MORE police have been promised for Oswestry and the surrounding areas in the coming year.

John Campion, police and crime commissioner for West Mercia, attended a public meeting in Oswestry on Monday to hear the worries and criticisms residents.

Mr Campion said the force is set to spend £225million in the coming financial year and will be training and deploying more than 110 new officers.

More than 50 people attended the meeting to quiz the PCC and a panel of police representatives including Inspector Tracy Ryan and Shropshire Superintendent Mo Lansdale.

Main concerns for residents were drugs, response times and anti-social behaviour.

Oswestry resident Eileen Jones said: “A fortnight ago I woke up to find my bench outside had been stolen, and it was left in pieces in a local park.

“I have lived in the area for 18 months now and recently I’ve been really frightened.”

A shop owner also criticised the response of the police – she said: “We report all issues of shoplifting and anti-social behaviour, but nothing seems to get done.

“We feel under-valued, we’re doing the best we can to help the police.”

Allister Moutrie who manages the Sainsbury’s store in Oswestry said: “Over the past 10 days I have called the police three times, twice on 999.

“We had a group of lads throwing bollards at customers outside the store – we didn’t have a police response until 15 minutes after it had happened, by that time they were long gone.

“Last week we had we had lads in the store riding bikes at customers – we tried to contact 999 and there was no response for three minutes.

“How will visibility be improved? On top of that, by when will response times be improved and by how much.”

Mr Campion addressed many of the issues raised and spoke of how the force hopes to benefit from more investment in the coming financial year.

“We are now in the position to start significantly investing in the force for the first time since 2010,” he said.

“This means officer numbers will be going up – we announced 100 new officers during the last financial year, and we are set to have another 115 which will all be recruited and in post by the end of the financial year.

“For the first time, the Chief Constable of the service has signed up to a whole raft of improvements that we will get as a result of the money being invested.

“There is a list of improvements, with one of the key ones being visibility – too often we find we don’t see as many officers as we would like to in our community, so I now have his commitment that visibility will go up and he has the right tools to make that happen.

“He has also committed that response times will come down by an average of two minutes – that is a big reduction across an area as big as Shropshire, and it will make a huge difference.

“We’ve started to see a decline in confidence in the police in recent times as police numbers have gone down – this is measured nationally and locally.

“We’re hoping now, with an increase in officer numbers, we will see public confidence go back up.”

Councillor Clare Aspinall asked about the possibility of having a staffed front desk back at the Oswestry Police Station, but this was made to sound highly unlikely by Mr Campion.

He said: “There will continue to be officers based there – there is absolutely no intention to close the building.

“As to whether we can afford to put dedicated resources back towards having a fully staffed front counter, I honestly don’t think we’ll be able to do that.”