment is firm that a return to a strong neighbourhood-based policing model is absolutely part of our plan. In fact, we will have Her Majesty's Inspectorate and Constabulary coming out in a matter of weeks to look at the Met again in our level of delivery of neighbourhoods policing. And in fact, Hackney and Tower Hamlets have been chosen for one of those sites to come and come and view precisely because, you know, it's been at the forefront of our efforts to improve trust and confidence was to rebuild those neighbourhood-based teams. So no, I didn't. Thank you for raising and you'll find no stronger supporter in the room than me for that sentiment. Thank you. Councillor Garbutt and then Councillor Selman. Thank you. Thanks for that, Cantus, through everything you're doing. Just to keep on the theme of recruitment, we've heard from some community partners that there are some concerns about the possibility of change of leadership, kind of your level and other kind of senior officers. And just, it'd be good to understand how much of this is your confidence is being driven through the Action Plan more widely, rather than kind of being held with you and your leadership. That's, yeah, my first question on kind of central leadership. Thanks. Yeah, it gets me a bit worried when people are worried. I think there might be some changes at senior leadership levels. I hope that's something I don't. But I think the sentiment has been there from the start, which I think is very real, which is, look, this is, I mean, we had this very, very early in my tenure when we first started debating some of these areas for improvement with the community. And they said, look, why should we invest our time in you, James? You know, your, you know, police leaders don't stick around for 10 year periods. It's the nature of policing that we move around a bit, you know, might you be here today, gone sort of tomorrow? And why should we invest that effort? So part of the development of this and the move on the earlier slide from this sort of trust and confidence working group and that activity through to a formal board is to try and bake as hard as possible some of this into BCU governance structures. So that if we, and that hasn't just been sort of setting up a board and a meeting, but distributing those project areas across my senior leadership team. So each of my members of senior leadership team has a separate area of those responsibilities that are to deliver. It has a project style board that they have to come and present their updates to. It's managed as those have been involved in programmatic change and big institutions will appreciate some of this. It's managed in that change program sort of sense of the word. And that's with the aim of ensuring this is a legacy which goes far beyond individuals. These aren't just the whims or the views of individual leaders, but this becomes sort of baked into the DNA of how Hackney policing sort of delivers and improves itself. So, I mean, what we can't guarantee is that we will all be here for decades on time. What we can do is try and sort of cement these changes as rigidly as we can within the governance of the BCU. So sorry, it's a bit of a technocratic response, but I think that's probably where you know. No, I think that's, yeah, I think that sounds quite reassuring in terms of how the leadership is being distributed. And like you say, these changes are being baked in. I just want to ask a quick follow up just on the community policing scrutiny panel, which sounds really great. And I, you know, the description, the MOPAC report sounds really good too. And I just wondered if you could just describe, I know you said that there has been some feedback and some changes, but I didn't know if you could just point to like a change that has been made because of the scrutiny, like a change in behavioural practice from the police because of feedback from the screen. Yeah. So the, I mean, you can imagine some of this might sound quite tactile and granular, but the nature of the scrutiny is just that as they watch body worn video. So one of the focuses that we've been looking at through the training is how we think about finishing off the encounter with a young person once they've been stopped and searched. So we have to accept that even though we're finding 40%, as I spoke about earlier, we've worked about 40% of our stops are finding something of concern. That still means that the majority of the stops will be on innocent members of the public. And that's always been understood in the use of the stop and search tactic. It relies on reasonable suspicion, not even reasonable belief or certainty. So we're down at the lower end of the scale. We would put a percentage on it. You would envisage around a 30 or 40% of the success rate for that. So that means that a lot, most of those people we accept will be innocent who we're stopping. So therefore how we conduct that stop and how we finish off that stop, which has been one bit identified is crucial. And one of the concerns of the scrutiny panel was that the stop might start off sometimes in a difficult way because the person being stopped doesn't necessarily want to be stopped. Police officers don't know whether they've got a weapon on them or haven't got a weapon on them. Once that's been established, it's really important for police to switch, to at least leave that encounter with a sense of having dialed down some of the tension, dialed down some of the potential sort of traumatising impact of that event. So that was direct feedback from the scrutiny group and that's directly informed. So one of those, I'd have to go back and check. So maybe I might just write in to confirm this. But I think then on those ten training inputs, one of those is specifically looking at how we finish the encounter and how we finish that in a positive way. Thank you. Councillor Salman. So thanks for that. I think you've actually pre-answered my question with your answer to Councillor Garbett's first one a bit. So just a wee top up one on that, which is just through the governance structure that also allows for kind of the opportunity to reflect where things are perhaps not working and shifting it. And then if I could just sneak in a second question, which is just you touched on the work about changing the model in relation to schools policing, which we had the joint session with the Children's Scrutiny Commission earlier this year. And I think coming out of that, one of the reflections was about increasing people and parent voice within that process. So it was just if there was any update on that since that last session and if that's led to any shift in what's ultimately being taken forward. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. So on the governance, yes, absolutely. So although those areas were fairly fixed because they were on a presentation, actually this isn't like any change processes, fairly organic structure. So if there's new areas that we can bring in, that we want to bring in something else we want to deliver, then that's still the governance vehicle for which we deliver that change. In fact, one thing that we were just discussing this morning actually was we recognise that as well as some of these big set pieces, there's a kind of a smaller, there's almost a package of more disparate sort of smaller changes that we want to affect. And some of those are sort of internal. So I mean, to give one brief example, we've been pushing really strongly just within our workforce at the moment to ensure that we've got ablution facilities for those in the VCU, in our two police stations for those who want to conduct ablutions before praying. Seemingly small, but it's an important thing for our staff, but it doesn't really have a sort of place to sit to be led through governance. So actually what we're envisaging is just shifting that change governance to have a package of those smaller elements in as well. So some of those might be public facing and improving the way that we're engaging or conducting our activity in the public. Also some of those might be more internally focused as well. So yes, absolutely. It's something that can flex and grow with shifting demands and requirements. On the education piece, the point on pupil and parent consultation and engagement. So some progress has been made. One thing we've been waiting for, and you remember me saying, I think before the last screening session was we were packaging some of our proposal up and putting it up to the Met centrally for a view on whether that was carried forward. We had an important meeting around a fortnight ago internally within the Met that helped decide on that. To a degree, some of the engagement, particularly with the parents, was ended on seeing the outcome of that meeting with the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner and Management Board in the Met. Partly because we had some communications that we want to send out to parents through schools that we didn't want to send out until we were sure that we were on a safe footing in the way that the wider Met was heading. So we're through that. So we're poised to start communicating out to parents more significantly on this, which springboards some of the engagement with parents. We have been engaging with young people. In fact, I've got some meetings coming up in the next couple of weeks with Young Hackney and others where we're specifically getting together to talk about some of these areas. But I think, as you may have spoken about before, some of the work on the protected corridors, so the sites, the roads that the people feel concerned about, the genesis for that had its origins in the consultation with young people, but also the work to understand locations that people feel unsafe in has been this sort of continued source of engagement with young people to understand, both either directly but also through, you know, the sort of engagement routes that we've got through partners sitting with us here today. Thank you. Anna? Thanks for that. But can I just check in terms of that state that's about to happen more with parents and pupils? Sorry. Is that, as well as it being about communicating what's happening, is it also about how the feedback from them would shape the model in a sort of a fundamental sense as well? I mean, depending on how fundamental we go. So there is a core design to that approach, which we've, you know, engaged with schools, engaged with young people at the outset and have set, but it's about shaping then how the delivery of that takes place. I mean, the idea that we largely have people supplying expert advice and consultation with senior leadership groups, that we focus on the home school journey and that our neighbouring teams get involved in life at school, that those are the core sort of principles of this are fairly fixed, but then the way that those are delivered, yes, has an opportunity for consultation with parents and others. Thank you, James. Any questions from other commission members? Councillor Tinez. Thank you, Chair. Thanks, James. You might, you may have touched on this, but what has been some of the successes and challenges in carrying out the trust and confidence in a police in action plan? And how has this been used to improve things? Thank you. Okay. So, so I think the biggest success has, was probably the one of what seemed like the simplest, but it was the change in tone and a change in the way that we communicated with the public. So I think traditionally we had a defensive tone to when to problems and things going wrong in policing. And I think the first, you know, there's a sense in policing that until we were sort of held accountable by a court or a higher authority, there would be no admission of that anything had gone wrong. And I think hopefully what the public have seen is a very different change in our attitude to those challenges, which is to readily, where things have gone wrong, to get out quick, early, accept where things have gone wrong, listen to the communities and start making some of those, those changes early on. And certainly the feedback from working group and the wider shadow boards sort of often reflects on that as being a notable shift. So that might not sound a lot, but I think in terms of the public sense of a change, that's probably the area that's been most apparent. Obviously, I've covered off some of those areas where we're making translations and changes through those different areas. I think the biggest challenge is how ultimately this translates into a widespread sense of improved trust in policing, in the grandest sense of the word. So when we look at, now this is really difficult to determine because there isn't really an ideal sort of metric and way to really measure trust and confidence. And this is something politicians and councillors wrestle with equally. And what we do have is a range of surveying and we have to rely on those in perfect though those are. If we looked at something like the public attitude surveys by Mopac that gives us a sense, but I wouldn't say anything more than that, of where questions of trust and confidence sit. We can see, we can see particularly the effects of child queue locally here in Hackney. So to questions like, do you feel police treat you fairly? We saw an absolute drop off after child queue in terms of the confidence here locally in Hackney. And that continued to fall away for some time up until about quarter three. So around this time last year, it hit its lowest ebb. But what we have seen since then is an uptick. Now we're not anywhere where we'd like to be, but we've seen around a four percentage point improvement in that response to that question in quarter one of this financial year. So the data isn't brilliant and it's also quite delayed by the time it gets to us. So we're always operating that six months out in how we, is when we see that data. But that remains our biggest challenge. So we can do all the work in the world, but if it's not felt like an improvement by the people of Hackney, policing doesn't feel more attuned to the public need. If people don't feel that we're moving away from over policing and under protecting and improving protection and dialing down the over policing, that's not felt by our communities in Hackney, then it hasn't achieved anything, has it? So that remains our biggest challenge. And that's not something we're going to turn around in one or two months or six months or a year. That is, you know, we recognise across the Met, that will be a five to ten year endeavour. Early signs are good, but I would rest no laurels on that. And that will be our biggest challenge, how we translate that into a sustained and long-term improvement in trust and confidence. Thank you, James. Any other questions? Councillor Gooch? Oh, for Commander Conway. So, noting the redesign of local police training as a significant point in the plan, but also in the comments that we've had from the focus group that that's moving slower than would be desired. And what are some of the key risks to delivering that? What mitigants do you have in place? And particularly in relation to what you said after Councillor Sousa Runga's question, how can you work within the central Met policies on a local level to still achieve things within the borough? Yeah. Yeah, so the biggest risks to delivery of that, I mean, one is time and the other is resourcing. So every time a police officer is training, they're not out policing. And so it's a fine balance. We try and get our officers deployed, serving the public as much as they can. But also we need to bake in adequate training time. So every day that someone's in training, they're not out, as councillors highlighted earlier, not out in their communities in those neighbourhood teams. So that will always remain the biggest constraint on police training compared to something like the military. The military who might predominantly train and actually deploy those skills in a very limited way. Policing is the precise opposite. We're out there delivering the skills on an almost constant daily basis and have small margins of time for training. So that, coupled with the fact we then have, you know, a long list of things that people need training on, some of that's mandatory training. And this is where I suppose the perception can come in. Is there a conflict between what you want to deliver locally in training and what the centres want to deliver? Well, it isn't really a conflict. It's just a natural tension between those mandatory training elements that officers have to have to do. So every sort of year we have to be updated on our skills on using our use of force, on using handcuffs, on sort of techniques of restraint, things like that. They're absolutely mandated across the country. We have to renew and refresh officers training on those areas. And you'd expect that of any profession. So how do we carve out time within that for more localised levels of training? And that's a challenge. But that's why we've been thinking more creatively. For example, why we've moved. Let's not set one day aside in a year to give our officers extra localised training on stop and search, not only because that's difficult to find that day, but also because our training analysis shows that, and this is not just true of police training, but any training, front-loading a lot of training on a one-off event once a year, actually your tail-off and your drop-off in terms of knowledge retention is quite significant. So hence why we've looked at the 10 at 10 style that I talked about. And that's the model of training that we would look to roll out. So yes, it's been slower to develop that. We've had to think a bit more creatively as to how we developed that. But hopefully what you can see is that creativity is designed, that creative response is designed to try and defeat some of those constraints, which are naturally built in. One area that I know the public have talked to us about is the challenge on training our staff on adultification, which was one of the commitments that we made after the child queue report came out. That's had a perceived as maybe a bit of a slow start. It has had a challenging start. We undertook some joint training with local authority, which was very good, but it was difficult to scale that up across the 1,700 staff that I've got on the BCU. We were looking at developing some localized training here, but as we were developing that on the BCU, actually the central MET had long identified the need for adultification to be a part of wider MET training. And so really that was then picked up by the central team. We provided a lot of the work that we've been undertaking developing that locally into the central team. That's now been spun up as a training package centrally, but the quid pro quo is we've agreed that Central East Hacking Tower Hamlets will be the first site in which that's rolled out. It has been a slightly longer lead in time getting that training built up, but it was for the reasons that we needed to be able to scale that up to be a pan MET delivery, partly because of these aspects of the London Race Action Plan and the commitments that were made there that Councillor Thomas spoke about earlier. So, yes, some challenges, but I think our aim is frankly to overcome and bulldoze those challenges out of the way to deliver the training that we've long aspired to. Thank you. Do you have a follow-up, Councillor Gooch? We've gone slightly over on this agenda, but I do have one question before I sum up, and it kind of links in Councillor Gooch's question and Councillor Susarunga's question. So I believe last week the government announced proposals to get more officers on the ground and like having their names, contacts and stuff like that. But I guess what my question is, is what is our preparedness? Will that be implemented in Hackney? What is our preparedness to that? And then like what is the sort of proactive work we are doing in ensuring like in the police structures, there's a diverse range of officers with varying backgrounds, because I can appreciate some people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds working in the police service may have apprehensions of policing in their community or some of them might actually want to police within their community. So just kind of seeing what our preparedness is towards that. So, I mean, those latter points really are true whether we have additionality or not. And the London Race Action Plan talked specifically about that in terms of recruitment and retention. And some of those areas, as I talked about earlier, a huge amount of work going across the Met to improve recruitment across all of our communities here in London. And still with the aim of making the most reflective course in the UK, we are a long way from that, but we're not short of ambition in that regard. The announcements by central government, as yet the details of that haven't translated through to force levels. So we don't know what that amounts to. What I would say and what I would counsel is that we still face a significant, significant funding shortfall next year. So as it stands today, there is a fairly significant, well, there is a very significant black hole in the Met's finances. And as it stands today, I'm not, I mean, this is obviously subject to commissioners' negotiations with both the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary. So I wouldn't expect to be privy to this, but certainly I'm not aware that that funding gap is anywhere close to being filled. So, I mean, realistically, we would have to deal with that challenge before we necessarily understand how the central government proposals would have an impact. OK, thank you. So, yeah. OK, yeah. I'm just aware that we haven't really touched on violence against women and girls, just because of the time that we've had. But maybe we could send, I'm just aware of the time, but maybe we could send a follow up question about how violence against women and girls fits within the trust and confidence piece. Just trust from women, I guess. Yeah, yeah. But if we can follow that up, that would be great. Thank you. OK, so I'd like to thank all commission members for your question and to our guests for their responses. I guess where I'll sum up is, it's been helpful kind of scrutinising this work and kind of seeing where we are. We are seeing some progress. Yes, there's things that still need to be done. I think it's positive to have a sort of long standing council member and councillor Suzanne Fajana-Thomas in terms of her length of service within Hackney, but also her diverse background in being able to kind of work with the police and identify challenging areas, also being a woman as well. That's something that's really, really positive and we commend. It would be interesting to kind of see more on the data that is being processed to identify the key drivers regarding disproportionality and how it is affecting people in Hackney. I appreciate social economic class is not protected characteristics. I understand some people are campaigning for it to be protected characteristics, but there's ways in which we can tease out information in the data. Yes, that will be helpful, but it will be interesting to see how things progress and getting a response on the question regarding violence against women and young girls. So again, I'd like to thank all members for your valuable questions and all witnesses for their responses and engagement with the scrutiny process. So after the meeting, commission members will reflect on the evidence heard and may suggest or may make suggestions or recommendations for improvement for your consideration. So thank you. That concludes agenda item five. So we will now be going on to agenda item six, serious violence and gang crime. So the commission is keen to hear about progress made in addressing serious violence and gang crime with a particular focus on youth offending and reoffending, safeguarding, engagement and outreach of young people. Addressing serious violence and gang crime is one of the strategic priorities identified in the community safety partnership plan. And the discussion is seen as timely, given a serious, a new serious violence duty strategy and accompanying violence and vulnerability action plan have now been adopted. Serious violence. Serious violence and gang crime was also identified as an issue of local concern for residents who responded to the overview and scrutiny annual work program survey. Serious violence. As part of this scrutiny process, I also held conversations with community partners that are involved in providing youth engagement, support and outreach services to hear about their work, their experiences of working in the borough and what they might have to see what they what they might like to see happening going forwards. So attending. So we have some of the guests on this call and we may potentially invite them in to respond to points made within this meeting just to let you know. So attending from the Metropolitan Police, Central East VCU, James Conway, Central East VCU commander. Attending from the Community Safety, we've got Councillor Suzanne Fajana Thomas, Cabinet Member of Community Safety and Regulatory Services. a member of Community Safety and Regulatory Services, Geeta Subramaniam Mooney, Director of Environment and Climate Change. Sorry for hashing your name yesterday. Jerry McCarthy, Assistant Director, Community Safety and Regulatory Services. Maurice Mason, Community Safety Manager. Attending from Children and Young People, we've got Councillor Antoinette Bramble, Deputy Mayor of Cabinet, Deputy Mayor and Cabinet Member for Education, Young People and Children Social Care. Pauline Adams, Principal Head of Early Health and Prevention. Brendan Finnegan, Youth Justice Services Manager. Brendan Finnegan, Youth Justice Services Manager. Who? Okay. Apologies, I missed off. Stephen Davidson, Community Gangs Team Manager. And Stephanie, looks like Salman, Head of Probation and City and Hackney Probation. So, as the previous, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, jumbling up the papers. Bear with me. So, please can we note that we've had apologies from Detective Superintendents Brittany Clark and Mike Cagney from the Central East BCU. As with the previous item, we also have Children and Young People Scrutiny members here with us as the issues under discussion are of joint interest. I would like to welcome you all to this meeting. I'd now like to invite Councillor Fajana Thomas and Community Safety Partners to begin their presentation, which supplements the submission included in the agenda papers. Okay. Okay. I'm Maurice Mason. I'm presenting today, but I'm presenting, obviously, in collaboration with a series of key partners. So, Hackney's approach to reducing serious violence is really important to us, and I do believe that we have got a first-class partnership that's working in an integrated way to make Hackney safer. Before you think that that is a big statement, it was acknowledged 18 months or so ago by the violence reduction unit that the strength in Hackney was the integrated partnership in the way of working, which is typified by the community gangs team. So, thank you for giving us the opportunity, because I firmly believe, and I know what the colleagues do, that, you know, one has to expose the cell to accountability and feedback if you want to develop. And within the gangs team, notwithstanding what I've said about the integrated nature of the partnership working, we want to expose ourselves, we want to listen to your experiences, and we want to continue to improve. Within the aims and objectives within your terms of reference, which you've ably covered, Councillor, we've identified the serious violence strategy, which, incidentally, colleagues, is a national legislative responsibility, and it is supported through a strategic needs assessment or a collation of a variety of different data to be able to identify key areas of responsibility. And within Hackney, in terms of serious violence, because I've had it said, what is serious violence? There are four main areas, and they are the reducing of gang violence, the reduction of knife-related crime with injury, the reduction of street-based robbery, and the reduction of serious violence with injury. I'm not including violence against women and girls, which is always a key priority. That will be covered by another function. The second element that you were keen to cover is to ensure that there is clear governance to support the internal and external integration of partnerships, which I will go over in some detail. A key aspect of the work that we do as a partnership is that we are very much focused on to diversion and early intervention. I think it's really important to acknowledge that the vast majority of people within Hackney, as we know, including our young people, are doing very, very well, exceptionally well. This is only a small minority of individuals who may be affected by gang violence. So that's why it's important to have a process and a series of interventions that's geared towards diverting those who may require safeguarding because they're being exploited by gangs. And if you're a paid-up member of the gang, I think it's our responsibility to work with those individuals to manage their recidivism down and to divert them from a life of committing crime. Notwithstanding that I've said that the diversion early intervention is a key aspect of our philosophy within the community safety partnership, we do have a keen focus on to the enforcement side as well through the excellent work of the police and other agencies. We know that there's only a small number of offenders who commit a vast proportion of the crime, and we know acutely that serious violence has devastating effects on communities and families. So we are duty-bound to try to reduce that. But at the epicentre of what we're trying to do is the element of community engagement and community involvement. Community for me breaks to two words, common unity. And what I'm keen to do, and I know other partners are, is to work with communities to listen and to respond. And I would be really interested if you feel that there's some gaps in that approach, because I really do think we have to work closely with our communities. Dependent on the time, and I've got Gerry nudging me after 15 minutes, I will give you one, possibly two case studies, because it's about, not just about the words, it's about the action. And I want to demonstrate to you that the rubber is hitting the tarmac. And then I do want to cover some excellent performance that we've had. However, there's a caveat to that, but I will tease you and give you the caveat at the end. So the next slide, please. So within our serious violence strategy, we've got a corresponding action plan. And as I've said, it's informed by the serious needs assessment or strategic needs assessment. And there are a number of pledges that we've made in our outward facing documents. I'm sure colleagues will have had an opportunity to go through those herself and to read them. And as a partnership, we will be open to your questions at the end. But I just wanted to pick out a couple of those, which I think are worthy of notes. So number 12 is around, in no particular order, number 12 is around education. And many times and understandably, I get asked the question, yeah, but I'll be working with young people. Young people in Hackney, as I have said, are fabulous. And we are, as part of the work that we're doing as a partnership, doing a whole myriad of things with young people, to try to celebrate their success, but also to support them to be able to be aware of crime and to be aware of their rights. So at the moment, as part of our anti-knife, anti-robbery initiative, we are visiting all of the secondary schools. And we're also planning in for next year to visit all the primary schools, but only year six. That's what the experts say is the most important. Another one that I want to say, because actually you've been talking about trust and confidence. One of the things that James didn't say specifically, no slide to him, is that we've had some really good success around reducing section 60 stop and search. And that was the consequence of some of the work and intervention from Councillor Fajana Thomas around setting up a review panel and then learning from that. And we've seen the numbers reduced because we are determined to say that in Hackney it's not performance at all costs. We have to bring the community with us and we have to respect and be alive to diversity. And in fact, anyway, it makes sense to be able to work with communities and partners rather than working in a silo. So thank you. If you can go to the next slide, please. So the next slide then talks about, again, the serious violence and action plan and the response. And I just want to say, so firstly, the serious violence needs assessment is currently being reviewed and worked on again. So that's the first thing. Because it is a living document, we are looking to hold a knife crime and violence summit in January of next year. You're all welcome to attend. The idea of that is, again, is this listening where we are listening to communities and individuals. What can we do differently? How are we matching your needs and expectations? How can you support the process? That will also be supported through some academic reviews that we've had and put in place in evaluations. And again, the idea is that this body here makes recommendations. We have Professor Goodman and his evaluation. We have the community summit that we've got in January. And all of that will inform the way that we do business for the next 12 months. The next area that I want to cover, I'm not going to go through every bullet point to give you the time to ask questions, but we do take a contextual safeguarding approach. On its own, that would be a buzz phrase. So let me give you some detail around that. We can't look at individuals in isolation. They have to be looked at in the context of either their human relationships or their geographical relationships. And I'll give you a particular example where we identified a number of young people who were getting caught up in robberies, but equally they were being exploited by more senior gang members. We identified those individuals. Those individuals then were referred to the extra familial risk panel made up of social workers and key partners. And the intervention was very much about safeguarding them and also diverting them. So again, it's that concept of early intervention. The philosophy that we use is quite an old philosophy, but still really effective. And that's the broken windows philosophy. It's important to say that in any area you will have environmental factors that will impact on crime, such as graffiti, abandoned vehicles, littering, etc. And what we do when we go into a particular area, we look at those environmental factors, first of all, to try to show and demonstrate to communities that we're not just about talking. We're about taking action to get their support. One of the areas that I do think is an area for development for next year. And that is taking a more macro approach to the place based approach, where we look at bending mainstream partnership budgets into those areas of high demand. We have done them through the mass project, but I think there's a significant amount of work that we can do there from a strategic perspective, not around growth, because I'm acutely aware that financial restrictions apply, but through bending mainstream activity. So treating poverty more clearly, but only in those areas of high crime and associated factors. So next slide, please. So we are then talking about the governance. I did want to reassure you. So from the very strategic to the very tactical, there is a nexus around serious violence. Because of the impact is substantial on victims that it has to be that clear buy in. And I'm pleased to say that we have got that. At the very top, we've got James Conway and our chief exec, Dawn, who chairs the statutory officer group meeting. Then we have a tier two gangs and serious violence board, where the action plan is constantly reviewed and support is provided. Then we have a GES mission meeting, which is gangs and information sharing and tasking meeting. So those finite amount of resources, making sure that they're applied to those problem areas. We have a monthly community reference meeting. So if we're introducing something we present to the community, we listen to their feedback. And of course, don't forget that our community gangs team is co-located. So they all work under the same roof. But we will build a tent and work with anybody that's going to add value to reduce serious violence. Next slide, please. We talked about diversion and early intervention. Again, I'm not going to go through all of them, but we have got some of the experts behind me when it comes to diversion and early intervention. So one of the things I do want to say through our children and families and Young Hackney and Yacht team, they have got trauma specific therapies in place and indeed a clinician that's attached to the YGS integrated team. They are introducing, as we speak, trauma informed approach. I want to do that also within the community gangs team. So this is realizing trauma, recognizing it, responding to it and preventing re-traumatization. I think that philosophy will do some difference in terms of supporting victims and suspects. There's a myriad of sports programs, including working with Arsenal, Leighton Dorian Football Club, again, in those hotspot areas to divert young people. And social skills and regulating behavior interventions, again, led by Young Hackney and children and families, where actually I think in old money would have been called life skills. But this is supporting young people who are probably vulnerable in nature. And then one that James talked about, but I do want to give a big up actually, and that's the out of court disposals. Because James and others, including children and families, really did have to upturn some trees to get that implemented within Hackney wasn't a given. And that is about those low level or first time offenders, often young people, diverting them away from the criminal justice system. And over the last 12 or so months, we've had some really good success with that. But we don't just cut them adrift. We also intervene with them to try to tail that propensity to be involved with gangs. And then I do want to recognize, next slide, please. I do want to recognize the work that has been conducted by Stephanie in the probation service around integrated offender management to manage offenders. And through your questions, you can probe a bit more in terms of the efficacy of that. And I did want to say, but this isn't one that I want to gloat on, but over the last 12 months alone, there's been 275 years of custody sentences for those high-end offenders for serious violence. Next slide, please. Community engagement and participation. That is, as I've said, at the epicentre. So those of you councillors that represent Hemory and that area, or Mandeville and Gilpin Square and London Fields, and we're going to be doing it in Manor House, those areas of high demand from serious violence perspective, we will undertake surveys before we start the work. We will work with communities. And I'll give you an example in Gilpin Square, woodwork clubs we've set up, homework clubs, gardening clubs. Now this is about making sure that we get the communities working together so they turn their backs and are able to work with agencies around serious violence. Next slide, please. Yeah, I've got, thanks, Gerry's on me, Casey, his colleague, so I'll just round up in a moment. So the penultimate slide, in terms of serious violence reduction case studies, I do want to just go through one. I won't cover all three. I'll leave you to ask questions if you need to. So the Mandeville and surrounding streets, this is Gilpin Square, we brought together 54 partners, not extra money. This is mainstream activity in the face of financial restrictions. Our phase one was intelligence gathering and analysis and planning. Our phase two is enforcement, because you have to actually demonstrate to the community that you're prepared to tackle individuals who may be devastating communities. We then look to environmental interventions, such as removal of graffiti and removal of abandoned vehicles. We then look at community development and legacy, such as the boxing clubs, the woodwork clubs, et cetera. And then we've gone into, which we are now, into the caretaking phase. So if another offence happens, we will go back. We don't just put the community adrift, but we have left a legacy. Finally, the last slide. I did want to give you an idea, because I did have a caveat at the start around the performance. So the performance there, it is axiomatic. It is, that is off the dashboard, et cetera, around reported crime. However, every community meeting that I've been to recently, and I've been to a number of community meetings, I don't think the community would agree that we've had a substantial reduction in knife crime with injury and robbery and robbery with knife crime, et cetera. So one of the things I will leave you, and Steve and other colleagues from within our partnership are committed to doing this, we really do have to work as a partnership and with the police. And I must admit, I don't think the police is actually good at this either, but we are determined to make it better. And that's to get communication out to communities, to reassure them of the excellent successes that we've actually had. Thank you very much. That concludes the presentation. Thank you for the presentation. So I would now like to invite commission members to ask any questions that they may have for our guests. So I've got Councillor Sousa Oranguei, Councillor Garbert, Councillor Semerman. I'll sneak mine in first. So it is recognised that there have been some high profile cases of serious violence in the borough recently. There is a sense, however, that the fear of serious violence does not necessarily reflect the actual reality of serious violence rates. So there's two parts to this. So why do community partners think this might be? And has any work been undertaken to understand the impacts of the fear of serious violent crime on communities? And then the next part, what engagement and communication activities have taken place to address this? What is planned going forward? And what monitoring and evaluation mechanisms are in place to measure their impacts? I'll take this, James. Is that okay? So in terms of your first part of your question, in terms of the impact of the community and what are we doing to actually drill down and identify that, that's one of the primary first in a serious purposes of the strategic needs assessment? Because what that will do will be it will collect data from a variety of partners and stakeholders. So that's the first thing. Secondly, we have got our community reference group. So we do actually take things to the community reference group for feedback. The third aspect is the night summit will also include a range of community members, including very keen around young people attending as well. So we'll be listening to the feedback there. And then don't forget, before we go into a particular area to better understand the crime and how people actually feel as a consequence of residing or being in an area, we undertake surveys with the individuals. So, and this is what I was saying about the community engagement and community activity, deriving the partnership activity. The communities want us on top, not on top. And I think, you know, that's what we try to do. We are committed to making sure communities are listened to. In terms of what we can do about that, in addition, I've already said that I think it would be remiss of me to sit here and gloat about the excellent performance, because actually I think many of the residents in Hackney do not think that that is the case. So we really have got to get our heads together about how we actually communicate more effectively. I would actually say from a micro level, but also right down to the micro level, the micro level, right down to the communities, right down to the streets. And I must admit, we've got to be quick at doing it as well. At the moment, we're not quick and slick at getting messages out to reassure our communities. But the good news is that we've acknowledged that, we've identified it, and we're building it into our serious balance strategy going forward. Thank you. Thanks. Just to add to that, and to let commission members understand, while Maurice has done the presentation, that is actually the partnership consultation. We're reducing serious violence in the borough or crime. We do have boards for each area, and each area do have operational board as well, which are in most cases practitioners and members of the community in terms of what we are doing. We've got the serious violence board, we've got the equivalent of community gang as the operational. We've got the safer young hackney board, which is, we've got the board, we've got the vote board. We've got the combating drugs board, as well as we have the community aspect of that, which is the community resilience partnership meeting that I chaired quarterly. We had one last week. So there are layers to what, just wanting to say to what Maurice has presented, on how we are working on those boards. Some of them is got commissioning work, like with the combating growth, with turning point, with SWIM, that work with our community work, that, so, and something like the vote, working with community, black and global majority people. So just to, and with the serious violence, with government intervention, Maurice mentioned earlier, going to all hackney schools. Those are the people that do this work for us as a partnership. We, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Fajana Thomas. Councillor Rungo. Oh, Councillor Rungo, sorry, sorry. It's okay. I answer to Sheila, it's fine. Thank you. There's a little conundrum in the heart of this. I really respect that place-based approach, the key relationships, micro level, absolutely, really crucially important. But we have, at that level, local youth clubs, estate-based clubs, really suffering with funding resources. So, how do we resolve this conundrum? Because we have fantastic youth hubs, and I appreciate that. We've got those four youth hubs, which are great. But when we're talking about that place-based, and I was really impressed about the interconnections and the relationships, and that's very local. But a lot of those resources there, like the crib, like immediate theatre, like a lot of the state-based support plants, they don't have the funding, they don't have the resources. So, how do we work through place-based relationships when we can't really support them and really extrapolate the value out of them at the moment? And that's not criticism of anybody. I'm just saying that's a conundrum in the heart of this. I'll begin, if that's okay, Chair and Pauline, I'm sure we'll overlay. Thank you for your question, Councillor. Actually, in terms of the results for young people, that at the moment looks very much the same. So, what we have done actually to respond to the offer of younger people, what we're looking at is looking at younger people not being at the Youth Hub. Those younger people will be served in our Adventure Playgrounds, and the offering in Adventure Playgrounds has an offer inside and outside. Some children love being outside in the colder weather, and some children don't. So, there is an offer inside and out. It might be helpful to remind you that our Adventure Playgrounds, they are still free and children and young people are still given some refreshment or snack, which is also free within that facility. And then our Youth Hubs now focus on our young people that are 10 and older for exactly that point, so we can give a stronger offer to those older children. And also, it's a case of it doesn't have such a broader range. If you are a sibling and you look after your younger children, pick them up from school, you then have to go to a Youth Hub and you're all in that same space. So, it's about giving those older children a safer space to explore those things that are more meaningful and important to them. So, I think that's really important to stretch. Pauline, you might want to come in to add to that as well. Thank you. Thank you, Deputy Mayor, and thank you for the question. In Hackney, we are blessed in that we have quite a strong voluntary and community sector, a strong youth sector within that. And our young Hackney service should always be seen as a hybrid model. There are directly delivered services and then we have a range of commission services and grant funded services. We have a youth provider network, which is the opportunity for those organisations to come together, share challenges, share resources. And the thing that we want to get better at as a consequence of our young Hackney review last year is to think about how we build capacity together by sharing things like training and resources, doing more collaborative work going forward in the context that we know that, you know, there are a number of pressures on public sector finances across the piece, and that also affects our community sector. So, it's much more about how we do things together. As a consequence of the young Hackney review as well, we're also reintroducing our detached youth work. So, that will also provide the opportunity for youth workers to pick out, not only engaging young people on the street, but connecting up voluntary sector provision and also those relationships with our community safety colleagues. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That is not a criticism of anyone. It's just really valuable to have a really detailed response and a deeper dive. So, thank you to everybody who's answered that. Thank you. Councillor Garber and then Councillor Summers. Thanks. Thanks for your presentation. I just have a bit of a general question and then a specific one, but a general one is just about, we heard you speak to a lot of the kind of successes around kind of partnership working and engagement with communities, but I'm really interested in what the challenges have been in delivering some of the aspects of the serious violence duty strategy and how you'll do things differently going forward. That's my main question. So, to repeat that, just some of the challenges that we've had with working with communities and… Just delivering the strategy. Just delivering the strategy. So, the first thing that I would say is that we have had some really good support. I do want to say this from the London Violence Reduction Unit around funding. Secondly, we've had some support from MOPAC, but everything else that we've done, notwithstanding the question we've had from Councillor Colleague, financially has been on a shoestring. However, I wouldn't want you to go away thinking that the approach has been threadbare, because it hasn't. It's been about ensuring that the approach and interventions that we take as partners, that we bend that mainstream activity into the areas of the highest demand. So, that would be the first thing. Secondly, in terms of challenges, there is a challenge, and it actually sounds on its own slightly innocuous, but it's not. One of the challenges that we've had as a partnership is that ability to share information, and particularly police data. Now, this is not the police, because I know for a fact that James would be rushing information through our letterbox if he could, but they've just introduced a new ICT system called Connect, and that is really impeding some of the information sharing. And if we want to do a strategic needs assessment that's effective, which we do, we need that level of data. So, that's the second thing that causes a problem in terms of our approach. And I think the third one is one that we have identified, but I would say there's still work to be done. Probably a number of years ago, the community gangs team in particular was focused primarily and predominantly onto those paid-up members of the variety of different urban street gangs that we've got. What we have done and moved away from, but still delivering that, is the early intervention and the diversion, and the work to try to safeguard people, not just young people, but people away from gang-related exploitation and other levels of exploitation. And I've given you a summary of some of the things that we've done to try to ameliorate that situation. And then finally, let's be honest, in my years did pick up when Chief Superintendent James Conway mentioned around the financial restrictions, because in any of my 38 years of experience working in a community safety field, any financial restrictions sometimes can lead to a denuding of resource. And the safer neighbourhood team, in particular in Hackney, it doesn't surprise me, James, that you've been identified as an area across London, because we have got a first-class team. But any reduction in that team, and I'm sure you would share this with me, is going to affect our approach around serious violence. So they would be probably the three main things that I would say at the moment. But other colleagues may have other topics there. But what we try to do, and I'm not talking about sort of blithely the Pollyanna principle of everything is fantastic and everything is perfect. What we try to do is to identify the problem and then either try to get over it, under it, or sometimes through it, we're not prepared to give up because this topic is too important for the citizens in Hackney. If I can quickly, thanks. I think what I would add to that is about perception. I'm not sure if Councillor Cicero mentioned the perception of crime and the way people look at crime in the borough. While we are seeing a reduction in areas of crime, not just serious crime in the borough, there is a perception that people think that is not happening, that we're seeing an increase in crime rather than a decrease. And in particular, around stabbing, when you get a partnership message that there was a stabbing down the road, that anxiety there. But having said that, when you look at the data, I think one stabbing is one too many. I'm not in any way saying it's okay to see stabbing here and there. But what we've not seen in Hackney, what we're not seeing in Hackney are stabbing or dead like some of our neighboring boroughs. But people, when you say to people, we haven't seen, unfortunately, there was the death of a young person early this year. When you say to people, we haven't seen a serious violence death in Hackney for one year or two years. People will say, oh, that is a lie. When you start saying which one, then that's when the conversation changes. For me, as cabinet leader, having those conversations, that is one of the challenging areas of which go back to Carl Celosu's question around, how are we getting what we are doing, what is happening in Hackney now to people, so that people can walk on our street and feel confident. And over the summer, when we had the spike in robbery with knives, both the police and community safety, we worked together. And I don't know, James, but I had this significant decrease in terms of data of those robbery that we have seen, because the partners used to do and did something together. Thanks. Thank you. So, Councillor Garbert, I'll let you come in on a follow-up. If you can keep this follow-up really brief, because we are pressed for time, because I want to bring in Councillor Selman on your follow-up. Okay. Yeah, Councillor Selman. Cool. Thanks for the presentation so far. My overarching question is round about how the actions in the strategy will be taken forward through clearly defined political and corporate leadership and clarity around responsibilities and accountabilities. I guess my specific bit of question linked to that is the strategy makes really clear the importance of prevention, and I think the presentation tonight has really emphasised that and pulls out quite a few actions that sit across the community safety partnership team and the council, so other bits of the partnership as a whole. But I think the specific actions and the strategy itself, for example, round about serious violence, are quite focused on stuff that sits within the community safety team or the policing sector, so, for example, the community gangs team. And I was just wondering how that works in terms of governance, of ensuring kind of oversight of bits that sit across the partnership, and sort of, yeah, how that works in terms of looking at performance against those bits. Thanks. Let me start maybe by Maurice or Gita Maya. This strategy is a new thing. It is a requirement from the Home Office last year. So, for every local authority in the UK. So, it isn't a low thing. This is the first of the serious violence strategy that any local authority will have. So, it is the Home Office asking every local authority to submit the serious violence strategy from the serious violence assessment needs. So, this is our first one. So, in terms of governance… I did want to say that this, Councillor Salman, is one of the slight difficulties of a single person giving a presentation in a partnership setting. Because I would not want you colleagues to go away from here to think that the community safety team is working in splendid isolation. One of the physical representations of the partnership integrated approach is the community gangs team. However, every partner in this room would be able to knock you for six with all the work that they are doing in an integrated way, including children and families and colleagues to the right and colleagues to the left, around all of the work that they are doing. So, in terms of the governance to bring all of that together, though, because they are not doing it in a disjointed way, as Councillor Vajana-Sommers has already said, there is a number of boards that really get into the detail and bring together those strategic and tactical partners. And we are not shy in calling each other out. So, if somebody is, you know, sort of, because we do it as a dashboard, if somebody has got a red risk and there is a little bit of a dilatory approach around it, we are not frightened as a partnership, because we are actually quite mature, of calling each other out to actually get that progress going. So, please, I would not want to leave the panel or colleagues with any perception that we are not working in an integrated way, and that isn't, you know, there isn't a nexus between the right at the top all the way to the bottom, even politically through Councillor Vajana-Thomas and, indeed, Deputy Mayor Bramble. I do not feel unsupported, and I do think I have got the right level of accountability, and I really do think that we are integrated. But, again, as I said earlier, it is not what I think. The VRU undertook a peer review, and they actually highlighted the integrated work within Hackney as being a real positive. Thank you. Councillor Simon, yeah, if you could make the follow-up brief, because we've got a question online. No, I think the presentation did make really clear that there is a partnership approach. I think it was more in the actual document, which is, I think, from 18 onwards, is this sort of step out of the specific actions that will be undertaken as part of the strategy. And I guess with those, a lot of those actions that, like, they are the ones that are centred on things like community gangs team, which is a really important part of things. But I guess there was a lot of other things in that presentation, which aren't necessarily in this document, which might be because they're elsewhere. And I guess what I'm trying to understand is where are those bits captured, and how does the partnership have, like, a whole picture of all of those different things and performance against them? That's a fair point. Thanks, Councillor Salman. All those are captured within the action plan of this. And it sits with the various board that I've mentioned earlier on. It sits, this seat, and the overall governance seat with the Community Safety Partnership Statutory Officers Group, CSPSOG, do I get that right? So, which is co-chair by the borough commander and the chief executive. So, that is the hierarchy of that. And within those are the board. The board are shared by group directors. and director. You've got Gitaya with the serious violence gang board. You've got Jackie Burke, the safer young hackney bird. You've got Sandra Hausband, the Combating Drugs Board. Does that make sense? So, those are where... Yes. All those details are in the actual plans and is picked up by those boards. Thank you. So, I've got Councillor Ross online. Oh, sorry. Before you come in, Councillor Ross. I just... Councillor Salman, to reassure you, the actual action plan for the strategy is reviewed annually. It's a different document. Every action that's responsible for one of those tier two boards, it's discussed at those meetings. And then, at the end of general, we have to submit the action plan for 25-26 to the VRU for approval. And they have to be satisfied that we're meeting the needs of the strategy before they would agree to it. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Ross. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I just wanted to look at, within all of this, violence against women and girls. And from the report, I noted that there has been a reduction in violence against women and girls as well, which is great. I just wondered if that is being perceived by women and girls in the borough or if likewise with, kind of, you know, your stabbings and that kind of crime, that kind of violent crime, if that's not really being perceived by women and girls. And just to follow on, it'd be great to hear what is being done to eliminate the fear that women and girls still have and to make spaces that, the spaces that don't currently feel safe, feel safer for women and girls in the borough. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Ross. The focus on item six is more about youth offending, safeguarding, engagement and outreach of young people. So violence against women and girls is technically not part of this item. So do you mean in regards to young people with your question? Yeah, I was just going from the report that I'd read the presentation and just how, as part of it, it also had the serious offences against women, serious sexual offences and things like that. So I just wanted to bring that in. But if that is not relevant at this time, then that's fine. OK, is there anybody that wants to respond on that based on your. Do you want to do you want to try again, Councillor Ross? The sound is the audio is not that great. Councillor Ross? Can you hear me OK? Yeah. Can you hear me now? So, yeah, it was just in the report that I was reading the presentation, the slides, a part of the kind of violence, violent crimes was around obviously serious sexual offences, you know, basically. And I just wanted to bring that in. But I was just following your response, Chair. If that's not relevant for this moment in time, that is fine. I'm happy to continue with the youth violence. That's fine. OK, from my understanding, I'll try and paraphrase your question. So in regards to this item of serious violence and gang crime, your question is, is related to, I guess, the impacts on violence against women and girls in that respect. Yes. Correct. OK. I'll take that answer. Thank you. I think the context for... Sorry, is the mic on? Is the mic on? Is the mic on? The mic's on. OK, all right. OK. In terms of what it's known about violence against women and girls, what we don't know is that children who are brought up in environments where abuse, domestic violence is witnessed or experienced, increases the likelihood of their vulnerability to exploitation, grooming and the use of violence. So living in a culture of violence, enhanced violence. And I'm particularly pleased that we're talking about a serious violence strategy rather than a serious youth violence strategy, because most violence is committed by adults. And it's the environment children grow up in where violence is alert behavior. So I will see the reduction of domestic abuse, domestic violence, protection of women against sexual violence as a key strategy in preventing serious violence into the future. Thank you. Thank you. You OK with that, Councillor? Russ? Yes, that's fine for now. I can always send something across. That's fine. Thank you so much. Thank you. Any further questions from Commission members? Not on this specific point, just questions on this item. Is there? Yeah. Yeah, we've got a bit more time, yeah. Right. So my question is basically the PowerPoint with, you know, decreasing rates in relation to knife crime and gang crimes. So it looks like everything's sort of going down. I mean, rates-wise. But as you know, over the summer, we had two serious problems where we had stabbing to death of a 15-year-old male in front of school in Benful Court. And we also had the shooting in Dawson, which obviously a young girl, nine years old, was affected and now perhaps she can't speak anymore. So based on those two, for me it's extremely serious sort of two incidents. What risk factors were found to be linked to a series of youth violence perhaps? And how has those sorts of recent incidents and other data's been used to decide on how to prioritize resources and interventions? Yeah, thanks Councillor. So I think Morris covered some of this off at the start, which we would say, you know, there's no sort of mutual back-slapping just because we see decreasing crime trends if we have serious and incredibly serious incidents and tragic incidents like that. And or we have a community who still fear violence and have a perception of violence. The other thing I'd add, of course, it touches on something I made in the earlier item actually is, of course, that violence also isn't equally distributed across the borough. So some communities, some areas of Hackney will experience a much more acute level of violence than others, even though our trends are decreasing over time. So we were absolutely aligned to those facts. There's a whole range of factors which we look at and analyze and try and understand the drivers of violence. I mean, two which came through to the fore over the events over the summer, both when we look at those serious incidents and when we look at the intelligence and a panoply of, quote unquote, lower level incidents that we might have had on the borough. One is the continued prevalence of knives. And, you know, we see the work at a national level to clamp down on status weapons and status knives, but we see those being used. Some of the case studies, I think, in Morris's presentation, you know, talk of machetes, axes and things like, you know, horrific weapons like this being used on the streets. So the continued presence and carriage of knives and bladed weapons still remains a challenge for us. The second is a chronic presence of serious organized crime networks in London in general attracted to the fact that we're a capital city, that there are large scale drug markets remain at play here. And certainly the shooting of the nine year old child that you highlighted earlier and the other individuals shot there, we were unequivocal in our public commentary about that, that that was linked to Turkish originating to organized crime. We also have, as we talked about in the gang space, more sort of postcode based gang networks operate here in Hackney. So while we have criminal enterprise linked to drugs and other illegal activity, and we have a presence of knives on the streets, those remain two of our biggest strategic factors driving violence. The one which we haven't talked about because it sits slightly outside of the gang space is the challenge around nighttime economies, which we could, you know, is probably worthy of another presentation. But a lot of our joint work across council, police and other partners is focused on reducing violence in a nighttime economy as well. Okay. Thank you. So we had some things that were common from the focus groups we held with various local voluntary and community sector groups. And how we formed this question is like, there's a wide range of local voluntary and community sector groups making significant contributions to efforts to prevent children and young people from getting involved in violent lifestyles. I appreciate what you said in terms of the collaborative work that's being done. But what we were picking up was that basically information isn't shared amongst all of these groups in the same way. So how is partnership working between these key agencies and voluntary and community sector groups facilitated to better help them access information, resources or expertise and signposts to other possible avenues of support? Thank you. So in a youth context, in a youth work context, currently we have the youth provider network that I mentioned, which is principally a meeting of any organisation. It's not about the funding base. It's about any organisation that wants to join network and collaborate. But that's borough wide. And one of the things that we are proposing through the review and restructure of the young Hackney service is about having a locality manager for the full areas within the borough that will help cement local relationships on a smaller geographical footprint. So that that training, that training, that collaboration, that sharing of resources can happen more easily with a sort of a named single point of contact for those organisations. So that's one of the ways that we're proposing to take that forward. OK, thank you. So may I add to that just briefly? I covered it in the presentation, but just reinforcing the point. We do have voluntary sector individuals from within the serious violence world, including HCVS, Wickers Charity, Pedro and the whole range of voluntary sector organisations who are fully paid up members of our approach to reducing serious violence. And within the case studies that I didn't have the opportunity to go through, I would have been able to explain in a bit more detail exactly how that has impacted. And one of the other areas that that I do want to raise is and it was one of the Councillor Garber raised actually about a problem that has just come to me. And that is we weren't successful with the my ends approach, which was very much about geographical base. For me, that would have been the archetypal place based approach built up from the community up. Councillor Bajana Thomas and I attended a meeting in the House of Parliament a while ago. 22 MPs were there only a couple of weeks ago and I get the distinct feeling that I may be wrong because who am I? But I get the distinct feeling that my ends is a really good flagship approach that may be adopted further across Hackney. Sorry, sorry, across London. And if it is, we will be on that with both hands to make sure that we implement it here. And that will really start to make some inroads into enhancing the work, the excellent work of the community and voluntary sector going forward. Thank you, Maurice, because some of the feedback was that basically you've got various organisations doing various things in their various ways. But the perception can be that more well established or bigger dominant organisations are, how can I say this? They have more access and they have more involvement with addressing these issues and working with the local authority and other smaller organisations, smaller organisations that are doing their thing, but pretty niche are kind of getting pushed to the side. And it would be good to see like them being able to kind of bring their various expertise to address these issues, because whilst an organisation can be bigger than another, the smaller one may have more specialism in dealing with a particular issue than a larger one. But your responses have been helpful. For your sake, Councillor, if I may, just really quickly, we will work with any key organisation that is aimed at reducing serious violence, both big and both small. The perception around the bigger ones, there's not much money being allocated. These people are bringing things to the table, either through having secured funding elsewhere, or actually they are looking to support us because they know it's the right thing to do. So I did say at the start, anything that you've got with your expertise and knowledge and experience of these smaller groups, my pledge to you will be, we will work with them. But bearing in mind that there isn't a shed load of money anywhere to be able to be allocated. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any further questions from commission members? We've got space for one more. Okay. Councillor Gooch. So you've mentioned funding constraints. There's two points to this really, one of which is how do you maximise other sources of funding, other partner organisations to try and bring in resource where you might have constraint yourself. And you've mentioned that you have difficulty with the police information system and getting access to all the information. Are there any other bodies, you know, how do we share information with them? Is that as smooth as it could be? Are there improvements to be made with other agencies? So the first aspect, thank you for the question, by the way, because it is very germane to what we're talking about. And I'll give you an example. I think it's a good one. And this, again, is not based on hubris, but it is based on a responsibility, I think, to the people in Hackney for us to be able to negotiate with key agencies to attract funding. In the aftermath of a critical incident, Hackney is the highest recipient of funding from the violence reduction unit in the whole of London. So we will access money. We are also supported by the VRU more widely, by MOBAC, through Mayor Karn's allocation. But equally, it is about existing resource. And it's about making sure that the existing partnership resource is focused into the right areas. Because I do think if we rely too heavily on funding allocation, what happens if that funding allocation dries up? So we have to be alive to that. But we have been particularly successful in Hackney at being able to attract financial allocations. And we've used that money very effectively to reduce crime. And I think that is why it is playing out in terms of the reported serious filing figures. But my approach going forward would be one that I would guard or caution against relying on funding allocations. We have to look at other ways of doing it. Finally, for me, if I may, and it's one that I have spoken to, Steve Davison, the Community Gangs Team Manager, we've got some really big companies within Hackney. We did do it in a very tenuous way in the MAS project where there was a company that provided funding for some training and skills in Pedro. But I want to approach some of these companies to get some sponsorship from the private sector element. So I hope that answers your question. I didn't catch the second part of your question. Oh, the police data. The police data, what I will say is, and James, you'll probably, yeah, I was going to say you'll probably answer that I wouldn't, you know, sort of answer for you. But I think you would agree. It's got nothing to do with you, and I think it is a bit of a challenge for us, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of contributory factors there. One is we've come into a new system that simply counts things in a slightly different way, and we extract the data in a different way from a new sort of mass system which runs the Met. And it's taking us, as with any massive institutional technology change, a while to return to some of the data processes that we had before. So there's a bit of a lag in being able to access some of the data. Because it counts things in a slightly different way, it's taking us a while to assure ourselves of the data accuracy of some of the ways that it counts. So we wouldn't want to sort of pass information across if we weren't completely satisfied. It was either counted in the same way, or at least we understood the different ways in which it sort of collated the data. The other challenge is some of the legal constraints that are put on those, particularly by the Information Commissioner's Office, in terms of how we share data. We have been, the way in which we were traditionally shared data has been highlighted as non-compliant, or, you know, risk non-compliance with some areas and put some of the data at risk. And we have to be very careful about how we share personal data, particularly police intelligence data. In years gone by, we were very happy for sort of council analysts to sit and access all of our data sets directly. That's not allowed and that's been highlighted to us as something we need to be careful against. And then the risk of data breaches and data integrity compromises as well also prohibit some of the ways in which we share data. Now, none of those are, as Maurice says, none of those at an institutional level, that's an organisational level between us, getting away of our desire to share data. It just essentially creates some additional hoops that we need to jump through to assure ourselves we're sharing data carefully, compliantly and in a way which, you know, stands up to scrutiny in its own space. Thank you, James. Geeta? Thank you, Chair. I was just going to add that the data isn't just obviously about the police. And I think, you know, really importantly that we need to try and resolve that issue that the borough commander has talked about. But, you know, we have data that sits within the council across all of the services, youth justice and all of our prevention services. We obviously have our colleagues from probation. So what is really important in terms of our approach is looking at the data that sort of enables us to think about the strategic needs assessment. And then using insight. We've talked a lot this evening about the insight from communities and young people and then layering that up with evidence. So there's lots of evidence out there now about the things that are working. And Maurice has mentioned as well that we are developing our own evidence base by, you know, the evaluation that we just had from Middlesex University as an example. So what we're doing is collating data, insight and evidence all of the time to really inform what we know. So it's not just reliant on one source of data, whilst that's really important to us. Thank you. Thank you. So I'd like to thank all commission members and other members for your valuable questions and to all witnesses for their responses and our guests and engagement with the scrutiny process. It's positive to sort of see the progress we're making in regards to serious violence and gang crime and part of the organisations that came to us and gave us feedback was really helpful in terms of giving their insights and feedback to the work that we're doing. I completely appreciate. I think we all appreciate the limits to what we can do with limited funds, but we've just got to try and do what we can to kind of make this make this work. And yeah, I completely appreciate and agree that we've got to get better at ways in which we're communicating with the community, as Maurice had mentioned. So yeah, I'd like to thank you all for that. So after the meeting, commission members will reflect on the evidence heard and may make suggestions or recommendations for improvements for your consideration. So now we're going to move on to agenda item seven, which is cabinet question time with cabinet member for community safety and regulatory services. So cabinet members are invited to attend annually for a Q&A session with the commission. Today we will be hearing from Councillor Fajana Thomas as cabinet member of community safety and regulatory safety. The commission set three areas for questioning relating to the cabinet members portfolio in advance of the meeting. And these are included in the agenda papers. I'd now like to invite Councillor Fajana Thomas to provide a verbal update on those areas of questions. Yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, the guests are welcome to leave and you don't have to stay for the question time with the cabinet member. Well, thanks very much, Chair. And can I just say thank you for sending the questions in advance? So it gives me time to prepare. So do you want me to just go straight into the first one around hackney prevent? Yes, please. Oh, one of the first question around are we responding as a council to challenge of extremism and terrorism in light of the rise of extreme right wing radicalization and terrorism. Just to put on record that in Hackney, we haven't seen an increase in extremism in our borough. I recognize over the summer what happened in some area, both in London and outside of London. And I can reassure you that Hackney is compliant with the statutory responsibilities under the Counter Terrorism Act. This is as evidence on the annual basis, we have what we call the quality assurance process carried out by the Home Office. And that is the QAP access delivery is focused over a key areas to establish compliance. And I can assure you that we are in compliance according to that process. And in Hackney, we have a multi-agency Hackney channel panel to ensure that the individuals who may be susceptible to radicalization are supported to reduce their radicalization through multi-agency activities such as enhance mental health or anti-radicalization interventions. The process is also supported by multi-agency information pollution and threat assessment. And one thing to mention around this is actually some of our community, there are areas where you have issues with referrer to the panel. But in Hackney, we have a community where they actually may referrer to the council. In terms of many vulnerable individuals who have been identified at those forums in the channel process, they receive support through housing, sometimes mental health, then other preventative intervention to reduce radicalized behaviors. Also vulnerable victims of hate crime are supported by specialized police officers and our hate crime coordinator work to support them. The Hackney prevent team also works with interested partners to undertake prevent and counter-terrorism awareness training to prevent referrers. Some of those trainees are always here with councillors if they are interested to attend. Many people, many of our community members do attend those trainees because they are published to the voluntary sector. So do you want me to go to the second part? Yep. The second part was asking about the Home Office funding. Yes, from next April, we cease to have the Home Office Prevent Grant. The Prevent Home Office funding was introduced in 2015 for 45 local authorities at the time. We were with the highest terrorist threat to enable them to go above and beyond in the implementation of statutory prevent duty. But since 2022, the Home Office has steadily reduced the number of prevent funded areas. And acne is one of those areas which in a way it is a good thing if they are saying to us that acne is not facing threat to the level that we need to go beyond our statutory prevent duty. When this happened, just in an attempt in particular following the summer disorder around far right, I wrote to the Home Office about to reconsider the decision because we are not sure what to expect. Unfortunately, unfortunately, I received a response back from the security minister, Dan Jarvis, advising that there is no plan to reverse that decision in terms of funding preventing in acne. However, however, however, they reassure us that some of the work we are using those funding to support will be delivered London-wide. That include establishing an online prevent awareness training where all those training we offer that people will still be able to attend training. The Home Office has pledged to leave the funding available to organizations in acne to support prevent. For example, we have the opportunity to bid for intervention in schools, which was part of what we were doing before to raise awareness around preventing school. So we are able to bid for that. And the final thing on that, there will be provision of evidence-based practice and support will be available from the Home Office Regional Coordinator. So what we now have is because we now have Regional Coordinator and the BCU commander, James Conway is actually, the is a part of the local authority that was supported with funding in acne. I'll stop there on the first question chair. Thank you. So are there any questions, a lot of questions from commission members? Okay, I have a question. So we've done positive work in terms of refreshing our hate crime strategy and engaging with the diverse communities within, within Hackney. Whilst we understand and appreciate the issues with funding, what sort of alternative things are we doing to still ensure that the refreshing of the hate crime strategy is central to addressing the issues regarding discrimination within society. We do have hate crime incidents and things like that. So I think we should, I'm not saying that we are taking our foot off the gas, but I think we should still hold it central, but what are we doing with limited funds? Oh, that's So, You're coming in on you. That's, that's okay. Well, what, what, what would you do? I mean, depending on what that would happen to you. Oh, sorry. From, we have curated, um, a prevent and hate crime position moving forward. So we're not going to say we're not doing anything around prevent because the funding is being withdrawn. So we still, uh, as a council, we've, uh, curated that position and the recruitment with starting the new year, hopefully by the end of January, February, we're going to have a prevent and hate crime officer in place. And again, we're looking at, uh, having the board, a prevent and hate crime board where we're able to, uh, again, still carry on with the work. We're able to do within our statute tree, able to deliver, uh, or within our, the, uh, the, within CTA, we're able to continue to deliver that. So we're not just folding our hands, not doing anything. Thank you, uh, Councillor, um, Vajana Thomas. So did you want to go on to the next? Oh, yeah. Um, Councillor Gabbert. Um, thank you for that information. Can you just give us a sense of how you feel prevents what difference it's made for in Hackney, like specifically? Thanks very much. I think in terms of prevent, I think prevent has made a huge difference in Hackney. I mentioned briefly in my presentation, we're not, Hackney wasn't one of those areas where there, we, we were fortunate. We have very good officers in our prevent team and work very closely with our communities. So we're not one of those boroughs where people see prevent us, them and us. In fact, from some community, from members of our community, we do get referral from the communities, uh, asking prevent, uh, team to see, can we look at this individual? And that intervention from the team has made a huge difference into that. And apart from that, our schools, the, the, what we, the, the intervention in schools is massive around getting young people to understand what prevent is all about, what terrorism is all about. So it is, that's a sense of radicalization, young people understand the grooming, the being radicalized. So that really, I believe that really makes a difference. And importantly, Councillor Gabby, like I mentioned earlier on, I think while I'm not saying prevent takes all, takes all the credit. I think the massive work we have done in Hackney, Hackney Council, voluntary sector with the prevent team is what we have seen. When those, uh, disorder were happening up around the country, people, uh, even people were gathering together to say they've not come to Hackney. We are here, we are going to mount a counter protest if any far right are coming into Hackney. And I think it was the work over the years that we have done. And I'm not too sure any of the counsellors here who's attended any of the prevent, uh, trainees that they've put on. We normally get very, uh, positive feedback on how people have learned more about what prevent is all about. So I'll stop there. But I can say it has made a difference. Thank you. Are there any further questions on the, um, Hackney prevent before we go on to strategic relationships with the police? Okay. Back to you, um, Councillor Fajan, is honest. I'm going to say, oh, sorry. Thanks Maurice. It's around the impact of the updated national definition of extremism and gateways. Um, engagement principles and the newly formed counter-terrorism center of excellence on, on future work. Oh, sorry. Apologies. I thought you had already incorporated that, but if you want to go one by one, that's why. Oh, sorry. Uh, it's just to say, although the previous Tory government adopted a new definition, as far as I'm aware, it has not been acted in legislation. So they, they, they, we got a new government. So I'm not too sure what the, uh, liberal government would do around that. But, uh, extremism can lead to the radicalization of individual, uh, deny people democratic rights and opportunities, suppress freedom of expression, and all of that. The new, I think what we can see is, um, uh, I hope the labor government, uh, changes some of the world in the, in the new definition. And the reason I'm saying that is that when you look at it, uh, there's some of our community that will feel with that, uh, some of the words there. With that, I don't want to name any community you can see that is more geared to certain communities and that will impact people in acne. And in acne, we need to be careful around, around that. Uh, the proposed center of excellence will work towards providing innovative ways of disseminating research and evidence across the counter-terrorism sector. The center will also advise and scrutinize the government's approach to counter-extremism. It will also help to shape policy and academic and practitioner literature to inform this practice in the UK counter-terrorism space. So, if any, I'll stop there. Thank you. Are there any questions on that point from commission members? Um, Chancellor Selman? Um, you know, it's just, so, um, I guess the other thing that's been recently is, and not a Hackney specific thing, but nationally, anxiety about whether there might be an uptick in inappropriate referrals and to prevent from places linked to, for example, concerns around about, um, tensions in the Middle East and also actually, you know, sort of environmental climate context as well. I know that in Hackney there's been a huge amount of work with the quality of the people in individual roles about how prevent is approached locally. But I just wanted to check in terms of what's coming through in terms of referrals. So from, for example, um, schools or other parts of the community, if the, whether we'd seen any kind of variation in kind of what was being referred through, or if that's kind of, yeah, that we are continuing to make sure that it's that Hackney-wide approach to kind of how prevent is applied sensitively in context specifically in Hackney. Yeah, I can understand, I can understand council because it's more, uh, it's either myself or Brendan who chairs the channel panel, um, and we haven't seen any differences. I would actually say that, uh, the majority of the individuals that appear before a channel, um, are suffering from mental health. So therefore that's a supportive, uh, function and I would probably say 50% of them will be displaying right wing tendencies. However, we are not seeing any politically motivated groups that may be exploiting people. Um, and we have certainly not seen any political far right organizations operating within Hackney. Um, so we will continue to monitor it. My own opinion is that don't think the definition has altered the price of fish too much in Hackney, but we will continue to monitor the channel panel. I think I should probably know the answer to this and I can't remember when people are referred to channel panel. Can you just remind me what happens with the data that comes out of that? Is that something that's held in like council services and safeguarding services? Or is it stuff that can end up on sort of police basically picking up on the conversations earlier about like beta protection and things like that? But yeah, is that something where does that get held in terms of people who are referred to the channel panel? James, you may have to come in just to reinforce what my perception is around the police and SO15. Notwithstanding, I did work in that field a while ago. Um, but the police has the police, uh, national risk assessment framework. Um, and that's just been modified and changed. So initially it would be the police that would undertake the referrals. Once that actually is suitable to come into channel panel, then it's partnership activity and there is a record of the work that's actually done. But my understanding is that that wouldn't based on intelligence and information. It's something that we could could actually be to the disadvantage of an individual who actually, you know, becomes de radicalized. But James, is that your, I mean, you're an expert in this field because you've just come from that area. Yeah, I mean, things move quickly and that was two years ago. But yeah, the, the, so there's a distinction between the police role in the assessment and process of risk and then material then being held, for example, on a police national database of officers accessing. So no part of the channel process means that that they, that the information is held on a police national database in the sense that officers would, uh, you know, do, do a check and sort of have an awareness of that individual. However, there is a separate, but, but, but, you know, police data role around assessing the risk around, around channel referries and individuals. But I don't, wouldn't want to leave the impression that that means that somehow the police holdings of national data on criminal activity and channel are somehow confused. They are separate, separate sort of entities. Thank you. Over to you, Councillor. Councillor. ありがとうございました Paula, . Are there any, yeah. Yeah. To the central, ... Centre of police practices , yeah. The boss was around, 40 to the police, yes you couldn't watch the call. Four children but no one day. They are outage, every요 Hourn locations, It happened, we had contact from the public health, the police, community safety, education, and families and children's services on that board. So most, not most, everything we do around combating drugs, policing drugs, sit within that board. In terms of young people, young hackney lead and support on a range of intervention with children and young people presenting with a substance misuse related need. The service proactively engage young people who may be using drugs or alcohol in terms of outreaching services to school across the borough. They work in all our schools. They have close ties and collaboration with child and adolescent mental health services, including the offer of satellite service support in schools. Satellite service operation from across children's centres and youth provision in the borough. There is a close collaboration with young offenders team, youth justice, to help identify individuals where substance misuse may be a factor in the young person's presentation. There is collaboration with health partners such as Humartine Hospital and going to operation with children's social care, to help identify where a child or young person may be at risk or harm or criminality in relation to drugs and alcohol use. The collaborative outreaching practices with other support services, including the council community wellbeing team to help ensure multiple responses to that young person. So in addition, the young HACNI operates with co-funding from public health grant with additional outreach workers and therapeutic practitioners. So there is that alongside this, there is the new children and young person working group within the combating drugs partnership group as well. In terms of younger people that might be vulnerable or in a HACNI nice space, we work regularly with public health as well in terms of regular training offer to licensed premises in terms of young people who might be coming to licensed premises in terms of alcohol. The training seems to raise awareness around substance misuse that include, with our licensed premises, we do deliver trainings as well. as well. And these trainees include information on how to respond to cocaine in terms of vulnerable people that might be suffering if they're in the licensed premises. So opiate pill, nox and nalosone. So, I'll stop there and I'll go to the, the last thing to mention is that there are some key key initiatives in some of our, uh, uh, uh, sport areas. And through that, there is what we call the partnership tasking meeting, where they monitor what is happening. All those initiatives, or work around places like Hacney Downs, Gillette Square, and Shortish to, uh, apprehend people who are selling drugs to vulnerable people. So, going on to, uh, no place for hate, the priorities be embedded. Sorry. Sorry. Stop there. Yeah. Sorry. I just wanted to check. Does anybody have anything on, um, that question? Hey. Any follow up? Cancel? Thanks. That was really interesting. Especially the bit about the young people's group as part of the combating drug partnership. I think that sounds really, I'd love to hear more about that. Not now, but yeah, it'd be great to hear more about that at another time. Um, just on the bit about diversion, just for my understanding, cause I know this was picked up a bit in the earlier presentation about, um, people being caught with a small amount of drugs and not being criminalized. But I just wondered if you could talk a bit about the numbers that are going through, like, diversion, um, and how that's working in practice. Yeah, uh, thank you. Uh, in 23, 24, we had about 50% of our cohort around 60 children who went through diversion. Uh, two thirds of those, or at least third days were related to small, um, cannabis possession. A third were low level violence and a third were other, um, types of crimes and theft. So not huge numbers, right? Six, about 60 children. And you're often around a third of that related to cannabis being the most common offence, possession of cannabis, and as a diver, as a, as a diversion. We're not subject to the adult, um, cannabis cautions. Um, we use, we use, uh, uh, uh, triage and informal disposals and use caution and conditional caution. So that would, they wouldn't have any record. That's something that wouldn't have any record. No, no, that informal, that informal diversion ends up as an NFA. And our response is a safeguarding response. It's harm reduction and education for future prevention. Great. Let's do more of that. Thank you. Councillor Salmon. Yeah. I mean, I think the diversion stuff sounds really positive. I'm just wondering, there's, I guess, diversion that happens, which I understand is if there's been an initial, like, criminal justice response. There would then be another context where there are recognised very restricted resources, like the youth outreach team or substance abuse team content, which wouldn't be the criminal justice part of the system. And presumably in that context would then potentially not come into contact with diversion. And I guess I'm just wondering where, so say like a really common thing that anybody who's been to any community board panel ever, people always go kids in stairwells for cannabis, for example, or like, I'm just interested in, in those kinds of settings, who the lead agency is, if that makes sense, is it a policing response, which then might lead to diversion? Or is it a youth services response that might still in some ways be similar, but look slightly different? I think the short answer is probably both and, in that we have a youth work response that goes out of this detached outreach and includes the substance misuse prevention outreach work as well. And so it doesn't matter if you come into the contact with the criminal justice system first, or whether it's a proactive contact through the youth justice service, the workers and the response will be the same. Thank you. I think James wants to respond. Oh, follow up. Yeah. Okay. Follow up. Yeah. Let's check it out. I think the answer is like a really positive one. So just check out. It's essentially, regardless of which, it's the same support that you'd get and the consequences are similar in that you shouldn't end up with a record. Is that...? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I suppose there's two things here. There's who first encounters the issue. And then there's how is it dealt with. How is it dealt with is the same. Who first encounters it might be different. It might be through a health lens. It might be through a police contact, but it's channeled through the same place. What we're talking about in the earlier input, which we want to expand that yet further to... So quite a lot of this doesn't even enter, you know, a custody suite. No, no one gets arrested. There's simply a diversion on the street. There's ways of dealing with very minor issues on the street without needing to even go down at even the start of criminal justice process. There is another category of events where maybe slightly slightly step up, but we would still see at the very entry point of a possible route to criminal activity where you might get arrested, might enter the criminal justice process at a policing point. We think then we could yet further expand the use of deferred prosecution and diversionary activity at that stage and stop people even entering the court process and the criminal justice process. And that's the pilot that we've been testing here in Hackney, which has now the rest of the Met really interested because it sits, it chimes absolutely directly with the Met's commitment to a child first approach and I did find that children will be exploited way before there's any sort of conscious engagement with criminality. Okay. Thank you. Apologies, like we're definitely running over. So I think what I'm going to do now is I'll just go through the remainder questions. If we do have any follow ups, then I suggest we follow up in writing to get responses on there. But I appreciate we've been asking a lot of the questions in the room and Councillor Gordon did have your hand up. Is it a brief, brief question, Councillor Gordon? Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Can you hear me okay? Yes, perfect. Really briefly, just following up on those other lines of questioning. If children get taken to the police station in these circumstances and samples are taken of fingerprints and DNA, what happens to that? Are their efforts made to ensure that they're advised of their right to get those samples destroyed rather than being held in the database? So on some of the finer points there, I might need to revert in writing. I mean, everyone's informed of their rights on entry to police custody. A child in police custody would have to have an appropriate adult present in that situation. On the finer point of in the context of a deferred prosecution thing, I might need to... Yeah, colleagues might have a bit more questions. Yeah, I'll help you out, James. In fact, Councillor, what happens is children who are appearing custody as well as having an appropriate adult, if they're parents and the local authority through youth justice provide that appropriate adult, even parents or relatives, aren't they? The police and appropriate adult always give a solicitor legal representation. It's an outstanding practice for the Met to give that to children. That's happened in the last 12 months. Previously, children in custody, in Hackney police stations, if they were appropriate adults provided by youth justice, we always require a solicitor present to give exactly that advice that they have to be responsible for. So all their rights are clear and protected by having independent legal advice. Thank you. So Councillor Gordon, if you do have a follow-up, can we send that in writing, please, if that's okay? Yeah, thanks, Charles. Okay, thank you. So the next question we had, which I believe you've responded to when I asked the previous question about the hate crime strategy. Do you want to give a response on this question? Because I think you kind of gave a response already, but I'm happy to just quickly ask it and then you can respond if that's helpful for you. So this is the, how will Hackney's no place for hate priorities be embedded through clearly defined political and corporate leadership and clarity around responsibilities and accountability and what monitoring structures are in place to ensure progress, particularly in light of recent world events such as the conflict in the Middle East and Stockport riots. Thanks, Chair. The Hackney no place for hate strategy consists of four main strategic aims supported through an anti-hide crime action plan with corresponding responsibilities. The political leadership to support the delivery of the strategy sits with me as the cabinet lead. And there is a councillor champion at the moment is councillor in Ratbon to support my work in particular in the community. The corporate oversight and monitoring is provided by the community safety partnership statutory officers group. We've mentioned this, anything in regards to this area, anything crime seat within that CSP, SOG. For instance, I'll give an example following the attack in Israel and the subsequent bombing in Gaza, James said through the BCU establish a weekly response update. where we bring members of the community together with the local authority and police to update on what is happening and direction of things. And again, part of that, the chief executive just citing example of how the leading officers officers have taken that, the chief executive as, again, co-chair of CSP, Adam, your councillor, Gundimorin, you were actually in attendance at that, had a renewal of public commitment where we gather as a council with police officers and community members are clapped in ponds, standing in solidarity with the community. So, in terms of embedding that responsibility and accountability seat politically as well as senior officers, senior officers have a sight of what is happening. And in terms of community and hate crime, we have the hate crime officer that work with people in our community. We do have community, we do have community hate crime champions and again saying thank you to the community safety leadership. Although we have no place for hate officers for almost 12 months, but that absence has not been felt by the community because other officers are taking that role. During the hate crime awareness, usually we joined the hope organization to raise awareness in Na'apa Road, all these seven days of hate crime awareness, we are always occupied in Hackney, making sure people are aware of hate crime, making sure people are aware of hate crime. And in addition to this, we have officers working group. It's called the Hackney Community Cohesion Group. It's shared by the director, Gita, where diverse issues around hate crime in our community are discussed and monitored around pensioning in the community. I've already mentioned this earlier on, that we, in January, we're going to have a prevent and hate crime officers together. And through the Hackney, there is the Hackney Borrowed Incident Forum and our emergency plans, we are able to effectively respond to incidents such as those experienced nationally over the summer. I'll stop the chair. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Fadrana, Thomas, like I mentioned, we're going to send in any follow-ups. We won't take them here. We'll send them to you. So we'll go on to the next one. But if we can really please, like, I appreciate the work you've done in providing comprehensive responses, but we really need to be concise with those responses, please. We are short of time. So what progress has been made in delivering the eliminating violence against women and girls priorities in partnership with the police, e.g. preventing and reducing violence against women and girls, supporting victims and survivors, holding perpetrators to account and building trust and confidence? What have been some of the successes and challenges so far? And how will these be used to reflect and do things differently where appropriate in the new strategy? Thank you. Hackney is a zero tolerance borough when it comes to misogyny, sexual harassment and sexual abuse. And this approach has been pushed heavily across the work we are doing in terms of having with our businesses in the nighttime economy, the correlation of violence against women and girls at the nighttime economy. We are pushing that. We encourage bystanders intervention. We've got all our licensed premises are key partners in our approach as well as the police. Good progress has been made in terms of delivering those priorities. I'll start from, as you are aware, we are in the 16 days of activism to end violence against women and girls. Last week, Friday, together with police officers at the BCU, head of community safety here, with public head. We were out at a short-dish nighttime economy on the Don't Cross the Line, our flagship harassment campaign until 2 a.m. We are engaging venues. Over the last year, we have distributed 500 handbooks to licensed premises. We've trained since 2019, we've trained over 3,000 licensed premises officers. Our welfare and vulnerability engagement training covers important areas on issues such as drink spiking. We know it's one of government priorities now, but Hackney has been there before. This government will be doing things around drink spiking in Hackney. In 2022, again, one of the things we did in Hackney, we had an online survey that came up to better understand the experiences and concerns of women in this borough, which I believe is only three borough that have done that. All the other two were behind in Hackney. And what happened is when women identified to us that they are unsafe, we've responded to those suggestions by improvement to CCTV installation, to lighting, to removing blockages and other safety improvements. In terms of supporting all victims and survivors, we've got the domestic abuse intervention service, and working with the police, they have a meeting, a fortnightly meeting, a large multi-agency risk assessment conference, a partnership forum for discussing and taking action on high-risk domestic abuse cases that we have in the council. In, if James is here correctly, in 2023, we, our BCU performed, what was the highest performing BCU in the country when it comes to vote detention rate and prosecution rate? We work with many organizations, many community organizations that are supporting women around domestic abuse in particular. There is the disproportionality when it comes to women from black and ethnic minority. We commission immersion, working with women from that community. Previous to that, it was Claudia Jules working with some of our women. And again, in Hackney, we've developed a Hackney Extra Familiar Risk Arm and Domestic Abuse Pathway where we are supporting people at risk. In terms of, in terms of, we have the intergenerational domestic abuse protocol, as well as supporting people with disability who might be victim of domestic abuse, as well as people from LGBTQ plus community as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Fajana Thomas. So, like I said, follow-up questions we'll send to you. So, next is Section 3, CCTV and public surveillance. Before we go on to that though, I'm going to need to take a vote with commission members to extend by 10 minutes, if they're okay with that. I propose we extend by 10 minutes. So, those in favour that are commission members, please raise your hand if you're happy to extend by 10 minutes so we can get it all business sorted. Okay, so are you suggesting that you'll be happy to receive the answers to the CCTV questions in writing? You're all happy with that? Okay. We've still got our business to do though. Yeah. So, are we okay with that? Any objections? Okay. Yeah. Apologies, Councillor Fajana Thomas, but yeah, we put too much in but we really appreciate the responses you have given and we appreciate to receive the written responses to the questions. But I'd like to thank you and everybody for attending today's meeting. Thank you. Thanks very much. Okay. So, next, agenda item eight. So, scrutiny reports, letters and responses. So, this is a rolling item which gives us a space to note and discuss our reports and letters and any responses to our meeting. The commission has not finalized any reports or letters or received any responses to their work since the last formal meeting. So, we will move on to the next agenda item. So, agenda item nine. So, agenda item nine. Action tracker 2024-2025. This agenda item is included as a rolling item which allows us to track the progress of any action and information requests from previous meetings. The tracker has not been updated since the last meeting. So, we will again move on to the next agenda item. So, agenda item 10. Work program 2024-2025. The work program for the 2024-2025 municipal year is included within the agenda plan. Do members have any comments or questions? Do you? Can you tell us someone? Oh, okay. All right. So, members are asked to… Sorry, Office Q is being invited to the carnival, the bit about the carnival. Is it literally just council officers or is it going to be members of the carnival community? Because it just has a council officer and I just wondered if anyone who actually, you know, the community and people who organize the council are being invited, the carnival are being invited. I think we're still working on fleshing that out. Yeah, we're still working on fleshing that out. So, we will, yeah, come back to you and if there's any suggestions that commission members may want to give, feel free to email me. And I just, I think there's also probably a point there, which is that everyone wants the carnival to continue in the future. So, that's, that wouldn't really be a question for me that we would be discussing at that point. It would be how and in what form. So, I appreciate that point. But I think the kind of, the funding is probably the key element of that to me, because that's the, that's the major blocker to the carnival going forward. Did I get, sorry? I just, on that, when we discussed that, it seems to me that the funding is the key element of that discussion and where that might come from in terms of, in terms of who we invite. So, in, in regards to the funding, the budget scrutiny process, so, that would have been before you became. Yeah, we, yeah, there's, there's a process, but we'll explain to you outside of that, because that's not done in this meeting, if that, if that helps. I just think, on the agenda, it says, to look at future plans for Hackney Carnival and how it ensures that resources are targeted appropriately for long-term sustainability and value. I just think you need to have the people who are most impacted. So, people who organise it, people who enjoy it, their voice needs to be here, if that's, if that's the scope of the agenda item. Okay, that's noted, but we have to understand the processes that we have followed and we've committed to in the various public and private meetings. Okay, so, members are asked, yeah, members are asked to note the work programme. Okay, so, agenda item 11, minutes of the meeting. The draft meetings of the Living in Hackney Scrutiny Commission, held on the 18th of November, 2024, have not yet been finalised and will be provided at the next formal meeting. So, agenda item 12, any other business? Is there any other business? Okay, so, if there is no other business, I formally declare the meeting closed. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.