The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has committed £72 million over the next four years to help prevent crime across London, maintaining recent levels of investment despite significant pressures on the policing budget.
The new investment will help to deliver local services including support for victims of domestic and sexual violence, knife crime prevention and rehabilitation of offenders within the community.
The new tranche of the London Crime Prevention Fund will be awarded according to the greatest need across London’s boroughs, with a new emphasis on ensuring every Londoner has the access to the services they need to help support them and keep them safe. This includes targeted support to address violence against women and girls which specifically affects particular communities, focusing on targeted early intervention and awareness-raising.
Some funds will be redirected into a joint pot, to support services commissioned across boroughs. Local authorities will be core partners in the development of this new funding pot, which accounts for 30 per cent of the LCPF budget from 2018/19 onwards. All of the funding will be spent in local areas to further improve services.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “Keeping Londoners safe is my first priority, and providing boroughs with the funds they need to tackle and prevent crime is a vital part of this. A more joined up approach, and targeting money where it is most needed, will help us to support those parts of the capital which are struggling, and provide much needed services to all Londoners, including programmes to tackle serious youth violence and provide support to those who have suffered domestic abuse. These are critical issues, and I will do everything in my power to confront them.”
The Deputy Mayor for Policing And Crime, Sophie Linden, said: “Some of the most serious and complex challenges we face in policing our capital cannot be solved by one borough alone. This new approach to funding strikes a balance between maintaining crucial local programmes while supporting collaborative work between different areas and organisations. By working this way, we can deliver innovative services to Londoners in every corner of the capital and really make a difference to crime levels in our city.”
To ensure boroughs have time to prepare for the new funding model, no boroughs will see a drop in funding in the first year and 14 boroughs will see an increase. After the first year, funding will be awarded based entirely on the new needs based measurement.
To establish a more flexible, longer-term way of working, funds will now be distributed for two years at a time, enabling boroughs to plan their commissioning over more than one year. Of the two tranches, only the first has been allocated so far.
Notes to editors
- MOPAC has powers under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 to award crime and disorder reduction grants. The LCPF was established in 2013, bringing together a number of funding streams that had existed before MOPAC was set up. The fund ran from 2013/14 to 2016/17 in line with the Police and Crime Plan.
- Overall LCPF funding remains the same at £72m over the four year period. However, funds will be re-distributed across boroughs to reflect the new needs based model. To ease the transition to this model, no borough will experience a reduction in funding in 2017/18, but 14 boroughs will experience an increase - bringing them in line with the new assessment of local needs and demand. From 2018/19, the full new needs based model will be applied.
- Under the previous arrangements for the LCPF, local commissioning plans were aligned with the annual confirmation of the LCPF borough funding allocation, meaning some boroughs were unable to commission services for more than one year. The new model commits funding for two year periods, with the allocation for each period being committed irrespective of the outcome of the yearly policing grants.