A SAFER CLEANER BOROUGH
In 2018, we went to court to save Wimbledon police station when the Mayor of London was trying to close it. Now, both Mitcham and Wimbledon police stations are at risk once again.
The Mayor of London has broken his election promise, leaving us with no publicly accessible front desks in our borough to report crimes at, or to seek other help from the police.
Residents tell us that their streets haven’t been swept for months, and we have the fourth worst missed bin collection rate in London. It’s no surprise that our borough has been tainted by the “Mucky Merton” tagline because of Labour’s failure to keep our streets clean and tidy.
For those who choose to live and work here, the Liberal Democrats want Merton to be safe and spotless. We’ll get the basics right, making sure your council tax funds visible improvements.
1. Ensure community policing is at the heart of Merton, continuing the campaign against police station front counter closures. Policing should be accessible. We will work to ensure that officers have a permanent base in every town centre with our ‘Community Safety Hubs’ - reducing traveling time and making it easier to be present in the communities they serve. We will ensure that the Council’s neighbourhood wardens are properly resourced to become true ‘local champions’ for their areas.
2. Work to build confidence in community safety in our borough. We will push for town centre police teams to free up neighbourhood officers to focus on their communities. We will encourage the Met to fully implement Baroness Casey’s recommendations to rebuild trust, working with police leaders to monitor the success of reforms. We will develop better opportunities for local representative groups to review policing practices constructively, and establish meaningful ways to engage with young people to challenge harmful misogynistic attitudes which drive violence against women and girls.
3. Introduce a "Clean Sweep" street cleaning service to restore trust in the “Merton” brand. This includes fixed-schedule street sweeping and a reliability guarantee. We will continue working in partnership with residents to identify hotspots for fly-tipping and graffiti, ensuring our borough is a clean environment.
4. We will introduce a common-sense approach to the enforcement of fly-tipping and littering, focusing on warnings and a sliding scale of fines, so that repeat offenders and commercial flytippers are hardest hit. We will review the operation of Merton’s current flytipping and littering contractor, which seems to encourage a focus on immediately issuing fines for ‘low hanging fruit’ - genuine mistakes and people trying to recycle usable items.
5. Establish designated parking for food delivery bikes in town centres, ensuring our pavements remain clear for prams and those with mobility needs, also helping to reduce the risk for road users.
6. Make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians (and drivers!) and improve air quality. We will enforce weight limits on residential roads to reduce the number of speeding and noisy HGVs on residential roads. We will work with residents to bring in new pedestrian crossings to improve connectivity, to look at dangerous junctions and the traffic on ‘rat-runs’ through residential areas.