St Katharine and Wapping Ward Panel
Thank you for your interest in knowing more about the St Katharine & Wapping Ward Panel. The Ward Panel’s remit, like all 20 in the borough, is governed by the Met Police’s terms of reference. You can see an overview and a background video on the work of the Panel at www.skw-wardpanel.org
Members serve for two years and are then available for re-election. As Chair, I am now in my third year, being re-elected last year. Since this Ward Panel was set up by the Safer Neighbourhood Police Team (SNT) in 2017, there has been a turnover of members, with three new members joining last year and two this year. Five members have resigned.
The Ward Panel holds meetings every two months. Participants from the Local Safer Neighbourhood Police Team (SNT) include Sgt James Barkley; Pc Abdul Karim Moulvi. PC Huseyin Diskaya; the LBTH is represented by our allocated ASB Officer, Karrim Jalali and Tower Hamlets Homes (THH) by their ASB Officer Florence Adeyemi. Our two local elected councillors, Cllr Abdal Ullah and Cllr Denise Jones also participate regularly in our meetings.
Since December 2017, we have organised two well-attended public meetings in July 2018 and October 2019. The latter was held at Tobacco Dock with speakers including Det Inspector Dominic Barnes and Ann Corbett, Divisional Director of Community Safety at LBTH. I chaired the meeting and all the Ward Panel members were present wearing name tags. They circulated widely with residents during and after the meeting. A large amount of the meeting time was set aside for residents’ questions. Sadly because of Covid-19, no public meeting is planned for 2020. The SNT’s current remit, and hence the Ward Panel’s, is to concentrate on drugs, dangerous driving and anti-social behaviour as decided at a public meeting by residents in 2017 and then re-agreed by you at our public meeting in October 2019.
We have also formed a Resident Development Network (currently numbering some 50 apartment blocks across the ward) to help residents associations/management boards, to share issues they are encountering, which usually also affect neighbouring blocks. In our last newsletter we have asked you to contact us if your block is not linked into this useful network.
Our challenge is to better represent the diversity of the ward and we are always looking for new members. Specifically, we would like better representation from the Bangladeshi community, from the schools, the Youth Centre, churches and mosques. We are well represented geographically around the ward so have a lot of local knowledge and input about specific local issues.
The Ward Panel works with the police and the council and we aim to represent residents who have any safety/ASB issues that are adversely affecting their lives and enjoyment of living here. We are only as good as the information you, the residents, pass to us and most importantly report directly to the Police/LBTH as crimes and problems arise. This again is mentioned in our June Newsletter. Please go to our Website; www.skw-wardpanel.org/report which gives you all the various reporting methods available to you. Unless you officially report the problems, the council and police will simply turn around to us when we raise them for you, with the response: “It is not showing on our statistics therefore we are unaware of the problem.” Reporting therefore is KEY.
If you would like to attend a meeting of the Ward Panel as a guest, please let me know at: contact@skw-wardpanel.org
If you would like to consider joining us and bringing your skills to support the Ward Panel’s work and have the time to give, please respond at the above email address with your own email address so we may follow up directly with you. As mentioned above, we would be particularly pleased to hear from anyone drawn from the local Bangladeshi community, faith leaders, schoolteachers/assistants and youth workers.
Sally Unwin
Chair