Children's trusts to help curb crime
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Children's trusts must play a bigger role in preventing crime by young people, a leading civil servant has said.
Andrew McCully, director for the supporting children and young people group at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said children's trusts must look at supporting crime prevention work.
"We would like children's trusts to look even more at the ways in which they are able to bring prevention activity together," McCully said.
"One area left out of children's trusts' work is how children's services work as part of the crime prevention strategy. This is something that is often left to the crime and disorder reduction partnership.
"We want to ask whether or not this is effective and if some children's trusts could be more ambitious."
McCully said pilot projects where youth offending teams (YOTs) combine their budgets with other services, as outlined in Aiming High for Young People, were about to begin.
But McCully added that, in some cases, YOTs would pool more than the 10 per cent of their budget that was originally announced.
