THE community safety teams at Swindon Council and Wiltshire Police are set to merge in a bid to streamline the service and save money.

Swindon Community Safety Partnership, employed by the council, and Citizen First, employed by the police, will become one team working to prevent crime and disorder in the town.

The team will have fewer members overall and will be known as Swindon Community Safety Partnership.

It will see each authority pay £210,000 annually towards the running costs, which will save the council £79,000 and the police £109,860 on the cash they previously allocated to their teams.

Richard Palusinski, head of community safety at the existing partnership, who will also manage the new team, said one team would eliminate the previous problem of roles overlapping and teams sometimes pulling in different directions.

He said: “It’s a positive move. From my perspective, we have been working on the fringes of partnership all the time I have been the partnership manager and what this does is starts to create real partnership,” he said. “They come under one line management so there’s a more joined-up approach.”

Only the architectural liaison officer will transfer from Citizen First to the new team. The police team has six posts for warranted officers, but these have already either retired or been redeployed elsewhere in the force.

Mr Palusinski said warranted officers were never needed because the team focused on prevention, rather than enforcement, and the council already has capabilities to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Posts will also be lost from the existing partnership, but there were no redundancies because the posts were held vacant after staff retired or moved to other jobs.

A Wiltshire Police spokeswoman said the merger was for the council to comment on as it will manage the team. However she confirmed the police would not lose staff. The new team should be up and running by July.