Laura Kyrke-Smith

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. Aylesbury has much to offer and huge potential, but we will fulfil that potential only if people feel safe when they are in town. Our police do a really good job, as do wonderful organisations such as Street Angels, but we have got to be honest about the challenges, of which I will briefly mention three. First, the threats faced by our retail workers have surged in recent years. I met the assistant manager at one of the retailers at the shopping park in Aylesbury, and she showed me harrowing footage from her bodycam during a recent shoplifting incident. She kept remarkably calm and professional, but she was dealing with not just one individual, but a whole crowd of shoplifters who threatened her, surged the exit to the store and attacked her physically as well as verbally before making a dash for it. That is far from the only time this has happened recently, and no retail worker should ever have to deal with that. I support the measures in the Government’s Crime and Policing Bill, which will introduce a new standalone offence of assaulting a retail worker, but I would like to hear more from the Minister about that. Secondly, I want to highlight the persistent antisocial behaviour we see in our town. I met representatives from our local Pubwatch group, who described the antisocial behaviour that deters paying customers from coming into their premises. I hear from women in particular who say they do not feel safe walking down certain streets at night. I know that the Crime and Policing Bill includes measures to address this, such as the introduction of new respect orders, but I would be grateful if the Minister shared more about plans to continue tackling that blight on our town centres. Thirdly, I want to make a point about root causes. While it is right that we tackle these threats to safety in our towns, we will not get far without also looking at what is behind them. We know that antisocial behaviour is often linked to drug and alcohol use, but it is also driven by lack of opportunity and hope. In my view, measures such as the Government’s youth strategy, which sets out a long-term plan to invest in safe spaces and opportunities for young people, will ultimately reduce the incentives for people to get into the kinds of activities that make our town centres unsafe, and instead give people a sense of hope and opportunity. I would like to hear more from the Minister on that.