Estate management
We continually aim to improve the quality of our estates and neighbourhoods. Tenant-led inspections more often called estate walkabouts, are carried out twice a year with both tenants and council officers. The walkabout aims to identify and address areas of concern, leading to improvements in gardens, closes, and common areas within our estates.
Many of our flatted properties benefited from our fortnightly close cleaning contract. In addition, we continued to deliver a garden assistance scheme to help older and disabled tenants who can no longer maintain their gardens.
Community safety
Our aim is to make North Lanarkshire a better place to live, work and visit, where homes and communities are safe and feel safe for everyone. Improving community safety through CCTV and tackling anti-social behaviour, makes an enormous contribution to achieving this ambition.
We monitor 1378 public space cameras across North Lanarkshire, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. During 2023/24 we observed 6383 incidents, by issue type below:
- 36% - community safety
- 10% - environmental
- 37% - criminal
- 17% - ASB
Not only does CCTV help us to detect and deter crime and anti-social behaviour it can also help us to assist the most vulnerable people within our communities. Over the last 12 months we were able to help identify 184 missing persons. We are currently in the process of upgrading our CCTV with increased night-time performance from high-definition cameras, which will enhance our service and further benefit our communities, all remaining analogue cameras will be replaced with High Definition Digital Cameras by the end of March 2025.
The Community Safety Team now have three redeployable CCTV trailers which work off the grid and are self-powered with transmission possible through use of the Mobile Telephony networks. These trailers can be deployed to locations without power or appropriate mounting locations for standard CCTV equipment.
Antisocial behaviour
We continue to provide an ASB helpline service 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. This service is offered to all our residents irrespective of tenure. During 2023/24 the team handled over 16,500 calls that resulted in 8,115 requests for service. The remainder of the calls related to customers looking for advice or updates on previous contacts and signposting to other council services. We are constantly looking at opportunities to improve the services and support we deliver.
During 2023/24 we continued to use the ASB online reporting tool, making it easier for our residents to make a complaint. Progress is continuing in relation to a pilot and potential deployment of a new Noise App. The Noise App is an alternative to the installation of Sound Monitoring Equipment. It is less intrusive as the reporter captures recordings on their own device and submits it to a case management system for review. A decision will be made in respect of rolling out the Noise App on review and conclusion of the pilot period.
We react and deal with complaints, however we also explore new ways to help prevent issues from occurring. Work has continued on the ‘Break the Cycle’ program, designed to provide information and education at school level. Plans are currently being made to roll this program across all primary and secondary schools in the next academic year as well as in local sports facilities which host a variety of activities for our young people. This will show pupils the impact that antisocial behaviour can have on individuals and our communities and ultimately change behaviours.
Although our performance has taken a very slight decrease we are still performing very well and favourably against the Scottish local authority average.
