Borough partnership funds 2010/11

Report: 6
Date: 6 January 2011
By: Assistant Commissioner for Territorial Policing on behalf of The Commissioner

Summary

This report provides an update on the financial and operational benefits to MPS boroughs in receipt of the BCU Fund and the MPA Partnership Fund for 2010/11.

A. Recommendation

That members note the report.

B. Supporting information

1. The Basic Command Unit Fund (BCUF) is now in what is expected to be its final year and distribution of the fund is decided by the Borough Commander in agreement with the borough partnership and subject to formal sign-off by the MPA. To date the fund has provided a valuable source of financial support for a broad range of partnership activities but there is no indication that it will continue or be replaced with other funding dedicated to community safety partnership activity.

2. The MPA Partnership Fund of £1.6 million per financial year - £50,000 per borough - continues to provide a small degree of funding for each borough commander to support local initiatives and to encourage match funding from other partners. The spending criterion for this fund is reasonably flexible and has enabled borough commanders to support small-scale, local initiatives.

3. For each of these funding streams, boroughs are required to submit a spending profile at the beginning of the financial year. With regard to the BCUF the plan must be agreed by the partnership before being approved by the MPA. The arrangements for both funds state that spending plans be discussed with MPA link members.

Basic Command Unit Fund

4. The 2010/11 BCUF conditions of grant stipulated that planned activities must demonstrate a clear link to improving public confidence. It was a requirement of the funding that each project must be shown to build confidence in at least one of the five confidence themes (see later). However, the fact that most projects relate to more than one theme makes it difficult to identify total spending against each theme.

5. A clause provides for boroughs to vary their spending plan should circumstances dictate. This requires submission of an amended spend profile which is subject to the same condition of agreement by the partnership and approval by the MPA.

6. Revised procurement procedures this financial year introduced rigour and an extra degree of complexity to monitoring arrangements and whilst it is recognised that this is necessary for compliance and accountability purposes, it seems that the added bureaucracy may have had an impact on the timeliness of some spends.

7. The commissioning brief requested a breakdown of allocations against the five confidence themes. As previously mentioned, discrete figures for these themes cannot be provided as a significant number of the projects tackled more than one theme; however the total number of projects under each category is shown below:

• Tackling crime and ASB effectively – 170 projects.
• Driving effective partnerships – 100 projects.
• Working with and for the public – 50 projects.
• Delivering a high quality local service – 40 projects.
• Building an empowered, engaged and confident workforce – 10 projects.

8. It should be noted that a number of boroughs allocated a proportion of their BCUF to joint tasking and multi-agency pro-active operations. In these cases the funding supported multiple partnership activities that cannot be easily categorised into the above confidence themes; however dip sampling of the activities demonstrates that they broadly support the themes.

9. In total, boroughs supported over 290 different initiatives and projects with the BCUF. These ranged from the two boroughs that divided their BCUF between three projects and one borough that supported 33 separate schemes. On average boroughs divided the fund between around ten local projects.

MPA Partnership Fund

10. With regard to the MPA Partnership fund, assessment of distribution of funding against approved categories has been somewhat easier. The allocation for projects this year includes funds carried forward from previous years (approved by the Authority) and therefore £2.0m was available to support boroughs’ initiatives.

11. MPA Partnership Fund allocations by categories:

• Tackling anti social behaviour £ 89,200
• Serious youth violence prevention/engagement £548,720
• Hate Crime £52,000
• Violence against women £209,450
• BME engagement £65,875
• Kickz, Hitz and Met Track £71,000
• Partnership management and development £807,368
• Funds to be re-allocated to projects £163,309

12. Further examination of the final category ‘Partnership Management and Development’ has found that similar to the BCUF, boroughs allocate the MPA Fund in a variety of ways and may include activities in support of the preceding categories under this heading. Some boroughs direct their funding toward specific themes such as £88,000 in one borough for crime prevention activity. Ealing Borough allocated £72,000 shared in equal amounts between four of its more challenging wards, while Sutton focused a large part of this fund on tacking ASB connected with bonfire night (including proactive work such as test purchasing of fireworks). The Fund has also been used to support the London Week of Peace initiative as well as expanding the work of Street Pastors and Volunteer Police Cadets.

13. The ‘Partnership Management and Development’ category can therefore be seen to support a broad range of collaborative working. It encompasses Safer Neighbourhoods problem-solving, media and other communications to engage with communities, publicity materials for events promoting partnership initiatives and other crime prevention work.

Mid-year position

14. Boroughs are required to provide half-yearly updates in respect of their BCUF allocation and MPA Partnership Fund. The reports provide an indication as to whether expenditure is on track. Detailed examination of borough returns to date indicates that this is the case and that all planned spending is valid.

15. The commissioning brief also requested details of any emerging examples of good practice however, at this stage, owing to length of time projects have been running and limited assessment of benefits to date, it has proved difficult to identify any noteworthy examples of good practice. It has been possible to identify trends in the spend plans which may however have relevance. For instance, paragraph 12 above makes reference to £88,000 allocated to crime prevention work. A significant proportion of this appears to have been spent on crime prevention hardware (i.e. locks, alarms, gates, etc.). This has direct benefit in terms of target hardening not to mention the confidence dividend for recipients of the service. The pertinent and rather obvious question in the current financial climate is how this activity will be funded in the future. Boroughs will need to identify alternative sources of funding if they are to continue providing this significant crime reduction and reassurance measure to arguably the most vulnerable sections of the community.

Conclusion

16. This report seeks to present the current position in respect of both the MPA Partnership Fund of £50,000 per borough and the more substantial BCU Fund. It is clear that these two streams of partnership funding have greatly assisted boroughs to reduce crime and disorder in collaboration with key partners. The inevitable loss of the BCUF will potentially impact on local partnerships’ ability to tackle crime and deliver some of those reduction activities and greater attention to identifying vulnerable persons, repeat offenders and challenging locations will be necessary to ensure that mainstream funding is effectively channelled towards those areas.

17. Local Strategic Partnerships have been aware of the expected abolition of the BCUF for some time and it is reasonable to suggest that they should be prepared and addressing the risks identified within this report. These can be summarised as a reduced capacity for partnership activity in support of partners’ core business and a reduction in partnership posts where the decision is taken not to mainstream a project initiated under this funding.

18. Although much of the activity supported by these funding streams could be considered to be additional work, the majority of the themes are nevertheless core business. The removal of the BCUF could jeopardise this with a potential impact on the performance of partnerships in general and police in particular (owing to the availability of more easily defined performance targets). Once again any such risk must be identified and managed by the local partnership. It may be argued that the boroughs most vulnerable in this area are those which have used large proportions of their BCUF to finance pro-active partnership operations to tackle priority crime and will suffer reduce capability if funding is unavailable to continue the work.

19. This report should be read in conjunction with a further paper prepared for Communities Equalities and People Committee, which has a broader brief in relation to partnership working in the MPS. Efforts have been made to avoid unnecessary duplication in these related papers.

C. Other organisational and community implications

Equality and Diversity Impact

1. The funding received has been used to support a broad range of activities. There are no indications that the use of these funds has had any adverse effect on any single section of the community. On the contrary, as the profile suggests the funding has been used in a variety of positive ways to build relationships with minority communities, to reduce crime affecting vulnerable communities and to build confidence with the public.

2. The categories against which this report has presented the returns would suggest that funding is being used to support diverse communities. For instance, the Peace Week initiative which has run for 10 years, reaches an increasing proportion of the population each year. Through initiatives such as the Peace Awards individuals and groups gain recognition for their work. However, more importantly, the MPA Fund has significantly supported local engagement activity which often brings Safer Neighbourhoods teams closer to those communities they serve. The MPA Partnership Fund has traditionally been used by the majority of borough partnerships to support small-scale local projects established in diverse areas and in support of BME and other minority communities.

Consideration of MET Forward

3. With regard to Met Forward, this paper is relevant to three main strands: Met Partners, Met Streets and Met Connect. For Met Partners perhaps the link is obvious in terms of this being about partnership funding. As such, it is also about effective service delivery by partnerships. For Met Streets the linkage is in the area of Safer Neighbourhoods activity and pro-active operations planned through joint tasking processes. Finally, Met Connect is relevant as a number of projects are concerned with community engagement and raising awareness. It is the intention of this report to make clear that the loss of the BCUF has potential negative implications for each these strands.

Financial Implications

4. A summary of forecast borough spends against allocations for both the MPA Partnership Fund and the Basic Command Unit Fund is contained within Appendices 1 and 2 respectively. Any individual borough underspends identified in the appendices is subject to further review and the forecast position may change in subsequent periods.

5. General financial implications include the expected abolition of the BCUF at the end of this financial year; greater clarity regarding this position is expected in December 2010 when details of provisional policing settlements, including specific grants such as the BCUF, will be placed before Parliament. Nevertheless, the likely abolition is likely to affect a number of the projects supported by this fund that have employed staff to deliver them. At the beginning of this financial year when spend plans were being submitted every borough was advised that funded posts would only be approved if there was a clear end date to the project and a defined exit strategy. Each partnership when evaluating activities supported by this funding must decide on the success or otherwise of the project and determine whether there is any ambition to mainstream funded roles.

6. It is important that boroughs note that there is no provision this year for any carry forward of unspent funding from the 2010/11 allocations and borough leads have been advised of the implications of this. All BOCUs are expected to maintain close scrutiny of their plans and activities in order to identify potential underspends at the earliest opportunity and where necessary present amended spend plans for review or reallocation.

Legal Implications

7. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998, as amended by the Police Reform Act 2002 imposes a duty on “responsible authorities” to work in partnership to prevent crime and disorder. The Police and Justice Act 2006 and the 2007 Regulations introduced there under set out national requirements and minimum standards for partnership working.

8. Grant for use by the basic command units is provided by the Secretary of State to the MPA under Section 169 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. The fund is provided to promote partnership working and help deliver crime reduction in the terms set out in this report. The funding arrangements are subject to detailed Home Office Guidance set out in HO Circular 008/2008.

9. Director Finance is, under Home Office Circular 008/2008, responsible for making the necessary arrangements for local management controls and allocating the funding to the basic command units. This report indicates that appropriate financial controls are in place and that spend complies with funding criteria.

10. This report is submitted as part of the governance process and no further legal issues arise.

Environmental Implications

11. There are no adverse environmental impacts identified within the spend plans. While some activities relate to the use of vehicles, these appear to be from the existing fleet. All crime prevention products funded under the BCUF and MPAPF are to the Secured by Design standard and other activities are funded to reduce the negative environmental impact of crime and disorder (this would include clean up campaigns, visual audits and graffiti removal).

Risk Implications

12. There are no risk implications in relation to this report.

D. Background papers

None

E. Contact details

Report authors: PS Andrew Bayes, TPHQ-SN, MPS

For information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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