Burglary
Making Partnerships Work: Emerging Findings From The Reducing Burglary Initiative
Various authors have commented on how difficult it is to set up and maintain good partnership arrangements for multi-agency projects. This briefing note considers what practical lessons may be taken from the burglary reduction experience to ensure that partnerships exist in more than just name and have a chance of being effective. The focus is on organisational and managerial issues rather than on impact, which will be considered in subsequent papers.
Choosing the right project leader and giving them the space to manage effectively are probably the key ingredients to ensuring successful implementation.
Currently good partnership arrangements seem to be operating because of the personal skills and commitment of key individuals. If partnerships are to become widespread and to contribute to concrete reductions in burglary or other forms of crime, senior managers in all the agencies involved in partnerships need to support, encourage and resource partnership working.
Summary of key points for action:
Joint ventures should be adequately resourced. This should at least involve allowing staff time to fully participate in partnership meetings and mandating operational staff to prioritise the work involved.
Responsibility for setting and keeping to overall objectives should be separated from responsibility for implementation. This is most easily accomplished by setting up a steering group to oversee the project.
The steering group must be genuinely consultative and representatives from statutory organisations should be senior enough to make decisions about resource allocation.
The implementation leader and his or her team should report to the steering group but not run it, to ensure that the steering group acts as an independent check on progress.
For further information about the evaluation, see www.sbu.ac.uk/cpru
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PDF 99 KbLast update: May 2003