Top cop on why West Mercia Police is looking forward to new chapter

Last month West Mercia Police announced it would be withdrawing from the strategic alliance with Warwickshire Police and I wanted to talk about what this might mean to us locally here across Shropshire and Telford.

First of all, I want to stress, West Mercia’s Chief Constable and Police and Crime Commissioner have both made it clear the structure of local policing delivery within West Mercia Police remains unchanged by this decision.

Our local teams are at the absolute heart of policing and underpin everything that we do. They play a vital role in our communities and you will still be able to contact and engage with your local teams in the way you always have. This will not change.

Secondly, I want to say the decision has been made to ensure you get better value for money and that we deliver a much more effective and efficient service.

We can’t reinforce this enough and I want you to be reassured our local communities were very much at the centre of this decision.

The changes will predominantly be around the delivery of supporting services, these are the services that help and support our frontline officers and staff.

It has been recognised the current alliance structure is not as efficient and effective as it could be either here in West Mercia and what we will now look to do is reshape these services to ensure greater focus and clarity.

Ensuring we enhance and improve the delivery of these services locally will undoubtedly enable us to support the delivery of local policing even more.

I’ve previously discussed some of the changes we have made locally to adapt to the challenges we face, such as our new resolution team and local policing priority team and as we move forward we will look to build on these.

Withdrawing from the current strategic alliance arrangements is not a decision that has been taken lightly.

Careful consideration was given before the decision was made and I want to reiterate local community and frontline policing will continue as before.

Refocussing some supportive services back into West Mercia can only enhance local policing and I really do think the benefits we will see to local policing delivery will be valuable.

There has been discussion around the costs involved and as a taxpayer you may be concerned about this however again this was something that was carefully considered in the decision-making process and it is anticipated that through careful planning and consideration the costs incurred will be minimised as much as possible.

This is the start of a new chapter for the future of West Mercia, one which we’re excited about and work is already underway to plan this journey.

We strongly believe it is a positive move with greater opportunity for us to deliver efficient and effective policing services to our communities and provide the very best protection we can across Shropshire and Telford.

We’ve seen some fantastic results from our local policing priority team lately, including finding £20,000 cash in Wellington – we’re still waiting for the owner to come forward and are keeping an open mind as to whether it’s involved in serious and organised crime. I’m confident the team will get to the bottom of it.

We find that a proportion of our serious and organised crime in the county is carried out by those who don’t actually live here and we’ve recently carried out a few operations targeting travelling criminals.

In Shrewsbury, we joined up with British Transport Police to target county lines drug dealers travelling by train into the town and in Craven Arms the South Shropshire Safer Neighbourhood Team carried out a day of action which saw vehicles stop checked to make sure vehicles were roadworthy with a valid MOT and drivers were fully licensed and insured to drive.

Days of action such as this let people know we are out and about and while not always the case, it can often be if someone is involved in criminality the chances are their vehicle will not be roadworthy or they won’t have the correct paperwork and this is one way we can target them.

Don’t forget if there is anything you’re concerned about in your local area speak to your local safer neighbourhood policing team – details of how to get in contact with them are available on our website.

By Chief Superintendent Kevin Purcell, of West Mercia Police.