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Wardens shake-up
• AS the new executive member for community safety, I would like to clarify your article (Street warden decision ‘naïve’, June 5). After listening to residents’ views, the executive agreed to make the council’s street warden service more flexible, with enhanced powers to tackle anti-social behaviour.
The council is seeking to get wardens accredited. This will give them the power to issue fixed-penalty notices for low-level offences such as dog-fouling, graffiti, littering and fly-posting.
The borough will be split in half, assigning teams of wardens to areas in the north and south of Camden that need them most. A third team will be used flexibly, either to patrol a third area or to supplement the other teams.
King’s Cross, one of the three areas where street wardens have been posted for six years, has seen a decline in street level crime and anti-social behaviour. Sex work, drug dealing and drug use have been tackled as a result of the combined work of a number of agencies.
If the evidence suggests the street wardens can and should now be deployed to another part of the borough, other services such as the local Safer Neighbourhoods Team, the Safer Streets Team and the Camden Drug and Alcohol Team will continue to engage with the street population in King’s Cross. Far from a naïve decision, this is evidence-based, common sense policy.
CLLR JAMES KING
Executive Member for Community Safety
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