What does 2023 hold for Community Safety?
Happy New Year all!
As we move in 2023, it’s time to look at the big issues facing the community safety sector in the coming year.
Obviously if the political instability of 2022 is repeated it’s hard to know exactly what the future will hold, but there are three big issues which should definitely be happening and will significantly impact community safety.
The first is the Serious Violence Duty. This is the biggest shake up in community safety for years, and adds a new Duty onto CSPs to prioritise Serious Violence, developing a needs assessment and a strategy to help prevent people from becoming involved in serious violence as both a victim and a perpetrator.
This puts a huge onus on CSPs to be effective in order to deliver. The guidance doesn’t differentiate between a large city CSP and a small district; they both have the same obligations. This will require significant investments in time, staffing and resources to deliver; the role of county councils in two-tier areas will be vital.
I think the government have recognised the challenges facing CSPs, which have been starved of resource since PCCs came onto the picture, and as far as I’m aware significant funding has been made available via OPCCs to help CSPs prepare – for example, in developing needs assessments, strategies, commissioning etc. This is beneficial, but I do wonder if the capacity exists in the sector to deliver these tasks, or whether there will be a larger role for commissioned services to shoulder this burden.
The second is the much-delayed Independent Review of Prevent. Press coverage over the past week suggests the delay is due to Cabinet-level rows about the direction of the strategy. The talk is that the Home Office will accept all of the recommendations in the Review. This should then kick off a process where those recommendations are turned into policy; we can therefore expect a revamped Prevent Duty Guidance and accompanying Channel/PMAP guidance in due course.
For practitioners, it’s worth keeping an eye on the report when it eventually arrives and considering what changes may need to be made locally as a result. My gut feeling is that the nuts of bolts of local delivery in Prevent will remain pretty much the same, but time will tell.
The third big change on the horizon is the “in-depth review of CSPs” promised in Part Two of the PCC Review by the former Home Secretary last year. I would expect this review to be published in the coming months, and again I would expect it to have significant changes to the operations of each CSP.
Needless to say I shall be writing more on these issues in the coming year, so watch this space!
As ever, if you or your partnership require support on these changes then please do get in touch – chris@cjwilliams.co.uk