The Home Office’s Hotspot Policing Fund (HPF) is reportedly ending, on March 31. That’s understandable by the Labour Government, as the Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made it; and made much of it.
Jonathan Ash-Edwards, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Hertfordshire, has complained that ‘the only people who will welcome this news will be shoplifters, violent offenders, drug dealers and people committing anti-social behaviour in town centres’.
Instead Labour is making much of ‘neighbourhood policing’, which implies every neighbourhood having policing, not only extra resources given to places with most crime and anti-social nuisance.
A pair of conversations I have had show how it’s one thing to make a Fund and set a policy, that to Jonathan Ash-Edwards ‘isn’t rocket science’; another to make the most of it. In October 2024 a city business crime reduction partnership (BCRP) man told me of a city centre patrol, not paid for with the Fund. The patrols had had a false start and the BCRP had had to hire again, because the first patrols, by former retail loss prevention people, were not working. Two things are required of such a patrol; knowledge, geographical (what are the alleys and ‘grey spaces’ that street drinkers and urinators, and bag thieves rummaging through stolen property, might use) and of local crime (to recognise the faces of the, usually, handful of known, prolific offenders and ‘street population’); and skills (whether practical such as first aid, to respond to the everyday slips and trips on pavements; or qualities, such as showing empathy to the vulnerable, such as an elderly person who’s fallen).
A recent conversation with another BCRP man about his city’s use of HPF covered how the police drew on officers doing the hotspot patrols as overtime. Those officers might come from the next town; or even further away. It meant that they did not know who the local regular thieves, beggars and trouble-makers were. While the BCRP man was careful not to sound critical of the police, the upshot was clear; such patrols could at worst be aimless, or to be more charitable could pack more punch (not literally).
It’s similar in other public services; in healthcare, money from the centre can go on some issue (high blood pressure). A stall is paid for in a shopping centre, staffed by professionals; the town’s surgeries invite people to attend. There blood pressure is read, but no particular effort is made to ask about any other ailment; perhaps those professionals, there for the day, don’t want the avalanche of woes they might be told?!
