About Community Safety
What is Wiltshire’s Community Safety Partnership?
Wiltshire’s Community Safety Partnership (CSP) is a statutory body which brings together several organisations to tackle crime and help people feel safer. CSPs were set up under sections 5-7 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. No single agency can deal with complex community safety issues alone, so CSPs offer a multi-agency approach to this. The CSP not only looks at crime figures and how to help people feel safer, it also looks at the prevention of crime and how people can be supported to ensure they don’t become involved in criminal activity in the future.
Wiltshire’s CSP consists of representatives from the six ‘responsible authorities’:
- Wiltshire Police
- Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service
- The Probation Service
- Wiltshire Council
- Banes, Swindon and Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group
- The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner
These services work alongside other agencies, such as commissioned drug and alcohol and domestic abuse services, housing associations, mental health services, military services and others, to tackle crime in Wiltshire together. In Wiltshire, the CSP is chaired by Assistant Chief Constable Mark Cooper of Wiltshire Police.
The key responsibilities of the CSP are to:
- set up a strategic group to direct the work of the partnership
- have a framework for sharing information
- produce a strategic assessment to identify priorities and set out an annual plan to address these
- commission Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews (formerly known as Domestic Homicide Reviews)
In Wiltshire, the CSP sits within our multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, the Safeguarding Vulnerable People Partnership (SVPP). In doing this, we acknowledge that complex community safety issues can not be addressed without looking at the safeguarding of vulnerable people. For more information on the SVPP governance structure, click here.
Within the CSP, there are a number of subgroups which each have responsibility for an area of community safety business. These are:
Wiltshire CSP is working on its response to Serious and Organised Crime. A Wiltshire Police video introducing Serious and Organised Crime can be viewed here:
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The CSP is required by law under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (2007 regulations) to produce a three-year strategy. This has been produced in conjunction with Wiltshire Police’s Force Strategic Assessment, Wiltshire’s Police and Crime Plan and Wiltshire Council’s Joint Strategic Needs Analysis, to get as clear a picture as possible of the main community safety issues facing our residents. Work is underway on the new CSP Strategic Plan and this will be available in early 2025.
For more information about Wiltshire’s Community Safety Partnership, please contact svpp@wiltshire.gov.uk