Crime Reduction Centre
Crime Reduction Centre closure
The Home Office Crime Reduction Centre (CRC) is 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 would be too small to be a viable outpost remote from the rest of the Home Office business in London. The site will therefore close by September 2005.
Apart from training, CRC currently also provides the following services:
a free crime reduction enquiry service for practitioners
an extensive library of crime reduction material
a free quarterly journal for crime reduction practitioners
the Crime Reduction Website, the Government's primary online resource for people working to reduce crime in their area.
development of new arrangements for the capture and dissemination of crime reduction knowledge to support crime reduction practitioners (Improving Performance through Applied Knowledge IPAK)
The review recommended that these services should be retained. The Home Office is now examining the feasibility of this recommendation in the light of the decision to close the Easingwold facility. The working assumption is that if any of these residual CRC functions are retained, they will be based in London along with the rest of the Home Office team. It has recently been decided that the Crime Reduction Website will continue. A decision on the other functions is expected shortly.
Simultaneously, a decision will be made on whether to accept the final recommendation of the review – that some of the money saved by closing down the training operation should be redeployed to help improve the delivery of a limited number of under-performing crime reduction partnerships in higher crime areas.
Frequently asked questions
Q. Why are you closing CRC?
The Crime Reduction Centre's primary role in recent years has been to provide direct and distance training services to people working in community safety partnerships. An independent review by PA Consulting concluded that the training resources available at CRC were far too small to have any real impact, and we have therefore concluded that training provision should cease. This would leave us with an outpost so small as to be unviable as a separate operation 200 miles away from the rest of the Home Office.
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?
We are considering the review's recommendation that the Home Office 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 would allow us to have more impact with the limited sums available, but the benefits of this idea need to be weighed against overall Home Office business priorities. That exercise is currently under way. More generally, we aim 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 our 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 we are now looking closely at the options in the light of the decision to close the Easingwold site itself.
It has recently been decided that the Crime Reduction Website will continue. A decision on the other functions is expected shortly.
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: 5 April 2005