Thank you to everyone who joined last week’s women’s safety walk in Finsbury Park with Haringey Police.  It was a helpful opportunity to feedback concerns and discuss how the park can be made safer for everyone to enjoy.

Several suggestions have been taken away by Haringey Police and Haringey Council including addressing the lack of lighting and functional CCTV past the tennis courts and around Parkland Walk, improving signage around the park and repairing the Capital Ring bridge close to the Oxford Road gate.  We also discussed safety in the park at night and the early hours of the morning, the importance of patrols to deal with issues of illegal activity within the park, and the need to report to the Police any incidents of sexual harassment, flashing or catcalling so they have an accurate picture of the scale of the issue.

The Police have provided this further update on the actions they have taken away:

• They have said that they have shared concerns about women’s safety on Blackstock Road with colleagues from Hackney and Islington. They will be starting a tri-borough operation with all three police teams and local authority partners, and a key objective will be improving women’s safety and feeling of safety in the Blackstock Road area.
• The local ward team from Stroud Green have held a proactive plain clothes operation outside the underground station and have more activity planned together with the British Transport Police and Islington Police to reduce theft outside the station.
• The Police are working with Haringey Council to ensure the community hub space by the Stroud Green Road entrance does not contribute towards fear of safety or crime issues in the location.  The Police are also working with the Council to improve lighting and CCTV provision on Parkland Walk / the Oxford Road entrance. This includes looking into working with the studio by the railway bridge to increase lighting onto the walkway.
• The Police have obtained extra keys from the Local Authority so their Emergency Response Team officers can undertake a night shift tasking of patrolling the park in vehicles overnight as concerns were raised about the use of the park during hours of darkness. Their response teams will be completing this every night over the next month to provide extra presence in the area.

The Council have provided this update on the actions they have taken away:

• The recently installed new park lighting columns and lanterns, which run from the Finsbury Gate on Seven Sisters Road to the Hornsey Gate on Endymion Road, with spurs running off to the Stroud Green entrance and the Oxford Road footbridge, will be switched on by the end of October 2023, once UKPN has undertaken the necessary next steps to link up the new lighting system to the power network.
• Prior to this new lighting being installed, there had already been, for many years, lighting from the Manor House Lodge entrance to the athletics track, to enable sports users to access sports after dark.
• The Council has no current plans or budgets to introduce further lighting into the park, as nature conservation interests, in particular such as bats, also need to be taken into consideration in balance.
• In terms of CCTV, we have installed 6 cameras at key locations in the park over recent years.  These cameras are fully functional and are being centrally monitored.
• We will arrange for additional ASB warning signs to be erected at key locations within the park, displaying information on how to report crime.
• Over the last year or two, we have been upgrading the Manor House Lodge building and bringing it up to lettable standards. Now those works are complete, we have leased the building to the Museum of Homelessness, who will now commence programmes and activities to support homeless people in the borough and in the park.
• When people are found sleeping rough in Haringey’s parks, we immediately make a referral to Street Link, who send people out to engage with the homeless people and encourage them to find accommodation elsewhere. Where people do not leave of their own free will, we then potentially must go via the courts to enable enforcement action to take place. All of this can take some time so, whereas it may look as if no action is being taken, work is going on in the background.
• The bridge is a Network Rail asset. Although the Council has responsibilities to ensure that the bridge deck/footway is maintained, the bridge infrastructure itself is the responsibility of Network Rail. Council officers have reached out to Network Rail representatives as a result of this enquiry and, although no response has been received in time to properly update you now, we will continue to follow up with them.
• The police and the Council are working together to detect and prevent crime in the area. An example of this is the Council working with the police to make changes on Seven Sisters Road near the Finsbury Gate, as this location is considered problematic from various perspectives. The changes will result in much of the space between the park boundary (west of the gate) and the back edge of Seven Sisters Road footway being enclosed to prevent ASB but gated so that it can be accessed by authorised personnel, as and when necessary. Transport for London officials are aware of this proposal.

I will be attending other joint safety patrols with the Police across the constituency in the coming months and will keep you updated here and through my social media.  If you have any safety concerns you want to share with me, do get in touch.