How successful have PACTs been in improving the engagement between residents and the Council and partner agencies?
Minutes:
“How successful have Partners and Communities Together (PACTs) been in improving the engagement between residents and the Council and partner agencies?”
Councillor O’Brien responded that PACTs sat alongside a number of other community engagement tools used by the Community Safety Partnership and had been a huge success in Medway. There were now over 20 PACTs actively running across the authority. Some had been set up to deal with specific issues and had ceased to be active once those areas of community concern had been dealt with. Others had grown and evolved and become a real hub of community focus and interest, such as the Gillingham Green PACT which had recently carried out an environmental check of the area and identified an area near Layfield Road that would benefit from a waste bin, which had since been installed.
Councillor O’Brien stated that Community Officers attended each PACT together with representatives from Medway Police. They listened to residents’ concerns and arranged for any issues to be dealt with swiftly. The recent PACT Task Group had been charged with assessing the effectiveness and future of PACTs in Medway and had confirmed that PACTs were a good way of bringing residents together to develop priorities and action plans at neighbourhood level alongside other opportunities for community engagement currently on offer. He advised that the review document had been welcomed by the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) which was looking to support and engage even more closely with Medway’s PACTs to ensure their future success. He also reported the launch of the first marine PACT at Gillingham Marina. The first meeting had been well supported by the marine community and with a steering group in place he was certain it would go from strength to strength.
Councillor Bhutia asked a supplementary question of Councillor O’Brien to find out how he was working to engage young people in community safety?
Councillor O’Brien replied that it was the perceived poor behaviour of young people that had emerged as a common theme amongst PACTs. However, there was a lack of young people that took part in the PACT process and the challenge had been how to bring children, the schools they attended and the surrounding community closer together. He stated that two secondary schools had recently experimented with a new style forum to achieve this. The Schools and Community Together Committee (SACT) brought together pupils from all year groups to discuss community projects and to learn about the impact of graffiti, litter and other forms of anti-social behaviour to raise the profile of the school and community and to maintain the trust of its neighbours. The idea was to embed its ethos into the daily routine of every pupil through pastoral lessons and regular assemblies. The chairs of each SACT would also attend the local PACT meetings. Both schools were also looking into setting up pupil-led computer classes for senior citizens, tea dances and a community sow and grow gardening scheme. He advised that pupils were identifying the same problems and perceptions as the older population. The vast majority of young people were decent, law abiding individuals who wanted many, if not all of the basic things: to live safely in a clean environment; to have a voice; and to feel that they could make a positive difference. Councillor O’Brien stated that he hoped that schools across Medway would embrace this new initiative.