Sunday, 25 February 2018

Mill Hill Focus #19 - The latest news from Mill Hill - How local Policing changes will affect Mill Hill

Image result for Hudsons mill hill
Mill Hill's favourite restaurant voted for by you!
Welcome to the 19th edition of our weekly newsletter for the Mill Hill Community.  Published every Sunday, we bring all the latest news stories, events and other information for people living in and around Mill Hill.  

 We've been running this blog for nearly five months now and we've had some great feedback and lovely comments from local residents. We hope that you find the topics we cover interesting.

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 Shoddy Highway repairs

We've been receiving reports of some rather shoddy highway repairs in Mill Hill recently. We do wonder whether the council engineers actually inspect works and make sure it is done to standard




Given that some potholes are repaired numerous times, each causing disruption to traffic and inconvenience, we do wonder if these shoddy repairs are a false economy?


Crime and Policing update

As crime and policing has sadly become a hot topic in Mill Hill recently, we thought we'd share a communication from the Borough commander of Barnet Police, detailing how local Police are being reorganised.

From Simon Rose BSc MBA 
Detective Chief Superintendent 
Borough Commander Barnet 


I’m writing to you following the decision announced by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Cressida Dick, that the Met will begin the roll out of the Basic Command Unit (BCU) across London.  As a key partner I wanted to inform you of the decision and provide you with information about the changes.

The decision will mean the Met will bring together policing in Barnet with Brent and Harrow to form the North West Area (NW) which will deliver neighbourhoods, emergency response, CID and safeguarding.  On the BCU our officers, buildings and resources will be shared across the boroughs.  
From 19th March 2018 I will take on the role of BCU Commander with responsibility for delivering operational policing to the three boroughs.  
The Met have already made savings of £600m, and we now have to make further savings of £325m by 2021.  Officer numbers will fall to 30,000 by April 2018, and further by 2021.
The Met have been testing the model for the BCU in two pathfinders since early 2017.  The aim of the pathfinders has been to test the model to see if it works operationally.  The pathfinders have enabled us to learn valuable lessons that we have already applied resulting in changes to the initial BCU model, and will continue to do so.  The lessons were collated feedback from Met officers and our partners and at the heart of this is our commitment to allow sufficient time for everyone, enabling our leaders, officers and staff to get used to and own the change locally.
The pathfinders operated under a time of considerable operational challenge that included the terror attacks in Westminster, London Bridge and Finsbury Park, and the Grenfell Tower fire.  Emergency response was particularly challenging, but changes made to the model in August 2017, resulted in lasting improvements to emergency response performance which is now better than before the pathfinders started.
Along with the Mayor of London, we have met our commitment to put two Dedicated Ward Officers (DWOs) and one PCSO in every London ward, and we want to protect this investment against our challenges.  On our BCU these officers will work with local people on local priorities without being abstracted elsewhere and we will also increase the number of police officers working with young people, educational establishments and care homes. 
We are also investing more resources into the prevention and investigation of domestic abuse, sexual offences and child abuse.  We will take a more holistic approach to safeguarding through the management of risk and vulnerability, and bring together multi-agency safeguarding hubs, and our child abuse referrals so we can work even more closely with our partners and ensure all referrals regarding children at risk of harm are received through the one ‘front-door’.
Our BCU will have larger response teams responding to emergency calls, and our officers will own and investigate, end-to-end the crimes, the crimes they report, reducing the number of different officers victims of crimes have to deal with.  This will free up CID colleagues to concentrate on more serious and complex crime and proactive work.
We will soon begin a period of engagement before we begin implementation.  During this period we will be engaging with you to ensure you are kept up-to-date and to share with you our plans to ensure our BCU continues to meet our local requirements.  I will be in touch to keep you informed and to agree with you how you would like to be involved and kept informed about the changes.  You will also be informed who your senior point of contact will be.
I hope I have been able to offer some reassurance and information about the changes we are making.  Of course, if you need any further information or wish to discuss this further please do let me know.
The best local Restaurants

One of the focus team, Rog, did a social media survey, asking residents what their favourite local restaurant was for his Barneteye blog. Here are the results, here are the details and the results


There are over 30 places to eat in Mill Hill. That does not include the takeaways. I thought I'd commission a poll of Mill Hill residents on the Mill Hill Families facebook page and a couple of other social media sites. The rules were quite simple. I posted the following question and counted up the answers.
"I'm doing a little poll for my blog. If you have eaten in a restaurant in Mill Hill and can recommend it, can you Simply post the name of it below. On Saturday, I'll publish the list. If you've eaten in several and recommend them all, please add all. If you've got any comments it would be good, especially if they are useful to people with dietary requirements such as vegetarian or Kosher. Just interested to see which ones us locals like best. Not looking for bad reviews, please. If they get no votes that will say it all! Thanks and I hope we get some useful feedback. Looking for eat in rather than takeaways"
Here is the list

1. Hudsons
2. BAW
6. Kiyoto
7. Leyla
=8. Zushi 

Do you agree? Let us know.

Council Cuts to street cleaning causing a Tsunami of Litter in Mill Hill

We walk around Mill Hill every day and have been increasingly alarmed at full bins in the parks, litter strewn everywhere etc. It appears that this is the direct result of a policy of cost cutting for street cleaning by Barnet Council. A report on the Barnet Unison website this morning explained why. The council has drastically slashed the budget for street cleaning and cut the hours staff are allowed to spend cleaning streets. We suggest you have a look at this shocking report. It details how the number of hours staff spend emptying bins and cleaning streets has been slashed. We realise that not everyone will see a report by a local trades union as unbiased, however there are real concerns raised for our community.

 http://www.barnetunison.me.uk/wp/2018/02/20/barnet-residents-dont-blame-our-members-working-for-street-cleansing/

The focus team will be contacting the council for clarification of what is happening and hope to report back on this matter as soon as possible, once we've ascertained the accuracy of this report.

 Update Monday at 18:30 - Today we snapped this picture in Mill Hill Park


Other Local News




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