Safer Kingston Partnership Plan 2024-2029

This five year plan provides the overall strategic direction for the Safer Kingston Partnership to achieve our vision. We will focus our resources and collaborative working practices on four thematic priorities, each with their own annual delivery plans which will be reviewed following an annual strategic needs assessment. We aim to be responsive to any changes, and if deemed appropriate and evidenced by the strategic assessment, the priorities set out within this plan may change within the five year period.

Aims

In each of the thematic priorities we will aim to:

• Take a proactive and evidence led approach, to prevent and reduce crime and antisocial behaviour.
• Increase reporting of crime and harmful behaviours. 
• Listen to our citizens and our communities. 
• Adopt both individual and place-based approaches.
• Understand and address the root causes underlying crime and antisocial behaviour.
• Ensure support for victims and reduce repeat victimisation.
• Have a joint, robust, and proactive approach to tackle perpetrators, enablers, and places where harm is caused and reduce reoffending. 
• Utilise early intervention to facilitate positive changes in harmful behaviours. 
• Continue to embed evaluation and learning across the system.
• Be innovative and try new ways of working. 
• Be trauma informed. 
• Adopt a contextual safeguarding approach. 
• Promote key community safety campaigns and deliver community action days.

1. Working in, and with our communities to ensure our borough is a safe place for everyone: Our key commitments are to:

   • Raise awareness about the different types of crime and antisocial behaviour, how people can report these and the support services available whether they report a crime or not
   • Regularly promote key messaging relating to Fearless and CrimeStoppers to provide opportunities for people to report anonymously
   • Adopt and implement the five Home Office Anti-Social Behaviour Principles into our partnership arrangements to ensure an effective multi-agency response
   • Take a strategic approach to identify areas and/or communities with early indicators of rising crime and/or antisocial behaviour and facilitate proactive multi agency problem solving practices
   • Coordinate multi agency risk management/safeguarding panels to ensure a multi-agency response to safeguard and support victims and coordinate interventions to reduce re-offending
   • Use our full range of partnership tools and powers to enforce and hold perpetrators of crime and antisocial behaviour to account
   • Work with local businesses to learn, share and support each other to prevent and combat crime and improve community safety
   • Develop a Night Time Economy Strategy to protect and build on the boroughs strengths and assets, provide insight into tackling violence in public spaces and identify opportunities to grow and diversify night time activities.
   • Design out crime and ‘design in’ community safety by adopting key design principles to create public spaces that are safe during both daylight and darkness
   • Work in partnership with Kingston River Safety Forum (KRSF) to continue to review and improve the water safety measures along the River Thames that passes through Kingston and identify opportunities to improve support to those experiencing a mental health crisis
   • Improve CCTV coverage and monitoring to assist detection of perpetrators and increase the number of successful prosecutions/li>
   • Improve the safety of our local communities by reducing the risk to life, property and the environment from fire.

2. Preventing and reducing serious violence and exploitation. Our key commitments are to:

   • Work with partners to develop a whole systems approach and refresh our Violence and Vulnerability Reduction Action Plan (VVRAP)

   • Adopt a proactive, partnership approach to reduce the impact of serious organised crime in local communities by:

     • Improving our understanding of organised crime locally, including working with communities to cultivate local intelligence and keeping ahead of developments in technology
     • Advancing our understanding of local predictors of recruitment into criminality, enabling earlier intervention and prevention
     • Disrupting organised criminal networks and prolific offenders through targeted and legislative interventions
   • Identify those at risk of harm and exploitation or at risk of becoming involved in causing harm or exploiting others at an early stage and intervene appropriately
   • Take a focused deterrence approach that combines communicating the consequences of violence with support for developing positive routes away from it
   • Adopt a Child First approach and encourage children’s active participation, engagement and wider social inclusion
   • Promote the London Inclusion Charter and support education providers to effectively support children and young people
   • Facilitate participation and engagement with parents and carers and continue to build the parenting champions network
   • Address the inequalities and needs driving serious violence locally, including identifying and responding to trauma and other needs in a holistic and timely way
   • Take an asset based approach focusing on the capacity, skills and strengths of those individuals and communities most impacted by violence and exploitation to find out what is working well and identify opportunities to co-produce solutions
   • Engage with people with lived experience, such as those who have been stopped and searched, spent time in prison or been the victim of a crime as they have unique insight into what works and what doesn’t in the criminal justice system
   • Further develop the partnership response to ensure that victims of all forms of exploitation are safeguarded and supported, preventing the unnecessary criminalisation of children and vulnerable adults

3. Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG): Our key commitments are to:

   • Co-produce a VAWG strategy highlighting key theme areas such as partnership working, meeting the needs of diverse communities, young people and early intervention, holding perpetrators to account and provision of victim survivor support services
   • Develop a better understanding of the impact of serious violence and exploitation on women and girls and ensure appropriate support is available, including mental health support
   • Continuing to learn from people with lived experience and use the learning to drive what we do, how we do it and how we measure success
   • Continue to strengthen the survivors forum network and build on our services being led by local needs
   • Continue to raise awareness around VAWG and build on the existing work with our minority ethnic communities
   • Continue the early intervention and prevention work with our schools, colleges and universities to tackle root causes of VAWG
   • Ensure the newly commissioned VAWG Service is promoted to highlight expansion of support from Domestic Abuse to all forms of VAWG
   • Work towards a partnership approach to disrupt perpetration of abuse and to utilise all enforcement options available to reduce the risk to victims and survivors
   • Enhance the community response to longer term holistic support and enable sustainability and further funding opportunities for the Kingston Women’s Hub
   • Commit to our duty under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 to create local pathways and provide safe and specialist accommodation to victim survivors of domestic abuse
   • Continue to work within our night time economy venues to tackle VAWG through prevention, education and partnership working

4. Thriving Neighbourhoods and Communities: Our key commitments are to:

   • Promote good news stories to increase trust and confidence
   • Continue to develop and enhance the community safety engagement strategy and produce an engagement portal for residents, businesses and professionals
   • Celebrate young people and the contributions they make to their communities and provide opportunities for them to be part of the solution to keep Kingston safe
   • Promote social inclusion to encourage equality of opportunity and improve community cohesion
   • Work in partnership with the anti hate crime action group to increase awareness and understanding of hate crime and promote reporting methods for victims and witnesses
   • Roll out a series of hate crime workshops for partner agencies and the community
   • Build strong and trusted partnerships with elected members and our local communities to facilitate the sharing of information and provide opportunities to come together to develop place-based solutions to local issues
   • Continue to strengthen the partnership response to community tensions, recognising and responding early to avoid escalation
   • Promote opportunities for people to network, volunteer and improve community safety e.g. Neighbourhood Watch, Safer Neighbourhood Board, Police Ward Panels, community groups, friends groups etc
   • Further develop our bystander approach to help people feel empowered and prepared, if they do see a crime occurring, so that they know that they can do something safely, to make a positive difference