Off-licences are being “mapped” in Stockton to see any links to crime and anti-social behaviour.
Off-licences are being “mapped” by council bosses who are looking into links to crime and anti-social behaviour levels.
The move to show all off-sale premises selling alcohol in Stockton, including supermarkets, off-licences, newsagents and takeways, is part of a bid to “design healthy places”, Stockton Council’s community safety select committee was told. The town centre has the highest number, a total of 25, along with the greatest deprivation and highest crime levels.
A council presentation says all stores in the town centre are classed as high or very high risk. Public health director Sarah Bowman-Abouna said they were looking at how to address the causes of crime, anti-social behaviour and violence, and how to help people with support and treatment, taking into account factors like poor mental health and drug use, and working with businesses reducing stigma around substance misuse.
She said: “Thinking about how we design healthy places, this is just a piece of work in progress. We’re mapping the off-licence premises across the borough and looking at how those are concentrated and how they might be linked in to crime levels across the borough, and how that might help us in the representations we put forward when we have licensing applications.
“That’s very much balanced with the desire to have an active, healthy economy, particularly the night-time economy. We do appreciate the balance there, but also the impact alcohol has on health and anti-social behaviour.”
She also spoke of a three-year pilot with the award-winning substance use recovery organisation Recovery Connections, so far working with 13 people: “It’s looking at people in our community who have got really complex lives and a lot of complex needs, things like mental health, experiencing or potentially perpetrating domestic abuse and substance misuse issues.
“We’re working closely with partners to support those individuals, starting with what their needs and priorities are, and bringing services in place to try and improve access to the support.”
Strategic health and well-being manager Mandy Mackinnon said alcohol cut across everyone’s socio-economic status: “But the impact of harm is felt most greatly by our least affluent communities. Price and availability of alcohol has an impact.
“So we work really closely with our licensing colleagues on that to try and reduce the alcohol-related harm. In terms of drugs, drug use commonly exists alongside other issues.
“Support has to be accessible. We work really hard to reach out to people where they are, rather than expecting them to walk through our door.
“We really need to think about addressing root causes. It includes prevention activity through to treatment and recovery.
“There’s a decreasing trend overall for the borough around alcohol (hospital) admissions, but we are still at a higher level than England. In terms of drugs, there isn’t a significant difference between what we’re doing and the national average, but we do have have higher than average deaths from drug misuse, and there are lots of activities in place to learn from that and resolve some of those issues.”
She later said: “There’s some national research and figures, for example, to do with licensed premises and assaults. We can look at the density of our licensing in an area and roughly say, based on that evidence, if we increase the number of licensed premises in that geography we’d have a high risk of increasing x, y and z.”
She said drug use was more concentrated in Stockton town centre, but drugs networks extended beyond, and the impact of alcohol was different in each of the borough’s six towns: “Partly that’s to do with licensed premises and off licences.
“We work alongside communities, we work with service users and those who aren’t currently accessing services. We’re innovative in our approaches.
“We work with partners across departments, but also with other organisations such as police, NHS, voluntary sector. We’re really keen to build on all of that.
“We’ve also worked with regeneration colleagues, looking at how we shape healthy places,” she added, referring to the development of the forthcoming urban park in Stockton town centre. She said more funding for drugs work had enabled them to do more, improve outreach work, strengthen links and get more people into treatment quicker.
“We’re recognised regionally as being leaders in continuity of care. We work with prison leavers.
“The supplementary substance misuse treatment and recovery grant has really helped us in reducing drug-related crime and harm and enabled us to work much more closely with criminal justice colleagues across the system, and working with individuals who experience mental ill health as well as substance misuse.”
She said local detox provision had increased, with people supported into jobs: “In the last year we had 104 people who were supported by that team.”
Oliver Metcalf, operations manager for health and social care charity Change Grow Live, said their outreach team helped people into services and support and there had been a significant improvement to the care provided in the community, including a walk-in service seeing people for assessments: “You’re seen there and then, you get started with clinical support, you’re given a key worker.
“We can start making referrals to mental health, to housing, to get them in touch with the Job Centre, to give that wrap-around support as much as we can to start recovery.”
She said they challenged stigma about drugs and alcohol, helped with the effects on friends, families and carers, supported prison leavers and had a needle exchange programme, sharps team and clear-ups in hotspot areas.