Car number plate thefts - please be vigilant and secure yours

A set of car number plates were stolen on Wednesday 27th February in Marsh Road, Oxford. That's just by my local pub, the Marsh Harrier! Stolen number plates are used in a variety of crimes often replacing plates on stolen cars, or fitted to cars which are driven recklessly followed by non-payment of parking and speeding fines, also filling up with fuel and driving off without paying. All of these crimes will in the first instance lead the police back to you and can be very distressing.

This type of theft continues to happen weekly in Oxford, so I encourage you to consider fitting anti-tamper screws to your number plates. You can seek advice from your local garage or car dealer. I've just spoken to Motorists Discount Centre (two branches in Oxford). They stock kits of four of these security screws for £3.99 and I think they are really worth fitting if you can. Too many newer cars these days just have the plates stuck on with sticky pads leaving them too easy to remove intact then and use on another vehicle to commit crime that will be traced back to you!

Please check that your number plates are intact on a regular basis, if you do discover that they are missing report to the police immediately via the non-emergency number, 101. You are in a much better position if a crime is reported by someone with a vehicle displaying your plates if you have already reported them stolen! But it's even better to have taken steps to avoid having them stolen in the first place.

Central South and West Area Forum - student volunteering and community engagement

This meeting was held in the town hall and was quite well attended given the horrible wet and cold weather.  It was good to have people from OUSU and from the Oxford Hub student volunteering centre.

The meeting was chaired by Councillor Mark Mills and we fairly quickly broke into two groups - one to discuss student volunteering and one to discuss student community engagement.  It became apparent quite quickly that there are large overlaps between the two.  We talked about how students and more permanent residents can coexist constructively in the community and I was interested to hear about the work student voulunteers have been doing with elderly folk who live in the City Centre and often don't feel able to go out.  Quite a lot of these people are in my ward, Carfax, so this was of particular interest to me.

One thing that was picked up was that students are still having problems with Houses of Multiple Occupation, particularly around landlords and letting agents being slow to do repairs.  I said I would post instructions about how to check if a property is registered as an HMO and see who is the licence holder so have done so in a separate blog post.

The meeting finished about 9pm and was a useful exchange of contacts, ideas and views and hopefully will enable more student engagement and volunteering.