“Only with the right funding and powers can councils continue to make a difference to people’s lives by supporting families and young people and help tackle serious violent crime in our local communities.”
Responding to the Government’s Serious Violence Strategy published today, Cllr Simon Blackburn, Chair of the Local Government Association’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board, said:
“One of the key successes in tackling and preventing crime in recent years has been effective partnership working at a local level between councils, the police and health service. It is good that today’s Strategy commits to providing funding to support this multi-agency work and we are pleased it places significant emphasis on the early intervention support which is vital to prevent young people becoming involved in crime in the first place.
“Council Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) have achieved huge success in working with and supporting young people to prevent them getting involved in crime, with an 85 per cent drop in First Time Entrants to the youth justice system and 74 per cent fewer young people in the average custodial population over the last decade.
“The challenge going forward will be sustaining this success, however it is not helpful that councils are still waiting to receive their youth justice grant allocations for 2018/19. This is vital funding used to support young people and help keep them away from criminality in the first place. This follows government funding for YOTs already being halved from £145 million in 2010/11 to just £72 million in 2017/18.
“Councils also face significant rises in demand for urgent child protection work and with a children’s services funding gap that will reach almost £2 billion by 2020, councils are increasingly having to divert funding away from preventative work into services to protect children who are at immediate risk of harm.
“Only with the right funding and powers can councils continue to make a difference to people’s lives by supporting families and young people and help tackle serious violent crime in our local communities.”