Identifying County-wide Priorities
It is important that the views and concerns of local communities are escalated to inform discussions about funding within the county. In addition, while concerns are expressed locally, they may be best addressed through activity co-ordinated at the county level. The partnership’s role in ensuring this happens is to identify priorities for the county level agreement. This can be done in a number of ways but we suggest considering some of the following issues:
- Tackling more serious crimes that would benefit from a county-wide approach.
- Using delivery mechanisms at the county-level to address priorities (e.g. Drug Action Teams and Domestic Violence Fora).
- Making use of economies of scale in tackling priorities that are likely high volume across other districts in order to deliver better value for money.
- Accessing opportunities for county-level funding.
Partnerships may benefit from designing a protocol in order to ensure that there is agreement within the partnership about which priorities to escalate. This could also include a risk assessment to ensure that any issues not escalated are fully considered.
When producing the county-wide community safety agreement, the county strategy group must draw on the strategic assessments of the partnerships within the county. We believe that the following would be useful to consider in producing this agreement:
- Making use of links with other local partnerships, (e.g. Local Criminal Justice Boards, Local Strategic Partnerships or Children and Young People’s Partnerships) to agree and deliver priorities.
- Aiming to improve cost efficiency by making use of economies of scale and existing delivery mechanisms in co-ordinating approaches.
- Looking for opportunities to work across regions and across borders, not just within the county structure.
- Considering how to work with any unitary partnerships in the area.
- Ensuring priorities are reflected in the strategic plans for each individual agency.
- Forming multi-agency working groups around specific priorities at county level and encouraging community safety partnerships within the county to coordinate their activities where relevant.
Each locality needs to establish how community priorities will impact on the Local Area Agreement. As set out in Lead and Guide: The Right People Around the Table, there should be a clear relationship between the Local Strategic Partnership responsible for the Local Area Agreement and the county strategy group. There also needs to be agreement on how funding will be used at a county level to tackle joint priorities across the county. As suggested elsewhere, it might make sense for the county strategy group to be a sub-group of the Local Strategic Partnership.
