PCD 1295 - VRU Capacity Building in Boroughs & with Families & Custody Services

PCD 1295 - VRU Capacity Building in Boroughs & with Families & Custody Services

The London Violence Reduction Unit is allocating Mayoral approved funding to enhance activity in boroughs, with families and in custody. This funding will be going to 4 separate programmes for commencement in April 2023. This will include enhancing the borough capacity building, which is hyper local activity to reduce violence, uplifting the allocated amount to parenting activity across London, rolling out the youth custody ‘reachable moments’ service across London & extending the delivery of the Divert App. 

This will total £2,888,000 over a period of 1 year. The projects and programmes which are discussed in this Decision relate to PCDs 1149, 1147 & 1263. 

The Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime is recommended to:   

1. Allocate £1,500,000 to the My Ends-Style ‘Borough Capacity Building’ fund for financial year 2023-2024. 

2. Allocate £138,000 to the Divert App for financial year 2023-2024 

3. Allocate £250,000 to enable a London-wide roll out of the under 18s youth workers in custody programme in 2023-2024 

4. Allocate £1,000,000 to the Parenting Developments workstream for financial year 2023-2024. 

5. Delegate all final decision making on awards of tenders to the Director of the VRU 

1. Introduction and background 

1. The VRU is supporting the 24 boroughs that are not My Ends areas, through funding for 12 months delivery. This funding will be extended for a further 12 months to help support progress of additional partnership work and could include areas such as community engagement, supporting outreach through organisations coming together, providing training and development of champions as well as supporting strong and sustainable local networks of community members so that they are well placed to respond to local emerging needs and help advance and test new initiatives to tackle serious youth violence. 

2. The DIVERT App aims to reduce serious violence for people under the age of 25 supporting both potential victims and perpetrators & improve trust and confidence between young people and police. With users trained across each BCU, once triage has taken place for each referral an action plan will be put in place, the the service user will receive ongoing support or referral back into DIVERT. Ongoing funding will support continuation of this App. 

3. The ENGAGE programme, which provides a similar approach to DIVERT for young people aged 10-17 in police custody, is currently operating in two custody suites. The VRU has developed a plan extend and enhance this activity and is co-ordinating the reachable moments work with the MPS Detention Command and NHS Liaison and Diversion scheme in custody. This funding will also support the development and piloting on an “app”, to support diversionary referral. ENGAGE is also subject to an evaluation with the MOPAC Evidence and Insight team which will be fed directly into the work. 

4. Parenting Developments: This area of funding has so far delivered support and additional requirements for parent carer networks, including peer to peer and voluntary sector support for parents whose children have been directly affected by violence, inclusion of parental representation on assessment panels for commissioning of services and delivery of pan-London events for parent champions. Since the inception, Parent Voices has become a key component of the Parent Carer Champion Network programme with Champions ending their first year of volunteering peer to peer support and seeking new opportunities to support parents and have their voices heard.  We currently have 5 volunteers within Parent Voices who are already adding value to their role by providing feedback to the VRU Your Choice Programme and sharing their invaluable life experiences through the discussions with new providers during the mobilisation period of the VRU Inclusive and Nurturing Schools Programme.  Volunteer spaces for Parent Voices were taken up by Camden and Islington boroughs and they will also support the VRU by offering their time to visit funded projects across London, alongside Programme Managers, and voice their opinions on service outcomes and contribute to service developments. 

2. Issues for consideration 

1. An amendment to PCD 1263: 

1. PCD 1263 contained an error in relation to its description of the total of funding allocated to Borough Capacity Building in 2022-2023: £1,054,546. This is incorrect and should be a total of £2,049,982 & has been allocated via PCDs 1000, 1147, 1149 & 1263. 

2. In relation to Borough Capacity Building, some parts of London, we know that violence is very localised and is often concentrated in areas as small as an estate or a cluster of streets and for effective, long term impact to tackle violence, there needs to be strong, local, collaborative work.  The funding is for locally designed interventions in neighbourhoods affected by high and sustained levels of violence. Providing additional capacity building to support incident response in the community, through robust partnership approach, and to increase trust and collaboration between local communities, stakeholders, key local institutions, and statutory partners. This funding is to help progress additional community engagement, as well as supporting outreach through organisations coming together, providing training and development of champions as well as supporting strong and sustainable local networks of community members so that they are well placed to respond to local emerging needs and help advance and test new initiatives to tackle serious youth violence. The funding will be allocated directly to Local Authorities, to support boroughs that were not successful in My Ends. This will allow other areas to develop smaller programmes that have similar principles to My Ends in relation to a focussed area of work and collaboration, provide some capacity and test a concept. This will be assessed as we continue to develop the spec and consultation process. 

3. The Divert App is currently commissioned out to Bounce Foundation. Training of the Neighbourhood strand, comprising 490 members of staff, commenced at the beginning of May. A key tenet of training delivery was to ensure that each user would have complete confidence in the App’s stability as well as its ability to deliver results. Throughout May-July the team trained 86% of the Neighbourhood strand, amounting to 422 of 490 users. Training within the Local Investigation and Public Protection (CID) strands commenced at the beginning of August. These officers are more office-based and manage investigations into serious and complex crime. To date 168 of 375 users have been trained, equating to 45% of staff within the two strands. Of the 26 referrals received to date, 11 continue to engage with partners at Arsenal in the Community (5 participants) or ENGAGE Camden (6 participants). An integral part of delivering a new concept and monitoring its use is to listen to how target audience receive it. As part of the training input, all users were offered the opportunity to scan a QR code which would allow them to rate the quality of their training and the app itself. To date 236 responses have been received out of a total of 668 trained users.  

1. How would you rate the training received by the DIVERT App team? (Rating out of 5) The average score to this question was 4.82 

2. How would you rate the DIVERT App? (Rating out of 5) The average score for this question was 4.68 

4. The Engage programme currently is delivering to 18 boroughs (7 Borough Command Units) and the roll out that would support extending to the final 4 boroughs would mean an increase in the current budget as per PCD 1263 by £250,000 for 2023-2024. This is highlighted below in Table 1: 

1. Table 1: 

2. The boroughs which are currently receiving delivery are: 

1. Enfield & Haringey  (NA) 

2. Camden and Islington (CN) 

3. Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge  (EA)  

4. Bromley, Croydon and Sutton (SN)  

5. Southwark and Lambeth (AS)   

6. Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley (SE) 

7. Barnet, Brent and Harrow (NW) 

8. (Total 18 boroughs) 

3. The desired delivery would extend to: 

1. Newham and Waltham Forest (NE) 

2. Hackney and Tower Hamlets (CE) 

3. Richmond, Kingston, Merton and Wandsworth (SW) 

4. Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow (WA) 

5. Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham (AW)       

4. ENGAGE is currently subject to evaluation by Evidence & Insight (E&I). 

5. The Parent Carer Champion Network is currently planning to deliver for just 6 months in 2023-2024. This is to ensure that each borough receives £31,250 for a 6-month delivery programme. However, to increase this budget by another £1,000,000 will enable delivery for the entirety of the year. Voluntary agencies will ensure that support continues throughout holiday periods and activities developed for parent/carers to bond with their children and young people with the aim of supporting transitions and creating a supportive environment for CYP to share their concerns and any anxieties related to moving into Year 7.  The budget for Parent Developments has supported targeted work for Parent Voices (previously Parent Carer Champions) and small initiatives such as including parent volunteers onto tender Project Groups to provide their feedback in the evaluation of VRU tenders.     

3. Financial Comments  

1. The addtional budget requirement for this work totals £2,888,000.  The cost will be funded from the VRU’s approved 2023-24 Mayoral Core budget. 

4. Legal Comments  

1. Paragraph 4.8 of the MOPAC Scheme of Delegation and Consent provides that the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (DMPC) has delegated authority to approve business cases for revenue or capital expenditure of £500,000 or above. 

2. The Mayor's Office for Policing Crime is a contracting authority as defined in the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 ("the Regulations").  All awards of public contracts for goods and/or services valued at £181,302 or above will be procured in accordance with the Regulations.  

3. Paragraph 4.13 of the MOPAC Scheme of Delegation and Consent provides that the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (DMPC) has delegated authority to approve all unforeseen variations and extensions to contracts with an original value of £500,000 or above, when the variation or extension is greater than 10% of the original value and/or is for a period of more than 12 months. 

5. Commercial Issues  

1. Borough Capacity Building, Engage and Parenting Developments Programmes will all involve direct grants to boroughs. 

2. The DIVERT App will be commercially and publicly advertised as a tender and procured. 

6. GDPR and Data Privacy  

1. MOPAC will adhere to the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018 and ensure that any organisations who are commissioned to do work with or on behalf of MOPAC are fully compliant with the policy and understand their GDPR responsibilities.   

7. Equality Comments  

1. MOPAC is required to comply with the public sector equality duty set out in section 149(1) of the Equality Act 2010. This requires MOPAC to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations by reference to people with protected characteristics. The protected characteristics are: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. 

8. Background/supporting papers 

1. n/a