Jerry Gayle, our Community Safety Assistant, tells us about how we work with partner agencies to protect our customers.
Not everyone is familiar with the role of community safety in housing. But while we work in the background, we play a key part in supporting residents to feel safe both at home and in their neighbourhood.
Our Community Safety team are here to support our customers experiencing domestic abuse and have received specialist training to help keep people safe at home, working with partners, including the police and local authorities, to find the best solution for those involved.
Jerry Gayle, our Community Safety Assistant, tells us about how we work with partner agencies to protect our customers.
Working alongside services like the police, local authority, social services and domestic abuse charities, it’s important that we offer the right support and signposts to our customers experiencing abuse. And one of the most effective way for us to work together is by having MARAC or HRDA meetings.
In my role, I support the community safety team in checking the MARAC and HRDA agenda and case list. I will then let the team know if anyone of our customers appear on the list by checking our various systems. If a name of a customer appears, I gather background information that could help other agencies better understand their housing situation. This might be things like their rent arrears, the risk of eviction, or repairs raised, to historical incidences of domestic abuse and anti-social behaviour that may show any patterns or concerning behaviour.
“My research is shared with the MARAC and HRDA. It also informs the discussion that the attending Community Safety Officer will have with the other agencies at the meeting. They will report back to me so I can update any of our CRM cases, or start new ones, and complete any other actions that come from it.
Did you know?
- From November 2021 to November 2022, Abri had 346 domestic abuse reports.
- Although there has been a small decrease in reports in our General Standard Need properties, there was a small increase of DA reports in our Shared Owner & Intermediate tenures.
- The age group that appears to disclose DA the most still remains to be 25-34 year olds with 121 cases, followed closely by the age group 35-44 with 105 reporting DA.
- The vast majority of DA disclosures remains to be reported by females with 323 cases & 22 reported cases by males.
- According to Safelives.org.uk, there are around 290 MARACs across the UK.
- Across Abri we are linked to/check the agendas for around 30 MARAC and 4 HRDA agendas across various counties in the South East, South West and Welsh regions. Each agenda can vary on the number of cases, with the highest number of cases on one agenda to check through being 41.