Jessica Toale
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Town and City Centre Safety
Jessica Toale Excerpts(1 day, 20 hours ago)
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Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Tackling crime and antisocial behaviour has been a priority in my constituency since my election. Countless residents have told me they feel unsafe. Bournemouth faces seasonal pressures, where millions of people visit our beaches and parks during the summer. Last year, we had a slew of negative headlines about chaos, decline and lawlessness, but the crime statistics show a completely different picture. Bournemouth is consistently in the top 20—if not top 10—safest cities, or large towns in our case. Yes, serious incidents occur, but they are trending downwards. Shoplifting is rife. I do not want to minimise that or people’s experience of it, but in my limited time I want to understand why fear feels so real for so many people when crime is relatively low.
I recently met a resident who told me he does not let his 12 and 14-year-old daughters go out after 3 pm or 4 pm in Bournemouth. Yet when they went up to Regent Street he let them wander around and go off shopping on their own. Crime rates in Bournemouth are 16% lower than the national average. They are 130% higher in Westminster—an area that has 8% of London’s crime. I do not say that to minimise or to denigrate Westminster, but safety is not only about where the crime happens; it is also about whether the shops are filled and the streets busy, clean and looked after, and about confidence and pride, and feeling reassured and protected.
Since my election I have been relentlessly focused on funding for our police, with £1 million for hotspot policing over the summer, 40 new officers for Dorset police, and it is why I relentlessly bang on to the Minister about the funding formula. Safety was a key theme of our Bournemouth town centre citizens’ panel. The panel called for four things: a co-ordinated women’s safety initiative, improved co-ordination of positive safety initiatives, awareness of CCTV effectiveness, and a lighting audit to highlight low and high lighting areas in the town. These sit alongside actions designed to improve the public realm, spur regeneration, fill our streets and restore civic pride. I will certainly be playing my part in all of these.