‘I’m pleased to announce that it has been agreed for our dedicated police officer numbers to be doubled.

This has been achieved by West Yorkshire Police agreeing, following a number of meetings and lobbying of senior officers, to redistribute existing officers within the neighbourhood teams to ensure a better coverage for our area.

Over the last few years our 64 square miles of Dearne Valley Neighbourhood Policing Team has had only one full time police officer, PC Newsome, and one part time officer.

This week we now have three full time police officers in our area with PC Lorrimer, PC Knight and PC Newsome leading the team.

This was secured in late February following our monthly meetings with the local police, our representations to WYP Chief Superintendent Julie Sykes and a meeting with Police Sergeant Graham Slarke.

West Yorkshire Police still lack the resources they need and this will not by any means mean every issue in our area will be solved, but it does mean that there should be a little bit more capacity to deal with some of the pressures we face.

Cllr Will Simpson and I were pleased to meet PC Knight yesterday at a very well attended multi-agency meeting at Shelley College to discuss our steps going forward to prevent anti-social behaviour and, fundamentally, begin to re-build youth provision in our area.

There is a lot of work going on at the moment with volunteers, the schools, the police, council services and many more all coming together to make a difference on this. This work is ongoing, but we will seek to provide the appropriate updates as and when we can.’

Cllr Graham Turner