Crime Reduction Centre
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The Home Office Crime Reduction Centre was the UK hub for practical knowledge, expertise and good practice information on crime reduction. Partnerships and others could tap into resources to support their delivery of Home Office Key Aim 1, reduction of crime and the fear of crime.
CRC to close
An independent review of CRC was carried out in the Autumn of 2004. It recommended that the direct training and learning services which the Centre has been providing for community safety practitioners should be discontinued, on the grounds that these services were not well enough resourced to have made a significant impact. The Home Office has accepted this recommendation, and has concluded that, without a training function, the facility at Easingwold is too small to be a viable outpost remote from the rest of the Home Office business in London. The CRC operation at Easingwold therefore closed in July 2005.
Continuing work
CRC didn’t only run training courses. It had a number of other functions, notably maintenance and development of the Crime Reduction Website (www.crimereduction.gov.uk), a quarterly publication for practitioners, and an enquiry service.
The consultant’s report recommended that these other activities should continue and it has now been agreed that the following functions will continue:
The Crime Reduction Website.
Publication of a new journal as a development of “Digest” aimed at crime reduction and drugs prevention practitioners
IPAK (Improving Performance through Applied Knowledge) - a new approach to knowledge management, which aims to put some simple yet rigorous new structures around the way in which the Home Office captures, evaluates and promulgates know-how about what works and what doesn’t in crime and drugs prevention.
The Home Office is also looking at the final recommendation of the review consultants - that some of the money saved by closing down the CRC training operation should be redeployed to help improve the delivery of a limited number of under-performing crime reduction partnerships in higher crime areas.
CLOSURE FAQs.
Q. How does the closure of CRC affect policing?
CRC is not responsible for the training of police officers. The Centre's work concentrates on the learning and information needs of community safety practitioners and crime & disorder reduction partnerships, and its closure will have no direct impact on policing or on the efficiency of police forces.
Q. How will training for practitioners and partnerships be provided in future?
The Home Office is considering the review's recommendation that it should target some of the savings realised as a result of ceasing training activity onto the provision of direct support to partnerships in higher crime areas. This could enable greater impact with the limited sums available, but the benefits of this idea will need to be weighed against overall Home Office business priorities. That exercise is currently under way. More generally, the Home Office aims to work with the Justice Sector Skills Council to ensure that there are national standards for community safety training which employing organisations can use as part of their normal approach to workforce development.
Q. How will the loss of CRC affect our ability to fight crime?
The closure of the CRC site at Easingwold will not directly affect the ability to fight crime. Even operating at peak capacity, CRC's training courses could only reach around 1% of the community safety workforce each year, so the decision to discontinue these courses will have minimal impact. Options for the future of other CRC services are currently being considered as part of the follow up to the review. The only decision that has been made on these is that, if they are retained, they will need to be located with the rest of the Home Office Crime Reduction Directorate (in London).
Q. Why not put more money into training, rather than ceasing it altogether?
Investing more resource in direct training is not an option given pressures on Home Office budgets as a whole, and we have concluded that it is not sensible to try to meet the national training requirement with such a small resource
Q. What about CRC's other functions such as the Crime Reduction Website?
The Crime Reduction Website - to take one example - is a major success; it has won awards and is very well regarded by its target audience. The review recommended that these services should continue and decisions have been taken to retain the Website, a journal aimed at practitioners and the IPAK knowledge management programme.
Q. How is this decision consistent with Government commitments to move more jobs out of London?
The Government remains committed to the principle that more Civil Service jobs should be based in the regions. But that commitment has to be balanced against the need to ensure that Government business as a whole is delivered with one eye firmly on value for money, and in this case it is hard to see how the taxpayers' interest would be served by retaining a tiny outpost so remote from the rest of the organisation of which it is a part.
Last update: Monday, September 25, 2006