Policing and Crime Prevention
1st May 2020 - 1st March 2021
“People are dying from drugs every day across the UK… We must have firm enforcement action and do all we can on prevention, recovery and treatment too.”
Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service, Kit Malthouse
On May 7th 2021, elections will be held for 36 Police and Crime Commissioners in England, and four in Wales. In January, the government announced the biggest increase in funding for the police system in a decade. The amount of funding available to the policing system for 2020 to 2021 will increase by more than £1.1 billion, totalling £15.2 billion. This represents an almost 10% increase on the core (resource) grant provided to forces last year, enabling the police to cut crime and deliver on the people’s priorities. It builds on a number of existing government commitments to bear down on the criminals who seek to do our communities and our country harm.
• It will enable forces to recruit 6,000 of the 20,000 additional police officers by the end of March 2021.
• It will provide £150 million in funding to fight organised crime and continue to crack down on online child abuse.
• Tackling serious violence will be also backed with £39 million, which includes £20 million for county lines drug dealing, which is seeing abhorrent gangs terrorising our towns.
• Funding for counter-terrorism policing will total £906 million in 2020 to 2021, a year-onyear increase of £90 million.
Prisons: Did you know...
• In England and Wales, 56,000 people were sent to prison in the year to June 2019; two thirds (67%) had committed a non-violent offence and almost half (46%) were sentenced to serve six months or less.
• In 1993 only a third of custodial sentences given to women were for less than six months—in 2018 it was nearly double this (62%). Most women entering prison to serve a sentence have committed a non-violent offence (80%).
• The number of Muslim prisoners has more than doubled over the past 17 years. They now account for 16% of the prison population, but just 5% of the general population. Only 169 of them, 1% of Muslims in prison, are there for terrorism related offences.
• In the 12 months to September 2019, there were 61,461 reported incidents of self-harm (a rate of 742 per 1,000 prisoners), up 16% from the previous 12 months. The number of individuals self-harming increased by 2% in the latest 12 months, to the highest recorded figure of 12,740 individuals (a rate of 154 individuals per 1,000 prisoners).
• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of people entering prison were assessed as having literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old—more than four times higher than in the general adult population (15%). Changes to prison education contracts now allow greater flexibility to fund opportunities, such as arts, and informal learning to allow people to engage and progress during their sentence. However, there have been declines in the number of people participating in learning whilst in prison, and in achieving qualifications in recent years.
• Despite recent increases, the resource budget for HM Prisons and Probation Service (HMPPS) remains 12% lower than in 2010–11.
Click here to find more about crime from the Office for National Statistics website.
