Richard Baum

I was very shocked and saddened on Sunday to see evidence of a widespread graffiti attack across Prestwich which I guess must have happened on Saturday night.

I am very angry that people think it’s acceptable to vandalise public and private property, but clearly some of them do, and take delight in “tagging” everything from walls to street signs. The problem has been around for years, has been pretty serious in Prestwich for a while, and there was a blitz of it on Saturday.

Local Councillors are getting the blame for not sorting this out, and I can understand the frustrations of local people. But I am equally, if not more frustrated. It’s deeply disappointing when my colleagues and I spend so much time trying to work with local people and groups to make Prestwich a better place, that criminals undo that work and make the local community feel unsafe and look dirty.

I think there’s a place for street art, but graffiti tagging isn’t art, it’s criminal vandalism and it needs to stop.

In terms of stopping it, I am frustrated that this is a classic situation where the Local Area Partnership (local Councillors and local Police) don’t have anywhere near enough resources and decision making influence to respond adequately and significantly enough to make a real difference on our own. We can scream for it to stop for as long as we like, but we can’t stop it without concerted efforts and more resources.

The Local Area Partnership (LAP) has been working to try to lessen graffiti for a long time, including lots of publicity about the youngsters caught and made to clean up their graffiti, free graffiti kits and the Love Prestwich campaign.

But resources are very limited, for both the Councillors locally and the local police.

This problem has been highlighted to the Tory Council in Bury, and unfortunately they have not chosen to do anything about it yet. Their original response was to send threatening letters to the victims of graffiti, ordering them to remove it or face court action. We found this approach completely unproductive, and as a results of our complaints the Council decided on a “review” with the aim of producing a “strategy.”

I doubt the merits of this approach, to be honest. What I think would work better would be funding devolved locally to provide more cleaning kits, and a diversion of police resources for a short time to crack down heavily on offenders and then make them clean up the mess. It needn’t take long, but it would be effective at wiping out a big problem caused by a small number of people.

But even if the Council are insistent on a review and a strategy, they haven’t produced one yet. Where is it? When will it be in place? Will there be additional resources? Will there be joined up working with the Police? Prestwich gets filthier, we keep banging on about this, and not a lot seems to be being done by the people controlling the purse strings.

We did have some success last year, catching some offenders. But now that the targeting has stopped, so has the success. The strategy needs to come soon, and it needs to detail what we’re going to do. And then as soon as possible we need to get on and do it.

In the meantime, please report any graffiti to the police, and we will continue to pressure the Council to enable the wider Prestwich LAP to take action to stop this problem.

Rick