Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner, Kathryn Holloway, has won a third consecutive Special Policing Grant for Bedfordshire Police to cover the cost of its outstanding unit focussing on fighting gang, gun and knife crime, after persuading the Home Office and Policing Minister of the need to back Bedfordshire once more.
The grant will total £2.9m and will be paid to Bedfordshire Police to cover the cost of its exceptionally high performing specialist Boson unit targeting Serious Organised Crime groups and others involved in Serious Violence, in 2020-21.
This latest grant to the PCC comes just days after the Policing Minister, Kit Malthouse, visited Bedfordshire Police HQ to meet with her and Chief Constable, Garry Forsyth, and to see for himself the drugs, weapons and cash seizures achieved by the Boson team and colleagues in the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit so far this year.
“It’s entirely fair to say that the Minister, Kit Malthouse, was incredibly impressed by what he saw and rightly tweeted after his visit last Tuesday that Bedfordshire Police is a ‘force on the front foot’ as a result. I’ve been helped by officers within the force and our finance team to make the most robust argument possible again this year that to keep going with outcomes including almost 500 years in prison terms for offenders, we needed the financial backing from Kit to deliver at this outstanding level – and this latest grant proves he was listening.
“For the past two years to date, against all the odds and the naysayers and even advice to forces saying that Special Grants weren’t going to be available, I’ve proved that it’s absolutely possible to win extra investment in policing if you prove what more the Home Office gets for more investment.
“Boson has delivered the enforcement – together with the community involvement and diversionary input of the Bedfordshire Violence and Exploitation Unit which the Minister has backed with two further grants of £880,000 each to me and they’ve collectively helped to drive Serious Youth Violence in this county down by approximately 9% and the Home Office understands that this is what success looks like.
“Originally, the Special Grants were restricted to paying for events on a single day taking place outside ‘business as usual’ in policing, like a terror attack. The Home Office has accepted my argument that the costs of dealing with the most serious criminals and the violence meted out to control their crime empires, particularly around drugs, as well as weapon supply, is unprecedented for Bedfordshire Police and is also not ‘business as usual’ for a police force funded as ours is. That’s why I’m so delighted that, although the odds were against me in many ways, the right thing is being done and this exceptional work will go on.
“It’s a great day for me as PCC having insisted on applying for Special Grants in the first place and, even when things looked bleak, on making another bid and also for every officer and member of staff who can be so very proud of this performance and the quality of the arguments they helped me to make with the evidence of what they do day in and day out but it’s a truly terrible day to be in an Organised Crime Group or violent gang in Bedfordshire!” said Commissioner Holloway.
This latest Special Grant follows two years of similar exceptional grants to PCC Holloway to pay for the work of the Operation Boson team of £4.571m and £3m respectively.
Over the past six months, Bedfordshire Police’s specialist guns and gangs team has continued its work disrupting these criminal activities, even during the coronavirus lockdown.
Figures show that from February to July this year, the Boson team executed 43 warrants and made 108 arrests. In this time the team also seized two guns, six imitation firearms, almost four kilograms of Class A and Class B drugs and around £67,800 in cash. The Boson team is also heavily involved in prevention work with partners. In June and July alone, more than 200 young people were referred to multi-agency panels co-chaired by Boson members and those working in youth offending, to develop solutions to stop especially vulnerable young people getting involved in criminal activities and helping them break the cycle of gang exploitation.
Detective Superintendent Duncan Young said: “This new funding is great news for the force and indeed for the Boson team and will really make a difference in us being able to continue to build on the fantastic work we have done so far in reducing Serious Youth Violence and our fight against gun and gang criminality.
“It was extremely beneficial having the Minister for Crime and Policing, Kit Malthouse, visit us last week. It gave us the opportunity to showcase how we have used previous government funding and all the good work that Boson has achieved over the last two years. But we were also able to demonstrate the reality our officers face every day and how the threat from gangs continues to be a significant issue for our communities.
“This new funding will help us continue with our multi-agency approach to tackle this county-wide issue of serious violence, through both enforcement activity as well as prevention and diversion projects for young people.”
Bedfordshire Police Chief Constable Garry Forsyth added: “It was a delight to welcome Mr Malthouse to Bedfordshire last week and I know he was struck by the enormous success we have had in tackling organised crime and exploitation, as well as the scale of the challenge we continue to face around issues such as drugs, gangs and firearms.
“Our Police and Crime Commissioner has been a true champion for the force on these issues and has helped us secure an unprecedented amount of government funding to tackle these issues head-on.
“This newest multi-million pound grant is just the latest in a long line of successes and the results we have been able to achieve with similar funding to date speak for themselves.
“I am truly grateful for the Commissioner’s efforts, as well as those of all our officers, staff, partners and communities, who have made it their mission to tackle these issues and protect our young people from harm.”
“The Minister has accepted our arguments that Bedfordshire Police does not have the resources to meet every one of its serious crime challenges without extra help and I certainly hope that this is also recognised in the Spending Review for all of policing where this force is concerned, when the Treasury responds to his bid for extra funding for the police service, in the late autumn,” said PCC Holloway.
“There hasn’t been time for Government to revisit the funding formula for all police forces since the Spending Review for all of Government was announced in July, to rebalance funds to forces like ours that are in the most exposed position, but Bedfordshire Police and I have been working all year, including with respected third party consultants, to submit our case – so we’re not accused of marking our own homework. This latest Special Grant is confirmation that the Minister understands how vulnerable we are financially but how effective too and I am hugely grateful for it. We now just need to make funding like this sustainable year on year into the future, long after I’ve left this role,” said the Commissioner.
PCC Holloway was due to stand down as Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner after four years in the role in May 2020. The Covid emergency has meant the PCC elections were delayed until May 2021. This latest Special Grant win for Bedfordshire follows two Safer Streets grants of £882,000 and a £48,000 grant from the Ministry of Justice to help victims of Domestic Abuse that the Commissioner and her office have won since the start of the pandemic.
