Stratford police station to be 'resolution centre'
WARWICKSHIRE’S crime fighters have come up with a new name for police stations. They’re to be called “resolution centres” under a scheme aimed at making police officers more accessible to the public.
Plans for these new centres have been unveiled by Philip Seccombe, Warwickshire’s police and crime commissioner, as part of his budget proposals for 2023-24. The centres will be based at four main police stations – Stratford, Leamington, Rugby and Nuneaton.
“The opening times of police stations in recent years has been sporadic,” Mr Seccombe told the Herald. People found this frustrating, especially when they discovered on arrival at a police station that they weren’t able to speak to an actual police officer, but only to a civilian member of staff.
Under the new system, the resolution centres would be open seven days a week – Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm, on Saturday from 9am to 4pm and on Sunday from 11.30am to 2pm. And police officers will be on hand to talk to members of the public.
“Over the years people have said they want the ability to go to a police station and talk to a police officer,” said Mr Seccombe. “Residents feel the ability to speak to a police officer is very important.”
The resolution centre idea dovetails into Mr Seccombe’s plans to make police officers more visible on the streets – and therefore more accessible to the public – so communities feel safer. His package of proposals includes:
- An extra ten officers deployed within local policing
- Strengthened safer neighbourhood teams, where police community support officers (PCSOs) will be recruited to provide “more settled teams”
- 15 additional call handlers
- More Specials to increase the numbers available to support officers
Mr Seccombe said that following the cutbacks in police numbers during the austerity years, Warwickshire now had more police officers than ever – over 1,100. The previous highest figure had been 1,060 in the 2000s, before the worldwide financial crash and the subsequent Age of Austerity. At one point the number of officers was down to 800.
The force said it was also pulling out all the stops to recruit more PCSOs. But Mr Seccombe said it was currently not easy to recruit people into the public sector, across a wide range of services.
It costs half a million pounds to recruit ten officers and if police commissioners didn’t hit their targets they would find themselves paying money back to the Home Office. “It’s quite a challenge,” said Mr Seccombe. “Some forces I don’t think will make it, but we won’t know until the end of March.”
On the question of recruiting the right calibre of person – a thorny issue given recent shocking events involving officers from the Metropolitan Police – Mr Seccombe said Warwickshire had always been “pretty tough, with a tough vetting regime”.
He said: “Police officers need a higher standard of integrity than the rest of the population because the police have special powers to arrest people and lock them up.”
On the challenges ahead, Mr Seccombe said: “Crime is changing. Forty per cent of it today is with scams and fraud on the internet, and the exploitation of children for sexual or other purposes. It’s a big issue. We’ve got to make sure the force is structured to cope with the changing nature of crime.”
The police budget for 2023-24 will see total net funding for policing rise to just over £125m with the police element of the council tax increasing by 5.33 per cent. Mr Seccombe said this represents a 27p a week increase or £14 a year on a typical Band D property.