Leicestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Lord Willy Bach today (5 Aug) welcomed a Home Office announcement that it was awarding £2.2m this year to the force for its groundbreaking efficiency work.
Leicestershire Police, alongside the Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire forces will receive £2,224,000 in 2016/17 through the Police Transformation Fund – a police-led funding stream allocated by the Police Reform and Transformation Board.
It is part of a £23m funding stream being split across 10 forces and the College of Policing to help improve effectiveness and capability across a range of operational departments to better manage the criminal threat.
The funding will be pumped into a partnership project aimed at eliminating duplication between the three forces and ensuring they have access to a larger pool of information and intelligence to help officers make faster and more informed decisions. A further £3,536,000 will be available to the project in 2017/18 through the same fund.
Welcoming today’s announcement Willy Bach said: “I’m pleased that the Home Office has recognised the merits of our ambitions for the tri-force collaboration project. This funding will give our innovative work a huge boost. We all accept that in times of great challenge and change, we need to do things differently. I believe that through embracing advances in technology, reducing duplication and introducing new models of delivery we can also do things better.
“In an era of austerity where Government funding cuts were unfortunately the norm, business as usual is not an option and we must seize the opportunity to radically change the way we operate to manage the threats to public safety and keep our communities crime-free.”
The Police Transformation Board consists of PCCs, chief constable representatives and senior leaders in policing with the final decisions on bids made by the Home Secretary.
The successful bids for funding include projects to support the transfer of digital crime scene images between forces, add new technology to the Child Abuse Image Database, improve procurement and collaboration and fund a network of co-ordinators, analysts and prevention officers for the Child Sexual Abuse National Action Plan.
Set up as part of the Spending Review in 2015, the fund is designed to allocate extra investment to policing in order to continue police reform and transform policing by introducing new and more efficient technology and capabilities to help forces respond to changing crimes and threats.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said: “Our police do a fantastic job every day fighting crime and keeping communities safe. The latest figures show that public confidence in the police has risen and most people believe they are doing a good or excellent job.
“But the job of reforming the police must continue and these successful bids demonstrate exactly the kind of transformative thinking that we expect from forces, with creative plans which will enable them to be more efficient and serve their communities more effectively. While ten forces will lead on the work, we expect these pioneering projects will benefit all 43 police forces across England and Wales.”
The total funding available for police transformation in 2016-17 is £76.4m, including £34m already allocated to enhance armed policing capability, £4.6m for police digital programmes and £3m for a programme to consider how best to organise specialist police capabilities such as armed, undercover, and roads policing.
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Issued by Sallie Blair 01283 821012
Posted on Friday 5th August 2016