This lunchtime I was mostly walking around a churchyard. St Giles', to be precise, where I joined two of the churchwardens.
St Giles was the first area I lived in when I first moved to Reading. It is a good neighbourhood, very close to the town centre and all its facilities. The church is a beautiful building and the greenery of the churchyard a welcome antidote to concrete and cladding.
But there are other, less welcome, things to be found in the churchyard.
Like these:
And this:
And plenty more besides.
For various reasons the churchyard is used by rough sleepers, drug addicts and drinkers. In a sense, there may be worse places for some of these people to go. However, this has a real effect on the churchyard's neighbours. I have written before about the garage under some pensioners' bungalows, which it took 2 years' solid pressure and headlines in the local press to force a recalcitrant landowner to make secure and let the elderly residents have a decent night's sleep.
The responsibility for maintaining the churchyard does not sit with the Church, but with Reading Borough Council. The photos here give only a flavour of the problems, with hypodermic needles by the dozen, alcohol containers (I hear, no surprise, that Tesco is doing a roaring trade in super strength cider), and sleeping garments alongside evidence of attempted arson and more besides. The state it was in today is a stain on the reputation of the Council and must be put right immediately.
It also doesn't help that the churchyard is on the edge of 3 police neighbourhoods (it is actually, bizarrely, just within Newtown area). Again after constant police pressure, the excellent Newtown neighbourhood police team have surveyed the local community and held police surgeries recently in St Giles' Close. But there are other problems elsewhere in Newtown, and it has taken far too much of me shouting for the voice of the St Giles' community to be heard.
Building on the information the police have accumulated, the interest in setting up a Neighbourhood Watch stimulated by the work of the Neighbourhood Police Team, and my pressure for the authorities to work together to deal with not just the problems on the surface but the underlying issues, I have arranged a meeting at which all the key players - four different Council departments, police, other agencies as well as the Church and local residents - come together round the table. I sincerely hope they will agree a programme of action - to do what they should be doing anyway and agreeing to work together. The community faces common problems. It will require some straight talk and hard work to get to grips with the solutions.
Some solutions will take a long time. I would love to see the railings around the Church - removed for the war effort in 1940 - replaced. I would love to see effective drug rehabilitation for those wishing to come off drugs. Talk to addicts or those involved in helping those with addiction and they will tell you that current programmes are far too short and do not break the cycle of addiction. If the Labour Party really cared about tackling crime, they would be serious about getting people off hard drugs. They are not - and it is Home Office ignorance that ruins people's lives as a result.
But - who knows? - in time even the Home Office may learn to listen and work together.
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