Labour and Conservative city councillors have joined forces to block an initiative supported by local voluntary and community sector organisations that was intended to facilitate a more inclusive response to antisocial behaviour in Exeter city centre.
They voted against proposals brought by city centre ward councillors to gather in-depth evidence from public bodies, the voluntary sector, businesses and residents to inform action to help improve public safety and address the impact of antisocial behaviour.
They did so despite the council’s fourteen-year council failure to comply with its duties under crime and disorder legislation in relation to Exeter Community Safety Partnership, which directs the city’s response to antisocial behaviour without the oversight required by law.
In this special report we look at the legislative framework underpinning community safety partnerships and the ways in which councils are required to hold them to account for the joint delivery of their statutory duties.
We consider Exeter City Council’s early good practice in performing its oversight functions before their deterioration after January 2012 and the creation of a non-constituted board on which council executive committee members took over community safety partnership oversight despite the legislation prohibiting this arrangement.
We also look at the disappearance of Exeter Community Safety Partnership records from council meetings and the five-year period during which just two PR-style presentations on its work were provided to councillors, leading to widespread ignorance of its composition, responsibilities and actions among the city’s elected representatives.
We then consider the systematic procrastination which delayed the city centre antisocial behaviour proposals for more than a year, including council director Ian Collinson’s repeated attempts at council meetings to discourage further scrutiny of Exeter Community Safety Partnership’s work in this area despite his position as the partnership’s chair and the council’s crime and disorder duties.
We also examine the council scrutiny committee which finally met to hear the proposals only to be disrupted by a committee member – prompting the public gallery to empty – who then led the charge against them, citing party politics as a justification for their rejection, before her party colleagues and a lone Conservative – who changed his vote in response to Ian Collinson’s claims – joined forces to shut them down.
Labour and Conservative councillors vote against city centre anti-social behaviour scrutiny proposals, September 2025.
The idea that local multi-agency partnership working is key to crime reduction and prevention first gained traction in the 1980s, when collaborative bodies began to take shape as voluntary initiatives to address community safety.
Section 6 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 subsequently placed such bodies on a statutory footing by creating partnerships in each local authority area which required councils and the police, then fire and rescue, health and probation services, to work together to make places safer.
Initially known as crime and disorder reduction partnerships, then community safety partnerships, they were credited with successes in several areas including anti-social behaviour and domestic abuse.
Following a 2004-05 review, Section 19 of the Police and Justice Act 2006 introduced new provisions that required all councils to hold their local community safety partnerships to account for the delivery of their joint statutory duties, either by creating dedicated crime and disorder scrutiny committees or by making existing scrutiny committees responsible for discharging this function.
The provisions of the 2006 Act came into force in 2009 after regulations explaining how it should be implemented – The Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009 – were laid before Parliament. These were amplified by detailed Home Office implementation guidance.
Guidance for the Scrutiny of Crime and Disorder Matters, May 2009. Source: Home Office.
The guidance made clear that councils must hold formal meetings at least once every twelve months to scrutinise the decisions and actions of the organisations working together in community safety partnerships to discharge of their crime and disorder functions under the 2006 Act.
It said that such scrutiny committees could “establish task and finish groups with the specific remit to deal with crime and disorder scrutiny matters” which would enable committee members to “focus/specialise on those issues and provide effective scrutiny”.
At the same time, the guidance emphasised that the role of these scrutiny committees should be to provide their local community safety partnership with “constructive challenge at a strategic level”, adding that, should they meet “only once a year” the meeting might focus on “which crime and disorder matters should be considered in the next municipal year as matters of local concern”.
The 2006 Act also conferred new powers on individual councillors to bring crime and disorder issues of local concern before such committees for debate and discussion.
More regulations followed in 2010 which reinforced the power of these committees to co-opt representatives of community safety partnership organisations, as well as representatives of community and voluntary sector groups and members of the public.
They also emphasised a prohibition on participation in this scrutiny process by members of the local authority’s executive committee.
The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 then transferred control of police forces to elected police and crime commissioners, creating various formal relationships between the new commissioners and the district and county level community safety partnerships in their areas, including enabling the commissioners to selectively channel partnership funding.
It did not, however, alter local authority community safety partnership scrutiny rules or duties.
Scrutiny of community safety partnerships, April 2012. Source: Centre for Public Scrutiny.
As soon as Exeter Community Safety Partnership was created, following the 1998 legislation, anti-social behaviour became a priority. A community safety review conducted in 2002 at the end of the first three-year Exeter Community Safety Strategy said it was already then established as “a significant public concern”.
The review found that “despite the positive impact that the council’s input and partnership working appear to be having” improvements were still needed in key areas – with anti-social behaviour at the top of the list.
The review report was presented alongside detailed local crime figures, an action summary, and an improvement plan derived from both. Like the annual community strategy reviews which followed, it was presented to Exeter City Council’s community scrutiny committee – even though the new scrutiny duties which followed the 2006 Act were not yet law.
When the Act came into effect in 2009 a report to the committee written by now-council CEO Bindu Arjoon explained the new duties and the extensive powers which came with them and proposed that the committee take them on.
The committee agreed, as did the council Executive, and the council’s constitution was amended in July 2009 to enable it to “discharge the functions of a Crime and Disorder Committee to oversee and scrutinise the work of the Exeter Community Safety Partnership in accordance with the Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009”.
Regular reporting to the committee began that September with the 2009 annual community safety partnership report. Between then and January 2012 the committee examined the minutes of all thirteen community safety partnership meetings that took place, and was provided with detailed local crime figures and several briefings and presentations on aspects of the partnership’s work, including anti-social behaviour.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership annual review, June 2004. Source: Exeter City Council.
But in March 2012 the community safety partnership meeting minutes did not appear on the scrutiny committee meeting agenda, and the same thing happened again in May, September and December.
At the same time, bizarrely, a council working group tasked with reviewing scrutiny operations, on which now-council leader Phil Bialyk sat, confirmed the community scrutiny committee’s ongoing role in discharging crime and disorder functions – even though the committee had not looked at the community safety partnership for over a year by the time the working group reported in April 2013.
(The working group also “acknowledged many positive aspects” of what was then the scrutiny system, including pre-scrutiny of executive decisions and the extensive use and success of cross-party task and finish groups – but this was another time, if not another place.)
The following month, the council community scrutiny committee was presented with an update informing it that Exeter Community Safety Partnership had decided – at an “away day” in November 2012 – to reorganise itself and adopt a “revised governance structure” which would “offer clear accountability and focus”.
The community safety partnership’s own executive group would now provide “strategic direction” – the oversight role that the legislation says council scrutiny is supposed to perform – and create its own task and finish groups to “take responsibility for delivery against priorities.”
The committee was merely invited to “note” the report, which is apparently all it did.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership update, May 2013. Source: Exeter City Council.
In the months leading up to this minor coup, the council had also set up a new forum for Exeter county councillors to meet with a select handful of city councillors, and others, to address “issues of common interest”.
Exeter Board was not a constituted committee of the council and had no scrutiny powers. Its first meeting took place in July 2012 but the records of that meeting, as well as those from the following two years, have disappeared from the council website.
When records begin they show the minutes of some Exeter Community Safety Partnership meetings being presented to the board, although minutes of many of the partnership’s quarterly meetings were omitted, apparently after falling through gaps in the board’s meetings calendar.
The first Exeter Board meeting for which records are available and at which the community safety partnership was on the agenda took place in September 2014. The records shows that then-councillor Rachel Sutton was a member of both the board and the council executive committee.
At the board’s next meeting in November then-councillor Keith Owen joined the board despite also sitting on the executive committee, as did then-council leader and executive member Pete Edwards.
By the following July’s meeting then-councillor Rosie Denham had also joined the board, also at the same time as sitting on the council executive.
No explanation is extant for Exeter Board discharging the functions of a local authority crime and disorder committee by scrutinising the community safety partnership when the law both prohibits council executive committee members from performing this role and requires a properly-constituted scrutiny committee to fulfil it instead.
New Exeter City Council Strategic Management Team, April 2015. Source: Exeter City Council.
In April 2015 Karime Hassan, who by then had taken over as council CEO, sought to expand the board’s functions and purpose.
He proposed new terms of reference which would “clarify the strategic role of the board to ensure that its focus is limited to matters and topics that are not being channelled through other groups”. His report said this included the council’s scrutiny committees.
The board approved its new terms. These neither mentioned Exeter Community Safety Partnership nor the legislation that required its oversight by a properly-constituted council scrutiny committee on which executive committee members must not sit. The board nevertheless continued to receive the minutes of community safety partnership meetings, now more regularly than before.
Then in February 2016 another internal council working group, this one created to review the council constitution shortly after Karime Hassan’s Exeter Board review, reported back. Among many other changes it proposed the reorganisation of council scrutiny into three newly-named committees, overhauling their responsibilities and terms of reference along the way.
The changes included the deletion of the scrutiny crime and disorder committee clause from the council constitution despite it clearly stating it accorded with the Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009.
No explanation for the deletion was provided in the accompanying report.
Wholesale changes to Exeter City Council constitution, February 2016. Source: Exeter City Council.
Exeter Board continued to meet, complete with its complement of executive members, and continued to receive Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes.
Phil Bialyk became a board member while also sitting on the council executive committee at its July 2017 meeting, when it decided to arrange an “away day” to “consider the way forward” for itself. It “endorsed” its away day decision at its September meeting, when it also “acknowledged” that it had “lost some focus” and that it was “now appropriate to review its role”.
More board terms of reference revisions followed, with another explicit statement that the board should not overlap with council scrutiny functions, as well as a new name – Exeter Strategic Board – and a conviction that the board had “an important role to play in providing strategic direction and in advising the city and county councils about the needs of Exeter’s residents and communities”.
Again, nothing was said about community safety partnership scrutiny duties or executive committee member prohibitions.
Despite its renewed “vision”, board meeting cancellations started to occur. Then another board reboot attempt took place in June 2018, along with another terms of reference review. Meeting cancellations nevertheless became more frequent and Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes, still being presented to the board when it did meet, went astray when it did not.
Then it emerged, buried in Phil Bialyk’s September 2018 portfolio holder report, that another community safety partnership governance review had taken place sometime during 2017-18 which had added another partnership management layer, all still outside the purview of council scrutiny despite the law.
Karime Hassan and Phil Bialyk overseeing Exeter City Council scrutiny cuts in October 2019.
A few months later, following the May 2019 local elections, Phil Bialyk took over as council leader. Among his first acts was to initiate yet another constitutional review with the express aim of reducing scrutiny’s capacity to act as an oversight check and balance mechanism in relation to the whole council.
He then took over as Exeter Strategic Board chair a few days later and introduced yet another review of its terms of reference – the fourth in as many years. According to the minutes – and apparently without irony – he “cautioned against it developing an over-arching scrutiny role given the extensive scrutiny work already undertaken in various other fora”.
Perhaps with this in mind, the minutes of the board’s next meeting in September 2019 record him saying that he would “request feedback from the community safety partnership”, although they do not say on what topic.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes then disappeared from the board’s agendas and have never reappeared since, at its meetings or the meetings of any other council committee.
The council approved Phil Bialyk’s constitutional overhaul in October, highlighting “the change in culture the proposals would bring aimed at making the council more accountable and transparent”. He said the changes were “appropriate for an ambitious council looking to enhance the democratic process in the city to meet growing public expectations”.
Exeter Strategic Board would be scheduled to meet another seven times before it disappeared from the council’s calendar completely in November 2021 – with Phil Bialyk still in the chair – but five of those meetings were cancelled. Neither of the two that did take place had anything to do with Exeter City Council business.
The board had, in effect, been usurped by the entirely unaccountable Liveable Exeter Place Board, which met for the first time in December 2019.
Exeter city centre antisocial behaviour crime data map from
Exeter Community Safety Partnership city centre antisocial behaviour action plan, October 2023.
Source: Freedom of information request to Exeter City Council.
Exeter Observer started using freedom of information legislation to access records of Exeter Community Safety Partnership meetings from 2020 onwards.
All the community safety partnership minutes that the council published until they stopped doing so in 2019 included full details of everything discussed and all those present. The partnership meeting documents released in response to our freedom of information requests are full of redactions, as if it is not a publicly-funded statutory body at all.
As for council scrutiny of the partnership’s activities, just two PR-style presentations were provided over the course of nearly five years, one in March 2021 and another in March 2023. Neither invited strategic challenge or steer.
So uninformed were councillors by March 2021 about the partnership that the presentation they were given had to list the organisations that were involved. Officers also had to explain that it was part of the wider Safer Devon partnership of the county’s four such organisations.
(These, in which each of Devon’s other district councils work together in trios or pairs, all comply with the scrutiny and strategic oversight requirements laid out in law.)
The March 2023 presentation was even more superficial – containing no crime data at all, for example, although plenty of social media metrics – compared with the documents we were accessing via freedom of information disclosures during this period, which address the abduction and murder of Lorraine Cox in Exeter city centre among many other serious and significant issues.
The committee presentations are also striking for the absence of information such as the community safety partnership’s structured annual action plans. It is precisely this kind of issue-specific strategic information which the government says is supposed to form the basis of council scrutiny committee community safety partnership oversight.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership Terms of Reference and Executive membership, November 2023.
Source: Freedom of information request to Exeter City Council.
In June last year, more than twelve years since any Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes had been presented to a council scrutiny committee, Duryard & St James councillors Michael Mitchell and Tammy Palmer jointly submitted a proposal for scrutiny of antisocial behaviour in Exeter city centre.
They proposed an initial scrutiny committee discussion followed by the creation of a task and finish group – just as the government recommends – to gather evidence from “public bodies, the voluntary sector, the public and the commercial/business sector” – to inform recommendations for action to be brought back in report form within six months.
Their stated intention was to gather multi-agency input to understand the issues, their causes and any potential solutions to address public concern about the impact of antisocial behaviour in the city centre with regard to public safety as well as its wider impact on Exeter’s reputation.
In fact the community safety partnership had already set up a city centre antisocial behaviour-focussed sub-group six months earlier, with InExeter Business Improvement District in the chair. Eight other organisations had seats including Devon & Cornwall Police, St Petrock’s, CoLab, Exeter Cathedral, Exeter College, Stagecoach South West, the University of Exeter and Exeter City Council.
But, of course, neither Michael Mitchell nor Tammy Palmer nor other scrutiny councillors knew this because of the council’s serial failure to fulfil its crime and disorder scrutiny duties.
Is it possible that the council’s leadership knew it should have addressed this failure long ago? At any rate its secretive scrutiny programme board met a few days later to confirm that the proposal would go before a meeting of its customer focus scrutiny committee at the end of the month.
At the meeting, systematic procrastination began. Tony Wardle suggested that the committee should not discuss the proposal until January 2025, seven months later, and Mollie Miller-Boam suggested the item itself should be postponed to March 2025.
Liz Pole seconded Tony Wardle’s motion and the Labour majority on the committee, including its chair Josie Parkhouse, predictably prevailed.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership 2023-24 action plan update, January 2024.
Source: Freedom of information request to Exeter City Council.
At the committee’s January 2025 meeting Josie Parkhouse suggested the committee further postpone discussion of the proposal, this time to March 2025. But it did at least add the item to its work plan to be heard in June.
Then, at its March meeting, the committee discussed how it might approach the item when it heard it later that year. Michael Mitchell said the proposal was for several people to give evidence to the committee before deciding whether to set up a spotlight review or task and finish group to go into more depth.
Josie Parkhouse immediately countered that the whole committee should be involved – rather than some of its members focussing on the topic in depth before reporting back – adding that the only question would then be whether to invite witnesses to speak in person or simply ask them for written submissions.
Mollie Miller-Boam said she agreed that the whole committee should take part and that written submissions would be fine. Rob Harding said it was the first time he’d heard of spotlight reviews or task and finish groups and wanted everybody involved.
Suggestions about which organisations might be invited to give evidence followed, clearly confused by none of the committee members knowing which organisations were already involved in the community safety partnership’s antisocial behaviour sub-group – or, apparently, the partnership’s executive – and which were not.
Josie Parkhouse suggested there was insufficient time between March and July to invite any more organisations to give evidence other than those identified in the proposal. Liz Pole suggested the city centre should not be the focus of the work.
Josie Parkhouse then added that even the proposal identified too many organisations to invite and that only the police, the university and Together Drug and Alcohol Service should be invited, along with the community safety partnership itself.
Michael Mitchell then said that InExeter should be invited too, as it represented the business community, and the committee finally agreed a July meeting plan. Josie Parkhouse chaired the following week’s scrutiny programme board, which also privately approved it.
As it happened, Exeter Community Safety Partnership reviewed its approach to antisocial behaviour in the city centre at a meeting it held on the same day, covering both its 2024-25 action plan and its draft 2025-26 action plan.
But both the council scrutiny committee and its scrutiny programme board apparently remained in the dark about the contents of both plans and the organisations involved in putting them together.
South Devon & Dartmoor Community Safety Partnership 2023-24 delivery plan update, February 2024.
Source: Published reports to South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council and Teignbridge District Council scrutiny committees.
July’s customer focus scrutiny committee meeting arrived but the chair, now Catherine Rees, announced that the item would not be heard at this meeting after all and would be postponed yet again, this time to September.
The excuses provided were that antisocial behaviour is a complex topic that “should be given sufficient attention” and required “more time and organisation to obtain the correct evidence”, that the High Sheriff of Devon had convened a meeting to discuss the same topic – in private – and that the community safety partnership already had an annual action plan – not provided – which “was beginning now and did not coincide with this meeting”.
The committee was also told that council development director Ian Collinson had taken over as Exeter Community Safety Partnership chair, although it was not explained why this might have any bearing on when the committee might be allowed to hear the item.
A long argument ensued.
Michael Mitchell said that it had been so long since Tammy Palmer and he had submitted their scrutiny proposal that the previous government had still been in power, that neither of them had been involved in any of the discussions that had followed and that council officers had taken the whole thing out of their hands.
He added that all they had asked for was an open meeting to discuss their proposal followed by a task and finish group to enable a small group of councillors to look at the issues in depth, bringing agencies together to seek solutions instead of window-dressing.
The committee then lurched onto the topic of which organisations to invite to attend in September. Josie Parkhouse requested that Inclusive Exeter, Intercom Trust and CoLab all be added to the list.
Ian Collinson then insisted that council officers had not decided how to proceed, queried whether antisocial behaviour was an issue that needed urgent attention, and claimed not only that Exeter Community Safety Partnership was the multi-agency group that Michael Mitchell was looking to create, but that it was already on the case.
Josie Parkhouse asked when the community safety partnership action plan was due and whether the committee might see it. She was told that it was being prepared by the partnership’s antisocial behaviour sub-group, led by InExeter, and would be ready in September.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership Sidwell Street antisocial behaviour action plan, May 2024.
Source: Freedom of information request to Exeter City Council.
Diana Moore said that previous antisocial behaviour action plans hadn’t always been followed through and that neither scrutiny committee members nor the communities they represent know what’s being done or have a route to engage with the agencies that are doing it.
Jakir Hussain added that taxi drivers should be involved as their 24-hour working patterns meant that they see everything that is going on in the city.
Catherine Rees then listed all the organisations that the committee now intended to invite to give evidence, also including some young people to get their perspective as well as Exeter Mosque.
Josie Parkhouse responded that the scrutiny proposal had not been to invite twenty organisations to the committee’s September meeting but to get an overview before deciding its next steps.
Ian Collinson then jumped in again to query whether a council scrutiny meeting was the best place to bring different organisations and the community together, suggest that the committee might instead wait for the High Sheriff of Devon’s private meeting to take place the following week, and propose that the community safety partnership report could be presented to the September meeting “rather than setting up a sub-group”.
Josie Parkhouse then said she had just looked up the community safety partnership on the internet, and wouldn’t want the organisations listed there turning up only to wonder why they were at a council committee meeting when they had already attended partnership meetings.
She added that she wouldn’t want to duplicate the partnership’s work by setting up an additional body to replicate its functions and said the committee should wait to see what the report Ian Collinson was talking about would produce first.
Adrian Fullam responded that the purpose of the proposals was to give the issue new impetus. Diana Moore said that Devon & Cornwall Police & Crime Commissioner Alison Hernandez had said how important it was that councillors scrutinise the community safety partnerships operating in their area, adding that such scrutiny should take place in public, not in private.
Ian Collinson intervened again, this time saying that Josie Parkhouse had “nailed it for me: if we can deliver through the [community safety partnership] antisocial behaviour sub-group chair, which is Nicola Wheeler, who is the chair of the BID, she can prepare a report which draws together all of those things, which links back to the CSP, bring that here, she can deliver that, and you can scrutinise that and then work out what your next steps are”.
He added: “That’s what I would recommend you do.”
Catherine Rees said that what the committee wanted was to hear both from organisations involved in the community safety partnership and from organisations which were not.
After more argument about which organisations to invite – during which it became clear that Josie Parkhouse had mistaken the community safety partnership executive members for its antisocial behaviour sub-group members – Catherine Rees brought the committee to a vote.
It decided to invite Devon & Cornwall Police, Together Drug and Alcohol Service, Inclusive Exeter, a group of young people (possibly from Exeter College), Intercom Trust, Exeter City Football Club and representatives of taxi drivers and the mosque, as well as the community safety partnership itself, to give evidence at its September meeting.
Exeter Community Safety Partnership Cathedral Green antisocial behaviour action plan, May 2024.
Source: Freedom of information request to Exeter City Council.
In the event, when the committee met in September, the public gallery was packed. The only people present at most Exeter City Council scrutiny committee meetings are councillors, officers and an Exeter Observer reporter, and the council does not livestream such meetings despite the government’s view that they are “fundamentally important to the successful functioning of local democracy”.
The first hour and a half was spent hearing evidence from students from St James’ School, Inclusive Exeter director Neomi Alam, Danny Harris from Exeter City Community Trust (not the football club), Rowan Livingstone from St Petrock’s, CoLab CEO Fiona Carden and Francesca Bendall from Waythrough, which delivers the Together Drug and Alcohol Service.
Inspector Nathan Johnson of Devon & Cornwall Police and InExeter CEO Nicola Wheeler also spoke, on behalf of Exeter Community Safety Partnership antisocial behaviour sub-group. They did not present the promised community safety partnership 2025-26 action plan to the committee.
When the presentation of evidence was complete all the organisational speakers (except the St James School students, who by then had left) were invited to join the committee members at the table.
During the discussion that followed, several speakers confirmed the potential benefits of getting local councillors involved in addressing challenges related to city centre antisocial behaviour.
Some related to city councillor capacity to get things done when Devon County Council is responsible for sorting out issues, because some city councillors are also county councillors and can directly address County Hall officers in a way their city colleagues cannot.
Two such issues are broken street lighting and foliage that obstructs city centre CCTV camera network surveillance. Laura Wright, who represents the city council executive on the community safety partnership, mentioned one instance in particular in which the county council’s failure to cut back an overgrown tree that obstructed the CCTV control room view had tragic consequences.
In addition, Fiona Carden emphasised the challenges resulting from local organisations being driven to work in silos because of the way funding is distributed, and asked how they might take steps towards longer-term approaches that enabled them to work together effectively. She said that councillors could help facilitate such outcomes by amplifying voices and lobbying for change.
Rowan Livingstone, when asked how the city and county councils might do better at a strategic level and whether more comprehensive or differing approaches were needed, simply replied that addressing these questions sounded like something a scrutiny task and finish group might do.
Public gallery at Exeter City Council Customer Focus Scrutiny committee meeting, September 2025.
Just as the committee was about to move on to Adrian Fullam’s formal proposal that it create such a cross-party task and finish group, Ian Collinson jumped in.
He said, as he had repeatedly already said at the committee’s July meeting, that he thought just such a working group already existed in the form of the community safety partnership antisocial behaviour sub-group.
He also said: “If this committee really wants to set up a task and finish group, then what is it going to do that is different to the task group that is already in existence, which has all the experts”. He then asked the committee directly: “What value will you be adding?”
Adrian Fullam replied: “What this will add is a member perspective, because members have the widest representation and connection with community”. He added that the purpose of such a group would be to gain an overview, assess the effectiveness of the community safety partnership’s existing approach then seek to facilitate further change by addressing requests from sector professionals.
He also said: “It won’t be duplicating this work, but it will be bringing the key points together”, adding that these insights would then be used to address concerns that councillors are hearing “from the citizens in Exeter that we represent”.
As soon as he had finished speaking Josie Parkhouse asked to interrupt the meeting for a toilet break, prompting Catherine Rees to tell all the organisational speakers that they could leave. Five minutes later they had all gone and the public gallery had emptied. When the meeting reconvened, Josie Parkhouse weighed in.
She said: “A task and finish group wouldn’t be the best solution to that, just given that, as Ian has already raised, that that already exists and I would hate to have duplication especially when we’ve got officers that sit on that body, that’s statutory, that spend a lot of time and energy on that statutory, sitting on that statutory body, to then have to do the same again for the benefit, really, of opposition councillors.”
She added, incorrectly: “The reality is that the ASB board currently has Ian, Victoria, as two officers, and three members from the executive who are the Labour ruling group as representatives of the city council.”
She then said: “It feels to me that we’d be just duplicating for the benefit of party politics which I don’t necessarily agree with.”
Five minutes later Peter Holland said: “An hour ago I was minded to support a task and finish group, but I have listened carefully to what our director Ian Collinson has had to say”. He added: “I have changed my mind”.
Had Peter Holland not changed his vote, the committee would have passed the proposal. As it was, his vote and the votes of the six Labour committee members who were present meant the motion fell, without any members of the public present to witness it hitting the ground.
Labour and Conservative councillors vote against city centre anti-social behaviour scrutiny proposals, September 2025.
After the meeting we asked the council several questions about what had taken place.
We said that Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes, which had originally been presented to the council’s community scrutiny committee, pursuant to The Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009, had not been included on its agendas since January 2012.
We asked who made the decision to stop including these minutes on these agendas, when this decision had been made, and why.
We said that Exeter Community Safety Partnership minutes were instead included on the agendas of non-constituted council boards after January 2012. We again asked why.
We also said that the provision that used to specify that the functions of the council’s community scrutiny committee included the functions of a crime and disorder committee to oversee and scrutinise the work of Exeter Community Safety Partnership, in accordance with The Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009, had been deleted from the council’s constitution in February 2016 without explanation. Again, we asked why.
We also asked it to specify by what means the council complies with its responsibilities per the provisions of Section 6 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Section 19 of the Police and Justice Act 2006 and The Crime and Disorder (Overview and Scrutiny) Regulations 2009 in relation to Exeter Community Safety Partnership.
And we asked it why Ian Collinson did not declare a conflict of interest in relation to his role as chair of Exeter Community Safety Partnership during the 25 September meeting of the council customer focus scrutiny committee, and subsequently refrain from participation in the meeting during its discussion of antisocial behaviour in the city centre.
All the council said was that it is not in a position to comment on any of our questions at present, nor does it know when it might be.
