Agenda and minutes

Sir Clive Loader, Police and Crime Commissioner

Simon Cole, Chief Constable

The minutes of the meeting held on 20 December 2012 were taken as read, confirmed and signed.

There were no urgent items for consideration.

All members of Community Safety Partnerships declared non-pecuniary personal interests in all matters relating to those partnerships.

Mr J T Orson CC, Cllr T Pendleton, Cllr B Roper and Cllr S Russell all declared non-pecuniary personal interests as members of the Strategic Partnership Board.

Cllr C Golding declared a non-pecuniary  personal interest as he was a non-executive director of the Probation Trust.

Col R Martin declared a non-pecuniary personal interest as he was a trustee of Warning Zone, which was in receipt of funding from the Police.

Cllr M Sood declared a non-pecuniary personal interest as the Chairman of the Leicester Council of Faiths.

The Chairman sought and received the Panel’s agreement to considering the following papers as one item, as they were all interlinked:

·         The Police and Crime Plan (paper B)

·         The Police and Crime Commissioner's approach to the commissioning services (paper C and the supplementary paper)

·         The Police and Crime Commissioner’s revenue budget and precept 2013/14 and medium term financial strategy (paper D).

Copies of these papers are filed with these minutes.  The Panel also considered comments on the Police and Crime Plan that had been submitted by chief officers and comments from Simon Galton, CC: copies of these are also filed with the minutes.

The Chairman welcomed the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the Chief Constable to the meeting.

The PCC introduced his draft Police and Crime Plan, his approach to commissioning, his proposed revenue budget and precept for 2013/14 and his medium term financial strategy (MTFS).  He emphasised that this was a first draft of the Plan, which was now the subject of a consultation that would end on 10 March.  The final Police and Crime Plan would be issued once the responses to the consultation, including the comments of the Police and Crime Plan, had been considered.

The PCC emphasised that his aim was to improve the lives of the people in the Force area and to that end he had proposed an extensive range of priorities that reflected the breadth of his role.  Improvement in performance would be achieved by rigorous challenge, coupled with use of accurate data.  He accepted that the Plan, as currently drafted, could be described as two-dimensional and needed to include more on joint working and building strong partnerships.  The final Plan, to be issued by 31 March, would be more three-dimensional.

In relation to Policing, the PCC explained that the new targets were focused on the areas of crime that mattered and were based on his manifesto and on what citizens expected of him.  The emphasis was intended to be on the crimes that caused the most harm and the PCC recognised the importance of looking after the victims of crime.

The PCC referred to the County Council’s questions regarding his commissioning intentions and pointed out that this was the largest fundamental change that had emerged from the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (that had established PCCs and Police and Crime Panels).  He spoke of needing to work with partners to understand what was working well and what was not and whether projects offered value for money.  He reported that a lot of preparatory work had been carried out by officers to understand and map the partnership and community safety landscape in the Force area; however, he was still not sure if all the relevant funding streams had been identified.

The PCC intended to treat the first half of 2013/14 as a transition period, offering the current providers of community safety services funding for the first six months, while he evaluated the schemes.  The PCC explained that he had considered alternative arrangements but had come to the conclusion that to have passed all the funding over to the current projects for the year would not have fulfilled his legal mandate to demonstrate a clear linkage between his funding decisions and the objectives in the Police and Crime Plan and would have been too easy.  To have stopped the funding completely until the evaluations had been completed would have risked seeing good initiatives fail.

The PCC went on to explain that one outcome of the Strategic Partnership Board workshop in January had been the agreement to establish four thematic or financial clusters:  ...  view the full minutes text for item 19.

This item was considered under Minute 19 above.

A letter to the Chief Executive of the Police and Crime Commissioner from the Chief Executive of Leicestershire County Council is attached.   A response from the OPCC’s Chief Executive had been notified but had not been received by the time of publication.  This will circulated when available.

This item was considered under Minute 19 above.

This item was considered under Minute 19 above.

Provisionally, a meeting of the Panel has been arranged for 10 am on Thursday 14 February 2013.

It was AGREED that a meeting be arranged for early March.