Wednesdays tend to be one of the busiest days for me, as I work part time, and Wednesday is my one full day off each week. This morning I had a meeting of the Local Services and Community Safety Overview and Scrutiny Committee. This potentially covers a huge area of work, both for the council and a variety of statutory and voluntary agencies, so the workload has been quite heavy over the past few months. So far, I've served on two Task and Finish reviews - one on CCTV, which is now complete, and one on Birmingham's You Are Your City Clean and Safe programme, which we should get a draft of soon. I'm also part of a working group looking at the impact of the new Licensing laws, and hopefully we will carry out a review on that later in the year. For the moment though, it looks like our next focus will be on Anti Social Behaviour - a big issue for Birmingham and particularly for Kingstanding at the moment.

This evening I attended a reception to mark the 25th Anniversary of Birmingham Women's Aid. As a former Housing Officer I was aware of this organisation in the abstract, but I don't think I'd had any contact with them before tonight. It started out as a group of women (a group of loud women, as several speakers emphasised!) setting up a refuge in a squat, and has now grown into a organisation which offers a whole range of services to women and children across Birmingham. One point that everyone who spoke tonight made was that the past 25 years have seen huge changes in the attitude towards and help available to those affected by domestic violence and abuse, and that now there is no question that services of this kind are needed.

The challenge for the next 25 years is getting to a point where there is no need for Birmingham Women's Aid and other organisations like it, because domestic violence and abuse will no longer be a problem in our society. Wishful thinking maybe, but it's an interesting reflection on cause and effect in terms of many of the services and organisation out there.