Opinion: We were promised change – Wellingborough is still waiting

Nor do we. So why does it already feel normal?

There is a simple rule in any team sport. You inherit whatever your predecessors left you, the lead or the deficit, and your job is to build on it and win.

What you cannot do is spend the whole match pointing at the people who came before you.

The scoreboard does not care who is to blame. It records one thing only, which is whether you delivered.

I think about that rule whenever someone in public office tells the people of Northamptonshire that the mess on our streets is society’s fault, and not really theirs to fix.

Last week the county’s Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, Danielle Stone, told the Police, Fire and Crime Panel that she does not want to see drug use normalised, and does not want to see our young people groomed.

She is right, and nobody in Wellingborough, Rushden, Kettering or Corby would argue otherwise. The problem is what is happening while she says it.

Drugs are being sold openly in our parks and town centres, and her own report admits that residents keep telling her, over and over, that serious drug crime is wrecking their sense of safety.

The figures are not in question. This newspaper reported that between 2018 and 2024 there were 6,529 knife crimes recorded in Northamptonshire, and that the number rose steadily across the whole period.

Youth Justice data shows that 65 per cent of knife offenders also misuse drugs, and that they are more than twice as likely to be tied to gangs.

Drugs, knives and the grooming of children into county lines are not separate problems. They are the same problem in different clothes, and people can see it happening at the end of their own road.

This is where the team sport rule bites. Mrs Stone told the panel that young people had been let down over a generation, and that it began “when we disbanded the youth service at the county”.

There is truth in that history. The old Northamptonshire County Council ran out of money in 2018, the first county in 20 years to do so, and services were cut to the bone.

But Mrs Stone was elected in May 2024. She has held the office for more than a year now. Residents did not give her the job so she could narrate what went wrong in 2018. They gave it to her to put things right in 2026.

And she has the means to do it. Thanks to the national uplift in police numbers, Northamptonshire now has more officers than at any point in its history, a headcount of more than 1,540, up from 1,280 in 2019.

That is not a force short of people. It is a force whose political leadership needs to aim it, day in and day out, at the dealers, the gang leaders and the adults grooming our children, who are exactly the people Mrs Stone says she wants to see brought before the courts.

So what could have been done, and what can still be done now?

Start with the obvious, which has rather gone out of fashion. The first job of any public authority is to keep people safe, and that means there have to be consequences for criminals, not a fresh round of excuses for them.

Put officers back on the streets where residents are actually reporting the dealing. Use stop and search, without flinching, where the intelligence is there. Arrest dealers and take them to court rather than quietly tolerating them. Take the persistent offenders off the street.

Name the hotspots, and publish the results every week so the public can judge for themselves whether anything is shifting. None of that needs a new committee or another pot of grant money. It needs the will to enforce the laws we already have.

Instead, the commissioner’s headline answer is the Serious Violence Prevention Partnership, which in June invited bids of up to £140,000 for projects to tackle serious crime.

Mentoring and diversion have their place, and I would not pretend otherwise. But a mentoring scheme is no answer to a man selling heroin beside a children’s playground at four in the afternoon. That calls for an officer, an arrest and a courtroom.

None of this is a party point dressed up as a local one. Our Member of Parliament, Gen Kitchen, says she is working closely with Commissioner Stone on knife crime. Good.

Then the two of them, one Labour MP and one Labour commissioner, both elected to serve the same residents, can be measured by the same test the rest of us face at work. Did the thing you were responsible for get better, or worse, while you were in charge?

That is the whole point of what we are doing in Wellingborough. We are knocking on doors, listening to people, writing down what they actually live with, and then asking those in charge, by name and in public, every week, what they plan to do about it. Not to score points off anyone, but to get the answers on the record, so that holding power to account stops being a slogan and becomes a habit.

Commissioner Stone says she does not want drug use normalised. Neither do we. So let us stop arguing about whose fault the past was, and start counting what actually changes this year. The scoreboard is the only thing residents will remember.