Introduction

St Peters NM supports the local Tenants & Residents Association in pointing out how nice and desirable place it is in which to live here in St Peters in Leicester.

We also support the current local housing manager for Leicester City Council one Ela Krychowska-Hall in her suggestion that people are queuing to get a home in St Peters. Although our understanding is that this is primarily due to the proximity to mosques and the fact that there are queues for all social housing almost everywhere.

It is however the hard work of St Peters NM in highlighting of issues here over the past 3 years in particular that has made it more desirable because by doing that, we have concentrated minds particularly at Leicester City Council and the local Housing Office that has brought about real service delivery improvements.

People looking to move here know also that this is a neighbourhood where people care and are amplified about issues such as drug dealing, ASB and littering.

Our stated Mission

In order to understand why St Peters NM work the way we do to resolve issues and improve our neighbourhood of St Peters & Highfields in Leicester you need to be aware of our Mission Statement.

St Peters Neighbourhood Monitoring’s stated mission is to “Work and campaign to improve the appearance of the neighbourhood and to highlight issues blighting the lives of those who live, work and study in this neighbourhood.”

2007 - 2008 Highlighted the Bulk Waste Rubbish Piling Up.

Back in 2007 St Peters NM successfully challenged Leicester City Council & Local Housing Office over the long term waste mismanagement that saw bulk waste rubbish piling up outside the entrances of our buildings, sometimes up to shoulder height on a daily basis.

Everything from filthy 3 piece suites to greasy cookers and stained mattresses right at the front door to the buildings used by residents and their visitors.

It had been happening for years and no one appeared to recognise it as an issue or had challenged it to get it dealt with, even the TARA failed to see itor if they saw it, failed to get it resolved.

Along comes St Peters NM IN 2007, who highlighted this issue in slide shows and video on our neighbourhood website and also on YouTube shaming and forcing LCC to deal with it.

2007 – 2010 Highlighting the stinking overflowing LCC Paladin bins

Then we challenged and highlighted on our website as well as Youtube and Flickr the LCC managed paladin bins overflowing with stinking refuse being stored right at the main entrances of the multi occupancy buildings.

Forcing LCC to acquire more paladin bins (after a long drawn out process) so they did not overflow as often at the entrances of our buildings as they used to. (St Peters NM down to this day is requesting still more bins and more rigorous waste management to make overflowing bins entirely a thing of the past).

2007 – 2010 Highlighting the issue flytipping by residents

Widespread and endemic flytipping where Tv sets and furniture was routinely and blithely caste out into the communal gardens, shrubberies, walkways and car parks by many residents was also highlighted and addressed by St Peters NM throughout our website and social networks including YouTube.

Highlighting this using digital media photo slideshows and video that was blighting nearly every area of our neighbourhood again brought about improvements as residents were warned we would identify them. In fact residents were then frequently charged as a result of St Peters NM requesting local housing staff to obtain stills from the cctv in order to identify the culprits involved.

The flytipping was totally rampant and out of control as it had been going on for years without being challenged in any serious way what so ever, whether by the Tenants and Residents Association or the Council.

2007 – 2010 Highlighting Waste Mismanagement by Leicester City Council Voids and Repairs depts

We always recognised that it was not good enough that residents be forced to stop dumping bulk waste at the entrances of the buildings and also the public spaces here if Leicester City Councils own Voids or Repairs departments continued to do precisely that.

St Peters NM has always stated that the “net effect of rubbish dumped at the entrances of our buildings of beside footpaths is the same no matter if it ss dumped by residents or by the council”.

Early in 2010 after highlighting the issue in photo’s on our Flickr social network and websites, Leicester City Council conceded that by dumping uncontained waste in this way throughout our neighbourhood “they had been in breach of their duty to care”.

Although this was a shocking admission, it set the scene finally after 3 years of persistent and hard battle on the issue for LCC to bring about changes in the departments who had been blighting the neighbourhood in this way.
Furthermore it was a victory and service delivery improvement that St Peters NM had won for every single neighbourhood in this city.

2008 - 2010 Highlighting the issue of Littering

One of our most stunning and successful campaigns had been the use of digital media and social networks to highlight the issue of littering in St Peters that was one of the single biggest issues we identified blighting this neighbourhood and community.

In October 2007 ST Peters NM had begun to film litter louts and post the video and still on YouTube and the neighbourhood website in order to identify offenders and deters others.

On July 1st 2009 with about 20 Litter Louts filmed and viewable online we ran up a publicity campaign in the press and broadcast media fuelled by the digital media of the incidents online on our website and social networks.

We created nothing short of a tsunami of publicity that saw tv cameras and radio stations interviewing us and filming on the streets and walkways of our Leicester neighbourhood.

It reached its peak with being invited onto the Today program on BBC Radio 4 which is the main news and current affairs program on radio in the UK. St Peters NM effectively had the ear of the nation as we highlighted the issue of littering.

At mid day on the 1st July our website collapsed under the strain as it struggled to cope with thousands of visitors per hour.

From that day on, littering in this neighbourhood has never been as rampant as it was.
We were congratulated by leading organisations like Keep Britain Tidy and held up as a shining example by the Home Office backed Community Crime Fighters Scheme.

St Peters NM had put St Peters Leicester on the map as a neighbourhood dealing with its issues using high tech innovative approaches that left everyone else way behind.

2010 Highlighting Rampant Drug Dealing

On the 5th July 2010 St Peters NM issued a statement to the press that we were highlighting the issue of drug dealing in our community that had been endemic for generations and that despite very commendable recent successes by Leicestershire Police continued more or less unabated.

St Peters NM felt that by publishing stills extracted from our videos of this dealers and buyers engaged in this activity that we could push drug dealing out of this neighbourhood in a way that all previous attempts and solutions had failed to do.

In order to get the message across loud and clear and in order to catch the attention of all concerned in this issue in our city we ramped up a sophisticated & high profile publicity campaign with digital media slide shows and videos of the issue across all our websites and social networks.

This resulted in worldwide press and broadcast media coverage including a large double page feature in the Daily Mail.

Predictably though some of the press coverage was exaggerated but most of it stuck to our press releases and statements as verified by our incident videos, incident logs and photography. THERE WAS NOTHING STATED BY US THAT WE CAN'T BACK UP WITH VIDEO.

There was no clinical way of doing what we set out to achieve. Some two weeks later, St Peters NM has not seen a single drug deal in this neighbourthood. The dealing stopped the precise day the publicity hit and has not returned since. We have never seen a 2 day period without drug dealing before let alone 2 weeks.

Highlighting this issue in the way we did has made St Peters a better and safer neighbourhood in which to live where visitors to our homes no longer have to walk past or witness hooded and masked drug dealers at work in our streets and walkways.

And as expected every local organisation is literally falling over themselves in order to claim responsibility for this stunning outcome.

Other work by St Peters NM

St Peters NM has done much other work that has contributed to transformation in this neighbourhood.

For example, in 2008 St Peters NM had some money left over from our budget to do with as we willed. Although we only had £700 to spend we wanted to do something with real lasting legacy that all residents and visitors could enjoy and would improve the neighbourhood.

So St Peters NM after much thought and consideration spent it on putting four stunning Laburnham trees in near a major walkway behind Highfields Primary school adjacent Galaxy Walk.

Additionally, in 2009 when no one here in St Peters, neither the St Peters Tenants and Residents Association nor the local housing office had put in for a bid for any of the new trees to be planted in the city as part of the 10,000 Tree Program, St Peters NM again sprang into action sparking an initiative that saw PC Tom Walkingshaw select 6 beautiful Japanese cherry trees for planting near the Laburnham trees along the major walkway between Pluto Close and Stoughton Street.

The ten new trees we acted to have planted in our neighbourhood totally transforms the area especially in spring does indeed creates something with legacy that will benefit the community in this neighbourhood for generations.

QUEUEING TO GET IN TO ST PETERS

So we hope you see from the information set out above why today when people like current local Leicester City Council housing manager Ela Krychowska-Hall  and Ebrahim Jasat, Secretary of the TARA start talking about their being queues to get a home in St Peters that we of all people in this neighbourhood understand why that is the case that people want to live here.

Hiding the issues in this neighbourhood and sweeping them under the carpet or by trying to kid ourselves about them never served this community well in the past before St Peters NM came along and it will not do so now.

By highlighting issues we have consistently brought about improvements and resolution to often long term, endemic and seemingly irresolvable problems even if in doing that it made for uncomfortable viewing at the time.

We have also let it be known that our neighbourhood has high standards that now make people want to live here.

We are sure everyone has heard the phrase No Pain... No Gain.