Southwark Council has through planned inaction decided to have Council Tax Single Persons Discount amnesty. Officers have advised they can;t back date chasing people who’ve wrongfully claimed SPD by 12 months. So delaying by 6+ months considering doing this represents an amnesty costing £1.5m+….

30 April Audit & Governance committee http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g4262/Public%20reports%20pack%20Tuesday%2030-Apr-2013%2019.00%20Audit%20and%20Governance%20Committee.pdf?T=10

Page 88 section 21 states:

“Single Person Discount Exercise – back dating request. Following initial discussions with the Assistant Director (Revenues, Benefits, FTSS), he wants to make further consideration of the scope for this, particularly in light of other key projects currently being undertake within his division. As such he will report back on in June.”

Effectively a statement of no action taken.

The previous committee 28 February

http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g4261/Public%20reports%20pack%20Thursday%2028-Feb-2013%2019.00%20Audit%20and%20Governance%20Committee.pdf?T=10

page 3 of the January meetings minutes section 10 states “bring back further detail to the committee on whether it is possible and cost-effective to data match historical records for signs of possible council tax fraud”.

Page 38 sections 32 – 35 state 13,000 data matches about SPD has been found. That £1.5m has been recovered from wrong SPD claims.

At the time I asked why Southwark didn’t recover money for the past financial year. The data is present to show where SPD has been wrongly claimed for a prior 12 months. The 30 April report states officers have chosen NOT to try and recover another £1.5M+ and they they’ll announce their plans in June. At best this represents a delay of 3 months and loss of £1.5m/4. At worse they’ll try and quietly drop it.

I’m passionate about this as it was my idea that led to the matching exercise resulting in 13,000 matches and £1.5m. To procrastinate and lose potentially £1.5m+ if they quietly drop it as near an election is outrageous.

What do you think?

I should make it clear I’m from Police families. Both grandfathers were serving Police officers. One a Chief Super who in retirement chaired NARPO, the other an armed MoD Police officer who guarded the first UK atomic weapons. My father was born in a Police station, uncle chaired magistrate benches and I’m proud to still have all their policing medals and badges.

So I attended Southwark Police commander John Sutherland meeting to talk about his plans feeling supportive. We were told 24 June is the go live date for the Met Police “Local Policing model” with 4 clusters of local police teams. It’s effectively turning the clock back 20year to “Sector Policing” where centralised officers react to problems and chase their tails. Then the hugely successful safer team model with dedicated local teams came along with local bobbies.  Instead of a Safer Neighbourhood Team based in East Dulwich of 7 officers dedicated to our we will have less than two officers based in Camberwell.

The cross party councillor consensus is that we’re unlikely to see Police officers coming to Dulwich. When they do they’ll be in minibuses for a few hours and then called away. We expect almost all resources to never leave the Camberwell area. We’re even concerned at the future 999 response times.

This Policing retreat from Dulwich is based on a number of flawed concepts:

1. Low crime wards. The borough commander declared our area low crime. We’re low crime for inner London but have a higher crime rate than the English average.
2. Travelling time. The borough commander said it would only take 15-20 minutes to get from Camberwell to Dulwich. But basing them in Camberwell will see that area prioritised over Dulwich. When they ‘come over the hill’ south to Dulwich without a base then the slightest desk work or break will involve officers travelling back to Camberwell.
3. Increased hours of coverage. Centralising the SNT’s means they’ll be a Police officer on duty for more hours of the week. But as we don’t’ expect them to ‘come over the hill’ we’ll see the current hours in Dulwich reduce to next to nothing.
4. Named sergeant, PC, PCSO. Each ward will have name sgt. PC and PCSO. But as they’ll be based miles away this feels irrelevant.

A proposed Dulwich Police based was repeatedly rejected by the Police. It was repeatedly explained that councillors were proposing to completely pay for a new base if it made operational sense and would be used.

When asked what the prediction for policing hours effort each area would see I was told no such analysis had been done. We were told he didn’t have the spare operational hours to staff front counters. No operational impact assessment has been made. We were told the decision making process taken was more art than science.

We proposed that he consider five clusters adding one based in East Dulwich.

If you agree we need an East Dulwich Police base then please urgently sign our petition – http://eepurl.com/sPKmf