The official deprivation index for Wales does show community safety is an issue, with parts of Tirphil and Phillipstown ranking among the worst 10% in Wales for crime and antisocial behaviour.
We see this played out when stone-throwing youths injure a police officer during an emergency call in Phillipstown, with a fire engine damaged in the same incident as the emergency services came under attack. A crime and safety review prompted by David Gaut’s killing had already begun by then.
Gwent Police and Caerphilly council turn down my request for a verbal interview, sending statements instead. Inspector Andy O’Keefe talks about how police, council and other other agencies work together to tackle issues New Tredegar faces.
However, he maintains: “New Tredegar remains lower in the table of recorded crime compared to many other comparable Valleys towns... my experience is that the fear of crime tends to be higher than actual crime rates and this is true of New Tredegar, particularly in the wake of the high-profile incident in summer 2018.”
Gwent Police figures for 2018 show 698 incidents of crime and antisocial behaviour recorded in New Tredegar, in a population of around 4,750.
But HM Inspectorate of Constabulary has told Gwent Police its crime recording across the force “requires improvement”, finding more than 5,000 crimes a year hadn’t been included in this system throughout the entire area they police.
Nevertheless, more than 36% of the crime recorded in New Tredegar in 2018 was for violence or sexual offences, although Inspector O’Keefe says in his statement, most incidents “were of criminal damage, public order offences and violence without injury”.
“Although these could be termed as ‘low level offences’,” he says. “I recognise they still have a wider impact on public confidence, so together we must continue to target those responsible.”
His statement goes on to talk about a ‘core’ of troublemakers, some thought to be as young as eight, responsible for recent issues.
The kind of things the police have done, he says, include an antisocial behaviour injunction against two youths, a criminal behaviour order being sought against another youth and the appointment of a dedicated police ‘ward manager’ based in New Tredegar itself.
Meanwhile, many of the local people I speak to during my visit say substance abuse is a major concern and in the Tredegar Arms at the centre of what locals call the ‘village’, Dean Heggie and Kerry Whybeard discuss this.
Dean says drug problems are rife.
“It’s everywhere,” he says, telling me about his 22-year-old son, Justin. “He’s in prison. He’s been in for over a year, he’s been on the drugs. He’ll be out and back on it. It’s just the norm, he’s never going to get a job. What is there for youngsters around here, what is there for older people around here?”
Well, there’s sport for a start.
The town has a bowls club, a sports centre and a rugby club, where Keri Vaughan is a coach.
Keri tells me how the rugby clubhouse is busy these days, especially as other local pubs and clubs have closed down.
“We see all ages from people in their 70s to 18-year-olds, the locals come to our club for the old-time dancing or the quiz nights, that sort of thing,” he says.
As a father-of-two, who’s lived in the same street all his life, Keri says New Tredegar isn’t the place he knew growing up.
“It’s a bit of a clich?, you used to know everyone, 20 doors up, but now there’s people from other places coming up,” he adds.
When I ask him about what other people have told me about crime, he replies: “I wouldn’t say it’s more violent.
“I don’t see people off their faces on drugs, but I know there are people close to me who sell the stuff and it’s just rife, the same as everywhere else, and as a small Valleys village, it’s caught up with the times I suppose in that way.
“I’ve got to be honest, we were a bit fearful when my oldest was a bit younger, but she’s 20 now and she’s gone to university and we tried to ground them well.”
At 70, Keri's own former coach Ray Davies remembers New Tredegar in the age of coal and the closeness of those around him.
“There were roughly 25 boys and girls within two years of each other, we played out in the streets until nine o’clock at night, you didn’t hear of all these crimes going on when I was growing up,” he says.
“I used to know most of the people that lived in New Tredegar, I hardly know anybody now.
“When the pits closed, a lot of people moved away to find work and I think as with most Welsh villages, when the pit shut, the village died."
He says the rugby club is doing okay and I remark that he must see active, enthusiastic young people there. He sighs.
“Not enough, really,” he says. “Another fear is, when us older ones die off, who’s going to take up the baton of running the club? I find youngsters don’t want the responsibility.”
When it comes to crime, Ray says he hasn’t been personally affected, but has seen more going on.
“Within the space of four weeks, you had the murder, the post office got broken into and also, four doors up from me, they had a drugs raid, with 12, 13 police cars which we’ve never seen before.
“There are always police cars up and down, helicopters overhead, which obviously we never saw years ago.
“You’ve seen that side of it deteriorating.
“I think a lot of it is that people have no jobs, and that’s throughout Britain, not just in New Tredegar, and I think there’s a lot of strangers here. We’ve seen a big difference in the village and not for the better
Looking at employment, or the lack of it, official figures show the proportion of unemployed men in New Tredegar was almost double that of Wales as a whole.
And for both sexes, the geography can present challenges.
Back in the caf?, hairdresser Emma says she’d been working in a local salon until it shut down last August.
Two jobs she wanted to go for were out of the question because she doesn’t drive and, when we speak, she was now only working on weekends as a security officer 25 miles away in Cardiff, accessible by train.
“You’ve got to look elsewhere, then if you do get elsewhere, you’ve got to travel and get money to travel,” Emma says.
For those who have the means to travel, there’s plenty of employment around, says Keri Vaughan, who works in Merthyr Tydfil building military combat vehicles.
“The majority of my friends or people I know have jobs in Cardiff or Newport, they travel,” he says. “Obviously there’s no jobs locally.
“A lot of my friends are builders or bricklayers, they travel across the bridge or Hereford way, they go where the money is.”
Each street we visit in New Tredegar seems no worse or better than other similar communities in south Wales, and that’s one of the points made in Councillor Eluned Stenner’s statement. She highlights the demise of the coal industry and how the council and other authorities have invested more than ?28.6m in recent years to try to regenerate the area, including a new school and children’s centre, road improvements, cycleways, the museum and community hubs.
'We don’t give up hope that things can improve'
An outsider’s view gives a refreshing perspective and comes in the shape of vicar Leah Philbrick, an American who’s been in the community for four and a half years. Before that, she worked in London.
“I know people think a lot has changed in New Tredegar and it’s probably a lot different from how it used to be 20 or 30 years ago, but for someone coming in, you still very much see, actually, it’s retained a lot of that in comparison to other places like London,” she says.
Church volunteers run the Living Room coffee shop, gardening activities and run a weekly food bank in New Tredegar.
“As a church worker, I’m very privileged to be working alongside a lot of people where you see the best in people,” Leah says. “You see people who are wanting to contribute, wanting to support one another, wanting to look after each other, that sort of thing.
“Lots of people recognise that the problems that we have in the community are maybe not uncommon, it’s not unique to where we are and possibly symptomatic of what’s going on in the wider UK.
“It’s just sad when you see it happening in our community. I suppose we try to maintain that sense of hope, we don’t give up hope that things can improve as well.”
Retired lab technician Audrey Cullen paints a similar, more positive picture of modern New Tredegar.
Audrey, who’s 76, is one of the food bank volunteers and has lived in the town since the age of nine. Problems here aren’t any worse than elsewhere, she says, adding weight to what the police have also said.
“It’s fairly quiet, we do get problems, but certainly not as bad as places like Cardiff and Newport,” she says.
“It’s a lot safer, I think, in the Valleys. I know people will cross the road so they won’t have to walk past youngsters, but you walk past them and they’re quite normal... the threat is more imagined than real.”
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