Ambition 3 Keeping children, vulnerable adults and communities safe

We’ll lead work with the Police and Crime Commissioner and other partners to reduce domestic abuse and violence against women and girls. We’ll also strengthen and develop our services for people experiencing domestic abuse.

We’ll work with the Nottinghamshire Violence Reduction Unit to deal with the underlying causes of knife crime and violence and find solutions that help protect young people from harm.

We’ll focus resources on preventing vulnerable people from becoming victims of fraud and tackle more businesses that trade fraudulently.

Building on our work to develop Nottinghamshire’s Community Hub during the pandemic, we’ll work with our partners to join up our support for vulnerable people and communities. This will help us offer better support and reduce loneliness and isolation.

With our partners, we’ll protect communities most at risk of flooding through:

• securing funding to develop flood protection schemes
• designing new developments with flood protection
• responding quickly to flood emergencies
• communicating with communities at risk
• supporting the most vulnerable.

We’ll develop and deliver our cross-Council transformation programme, ‘Whole Family Safeguarding’. This will improve the support we can offer to vulnerable families, so they can bounce back from difficulties faster and fewer children will need to go into foster or residential care.

We’ll increase the number and diversity of foster placements for children in our care, and support those children and families better, so they can stay in happy and stable homes.

We’ll provide consistent care to children and young people in residential homes, and make sure they feel safe, happy and secure. We’ll also support them with well-trained and empathetic staff and give them opportunities to learn and have fun. Where possible and when the time is right, we’ll help them move to a family home.

We’ll support young people leaving care to prepare them for adulthood, commissioning services to meet their needs and help them to stay safe, healthy, happy and fulfil their potential.

We’ll support people with social care needs to find and maintain a safe place they call home. We’ll provide the right level of support to our vulnerable adults, at the right time in their lives, and look to make best use of the strengths and resources people have in their family, friends and community to help them to live as independently as possible.

With our partners, we’ll commission services that help to prevent homelessness, supporting national plans to end rough sleeping altogether.

We’ll keep improving our support for vulnerable children and adults:

• Through our Adult Safeguarding Board and Safeguarding Children Partnership, we’ll review what works well and where we can make improvements, helping support our most vulnerable children and adults. We’ll deliver annual improvement plans to make sure our work keeps getting better.
• Our new councillor-led Children Looked After Board will drive our work to keep children safe in our care.
• We’ll make our Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) more efficient and effective. We’ll focus our resources on protecting those most at risk, and will work with partners to make sure those most in need are referred to the MASH.
• Through the cross-Council ‘All Age Approaches’ transformation programme we’ll improve support for people with disabilities,  providing the right support at key points in people’s lives.