Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Social Justice – in the Senedd at 2:15 pm on 5 October 2022.
Thank you, Sam Rowlands. As you say, PCSOs play such a crucial role in promoting community safety and tackling anti-social behaviour and acting as ears and eyes on the ground for police forces. But it's also about local relationships and so many of those local relationships are with local authorities, with their social services, housing, youth workers et cetera, as well as with health colleagues. It is very interrelated in terms of tackling crime, preventing crime and engaging in a holistic way, which we do with our policing partnership board and with the work that we do with our police and crime commissioners.
So, at the last meeting, for example, we had Lynne Neagle speaking about substance misuse, which is a crucial issue that health, of course, is involved in; public health was there. We also did have the Secretary of State for Wales; Sir Robert Buckland joined us at that meeting and he engaged as well. We take a public health approach in terms of trying to ensure that we have community safety and community cohesion, so it's about interaction, diversionary schemes. You'll be very interested to hear that the police and crime commissioner funded a boxing club in Buckley, a safe location, diversion, interaction scheme. So, it's not about saying less on liaising with health and social services; it's actually engaging for a purpose. But, obviously, that's something that we regularly discuss at that board.