Cllr James Walsh

Labour councillor James Walsh has called for Guildford Borough Council to lobby the Home Office for more funding to tackle the growing scourge of organised crime in the borough.

Speaking at the meeting of Full Council last week (August 25), Cllr Walsh called for the council’s Conservative leadership to work with Anne Milton MP and Surrey Police to demand more resources to tackle sex trafficking, modern slavery and drug dealing by London-based gangsters in the town.

According to Surrey Police and the Safer Guildford Partnership, violent and highly-organised criminals are travelling into the borough from the capital and are exploiting vulnerable people to cover their activities. Surrey Police’s Superintendent Duncan Greenhalgh recently told councillors that drug dealing and sexual and economic slavery were an increasing problem in the town and that the police suspected that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Worryingly, Supt. Greenhalgh said that resources spent on bobbies on the beat in Guildford had been reallocated to deal with organised crime and that essential data investigation software had been scrapped to save money.

Cllr Walsh said: “The scale of this problem is absolutely shocking. Albanian and other gangsters are using Guildford as a piggy bank and causing untold damage to people’s lives and the community through their activities.

“Gangsters from the cities are like a cancer and their poison is spreading away from urban centres and into places where they can exploit what they view as untapped markets.

“Innocent people are suffering as a result of this and I am appalled to hear that modern slavery and child sexual exploitation are also happening in this and neighbouring boroughs.”