Police battling "drug havens"

Police are battling to reclaim two areas of Staines which they say have become hotbeds of drug-taking and drinking.

Police community support officers Deborah Tippetts and Adam Justice said they have found evidence of cannabis in the youth shelter in the playing field which runs alongside Commercial Road in Staines, and said that children had used the alleyway just off Kingston Road to smoke.

PCSO Tippetts said: "We get quite a lot of youths hanging around on the corner by the alleyway. We have caught quite a few kids smoking in there.

"It was getting so overgrown that, to me, it wasn't safe for anyone to walk down there."

She said she and county Cllr Denise Turner-Stewart have organised for offenders on community service to cut back the foliage in the alleyway over the last six weeks, so it is harder for youths to hide there and take drugs or smoke.

She said she thinks it would be best to get rid of the youth shelter in the playing field off Commercial Road altogether, adding: "This place just encourages them to sit in there smoking and drinking, we just want to take it out completely.

"They can see us coming into the park from the youth shelter and they have two exits to leave before we get to them."

Cllr Denise Turner-Stewart, conservative for Staines South and Ashford West, said: "This is part of what I have been wanting to do since I became councillor, to clean up the streets.

"In the last 18 months it has become clear that there are certain areas where you need to remove the opportunity for people to think they are areas to congregate.

"If there is no where for them to go and do this stuff they have to either do it in their own homes where they have to face up to what they are doing or be out in the streets where the police can deal with them."