April sees the start of the new performance plan year and I thought you would be interested in the results achieved over the last year. After a difficult start when crime started to rise across the district we finished the year by reducing overall crime by 2.8% which equates to 147 fewer victims of crime.
Wealden saw big reductions in both burglaries of peoples homes and in violent crime with reductions of 36.1% and 20.8% respectively - the biggest reductions in Sussex!

Whilst I am obviously very pleased with these results and very proud of my team here for all their hard work in achieving them we are now into a new year and have to look ahead. There will undoubtedly be challenges this year in maintaining these figures and reducing crime even further in what is a very low crime area but that is what we are determined to do. This month we have launched our new operation ''Time'' to combat anti social behaviour. My very own ''time team'' will be out on Fridays and Saturdays across the district, working with our partners in the youth offending team and youth services. They will be responding directly to calls from the public about incidents of anti social behaviour and hopefully stopping problems before they start.

We have had a small change in staff on the district recently and the good news is that PC Cathy Codling (previously at Heathfield) is now our full time anti social behaviour officer. Her replacement is PC Ted Anderson. PC Paul Stephens is looking after our licensing issues and PCSO Ian Thomsett is our casualty reduction officer and will be working with our partners to tackle the number of serious collisions on Wealden Roads. I know that they are really looking forward to taking on their new roles and I am sure you will be meeting them at some point over the year.

In some more good news - at the start of the month we had a small spate of burglaries in the North of the district. Working with our colleagues in Kent we very quickly made some arrests and I am very pleased to tell you that two males have been charged with a number of offences relating to burglary, theft of vehicles and driving offences - it always cheers me up when we catch a burglar!

I will keep you updated with our progress during the year but if you have any questions in the meantime then please feel free to contact me

Regards

Julia