Our City Guardians provide on street reassurance, patrolling the streets from Monday to Saturday, identifying and reporting issues and helping people find their way around. The team undertakes a number of audits including lighting, highway faults and business audits.

The last street management performance statistics showed that the south east City Guardians, which includes Heart of London City Guardians had the highest figures in relation to productivity across the whole of Westminster. These figures included reporting, reducing, and solving issues related to crime, anti-social behaviour and environment.

The City Guardians carry out an early patrol to identify issues at the start of the day, allowing these issues to be addressed before footfall increases. This has helped set the scene for the rest of the day and meant the team could proactively target the issues concerning members and resolve them at the earliest opportunity.

One important task was identifying homeless people in the area and signposting them to the relevant agencies. They also identify cleansing issues, which in many cases they report to the Heart of London Street Team. Other tasks include removing prostitute cards from phone boxes, reporting urination wet spots and dumped waste as well as acting as ambassadors for the area.

An ongoing role for the City Guardians is performing business audits every two weeks. The results from the audits identify the concerns of the businesses in the area, which are then fed back into the Civic Watch process. The audits also allow for the Guardians to give advice on crime prevention, waste management and other similar issues.