Derby a cleaner and safer city thanks to Safer Streets funding

Published: 20 March 2023

A multi-agency drive to make Derby safer for its residents is paying off, with burglary down by 29.8% and bike theft down by 18.4% in a year.

Since 2020 Derby City Council has been awarded a total of £1.7 million from the Home Office Safer Streets Fund, to invest in initiatives which target neighbourhood crime, violence against women and girls, and anti-social behaviour, improving the safety of public spaces for all. 

The funding allows the Council and partners to use data and intelligence to target key areas, and ultimately offer support and protection to our communities by making their areas more welcoming and helping residents to feel safer.

Since its launch in the city, Safer Streets has funded additional street lighting and CCTV cameras in and around city parks, 12 new CCTV cameras in the West End of Derby, in city subways and the city centre. The city’s CCTV control room has also had an upgrade.

The launch of a Safe Derby campaign, to help keep women and girls safe on our streets saw the delivery of Active By-stander training and Get Home Safely workshops, and the Safe Places project.

Initiatives under the Safer Streets programme are having a wider impact in the city, as the statistics for burglary and bike theft show. In addition, the city has seen an overall reduction in anti-social behaviour of 18.2%, and drug possession has reduced by 16.8%.

Improving how an area looks is important in making residents feel safe. Council teams worked in partnership with environmental charity, Keep Britain Tidy to undertake proactive interventions in the city aimed at reducing the dumping of illegal waste. This project, along with others has seen environmental crime, such as illegal waste dumping, in the city, reduced by 53%. In the 2021/22 financial year, cleaning up illegally dumped waste cost Derby taxpayers £308,480.

A Derby City Council spokesperson said:

Overall, Derby is a warm and welcoming city, and everyone deserves to feel safe in their home and on the streets. Areas which aren’t blighted by fly tipping and anti-social behaviour feel safer and are more pleasant places to live. As we move into the next stage of Safer Streets, I’m looking forward to seeing this impact continue.

Some exciting projects are on the way and many others have already commenced. There is more to do and we are committed to doing whatever we can to ensure our city is safe.

Safer Streets Round Four will see almost £750,000 spent in the coming months to build on what has been achieved so far, working with local partners to deliver the schemes, including police colleagues, Down to Earth Derby, Engineered Learning, Derbyshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Empowered Youth, Community One and Keep Britain Tidy.

Projects include:

• Preventative education and peer-led interventions to support young people at risk of offending.
• Improvement and installation of CCTV and street lighting across the city.
• Installation of fly-tipping enforcement cameras - and interventions - to reduce environmental crime such as fly-tipping. 
• Funding to support the review and regulation of poor housing.  
• Designing out crime hot-spot areas in the city by landscaping or physical measures. 

Community, Crime, Public safety, Streets, Waste