This isn’t a councillor-blog. But you lot know a little about the ward I represent, right? In case you’ve forgotten, here’s some information about the ward and here’s some about the meetings I have been to every week since I was elected.

Rose Hill has been through a rough couple of years. It’s a pretty deprived area, particularly in terms of housing and facilities. We’re in the middle of a huge project to knock down 150-odd prefabs and replace them with new homes, but it’s been beset with delays. We’ve got a few difficult young people who entertain themselves with criminal damage and joyriding, and we’re had some pretty appalling serious incidents too. Lots of people on the estate are working hard to make it a better place to live, but sometimes you wonder whether everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet when the county council decides to cut nearly £14k from the advice centre, meaning it will probably open only three mornings a week next year.

So, why do I feel cheerful tonight? Well, we’ve had eleven arrests on the estate over the past two weeks, including some for drugs; for an attack on the flat of an elderly person; for breach of the dispersal zone; for breach of an ASBO banning a former resident from the estate. Our beat team has four excellent officers, and their oddly-named Operation Boodle is getting results. Following the problems we’ve had, we’ve got a pair of officers on foot guaranteed to be on the estate every night of the week until midnight, up til the end of December, and around the 27th, our new pair of PCSOs start. Last night at the area committee we approved two CCTV cameras to go up in a notorious trouble spot near the shops, and in a few weeks the police team will be reviewing the dispersal zone to see how it’s working. We’re finally sorting out the stick.

And the carrot? Well, at the same meeting last night, we passed brand new floodlights for the recreation ground, so that the Football Foundation-funded youth work and sports development work can finally restart. The SEEDA Learning Communities project which came on stream in May has refurbished part of the Community Centre and will do up part of the Sure Start building to finally get IT suites on the estate. They’ve set up a regular group meeting with Brookes University on the estate, and five residents are being supported to apply for next year. They’ve persuaded the different agencies to get on board and run a weekly careers information and guidance session on the estate, and started entry-level courses running in ESOL, literacy, numeracy, beauty and IT. Learning Communities has set up a young learners’ group, Asian women’s group, an at home learning project and is supporting the development of the Sure Start cafe as a social enterprise. They’ve got the BBC RaW project coming to run a pilot on the estate.

And there’s more. Our local school was taken out of special measures last week. Nine teenagers came to our residents’ and tenants’ meeting last week, and they want to sit down with us and our beat team to try to work out together how we make things better for young people and reduce trouble on the estate. Not to count chickens, but we may finally have an agreement on how we develop the community centre with the planning gain money from the redevelopment. And, last but not least, the tenders for the developer to build the new homes are in - a huge step forward.