Councils warn cuts will affect fight against knife crime
The LGA says its councils faced a 50% decrease in funding for youth work teams in eight years.
Saturday 9 March 2019 11:35, UK
Councils have warned the government to protect their youth offending teams from further cuts amid a rise in knife crime.
Authorities across the country are dealing with a surge in knife crime - 39 people have been killed since the beginning of 2019.
The Local Government Association (LGA) has said efforts to stop children joining gangs and getting involved in knife violence will be undermined if the funding for youth offending teams (YOTs) continues to drop.
In 2010/11, YOTs received £145m, but eight years later, this dropped by half, with 2018/19's funding at £71.5m.
The LGA, which represents 370 councils in England and Wales, says more cuts will hamper their ongoing efforts to prevent children getting involved with criminals.
Councils are waiting to find out what their youth justice grant allocations will be for 2019/2020 but have had to set their budgets without this information.
The LGA says setting the budget without the grant makes it hard to plan the support services they can offer.
YOTs have a good track record, in areas where they are in place there has been an 85% drop in first time entrants to the youth justice system over 10 years, and a 78% drop in arrests over the same time period.
The number of youth cautions handed out has also dropped by more than 100,000, 91%, in the same period.
Councillor Anntoinette Bramble, chairman of the LGA's Children and Young People Board, said: "The recent spate of tragic violence across the country underlines the importance of investing in services which protect and support young people, keeping them safe from the lure of gangs or from becoming involved in serious crime.
"Youth offending teams within local authorities have an outstanding record of reducing youth crime and making a real difference to young people's lives, but they are under huge pressure after seeing their government funding halved.
"We share the Government's determination to tackle youth crime, but it needs to properly fund the services that work most closely with young people at risk of offending.
"It is also important that there is no delay in councils finding out how much funding they will be allocated, so they can effectively plan services to support young people."
On Monday, the LGA released a report which detailed efforts in several councils to tackle knife crime.
It included Bristol City Council, which has faced a problem with gang violence for several years and even needed to put armed police on the streets in 2001 to deal with a rise in gang-related crime.
In 2017, the council moved its focus to intervention at an earlier stage and now its multi-agency safeguarding hub gets dozens of referrals a month, of which it can manage about 50.
The hub makes use of community volunteers to act as mentors to children and young people at risk of being caught up in street violence.
The council is also employing a deferred prosecution model for those already caught up in crime, which means they can avoid an immediate prison sentence if they engage with a community mentor for six months.
The home secretary has vowed to treat knife crime "like a disease" following an outcry over the number of victims.
Police numbers have fallen by 20,000 in the past decade in England and Wales but the prime minister has denied a direct link to knife crime - a claim disputed by a number of senior figures in policing.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has also urged Theresa May to take a tougher stance on knife crime.
He told Paste BN on Thursday that she must "take ownership" of a link between school exclusions and rising levels of violence.
A Ministry Of Justice says the number of children entering the criminal justice system for the first time has reduced 85% over the last decade "and continues to fall".
A spokesperson said: "For the last two years we have given the Youth Justice Board £72 million to allow local authorities to provide the best possible services for children and help them turn their backs on crime.
"The budget for the coming financial year will be set shortly."