Wanted: partners for a bid around offender rehabilitation

About the Crime Prevention Programme

The programme has existed since 2007. It has a budget of 605 million Euros for the period 2007-2013 and supports projects around law enforcement, crime prevention, criminology and protection of witnesses and victims.  There are generally two sets of calls for proposals each year, the first focusing on specific crime types, the second more general. 

Projects can be trans-national (with partners from at least 2 Member States comprising the bidding consortium) or national (from only one member state). However, national projects would need to demonstrate that they could lead to a trans-national project later, were complementary to existing trans-national projects or would create lessons and results with a high degree of transferability to the rest of the EU.  90% of project costs are supported by the EC which means that bidding partners would only have to finance the remaining 10% from their own budget. The minimum grant is 100,000 Euros and there is no official maximum.  Projects can last up to 3 years.

About the Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council Crime Prevention Programme

There is currently a general call for proposals open, with a deadline of 24 February 2012.  Further calls will follow in 2012. More information about the programme and the proposals can be found via this link. The bid is for a project to work on rehabilitating offenders and reducing their reoffending rate. The main element of the project would be a 3-year pilot in Knowsley involving the local authority, police and probation services and consisting of the following actions:

• Developing individual mentoring plans for male and female offenders in response to the specific needs of the individual;
• Introducing a 24-hour mentoring helpline for offenders;
• Developing a life change programme that will consist of individual and group work looking at: values and attitudes, strengths and weaknesses, communication skills, self-reflection, stereotyping, behaviour types, victim awareness/restorative justice, causes and consequences, enhanced thinking skills, setting goals and targets, interview techniques, C.V. writing, domestic violence victim/survivor support;
• Introducing an offender case management system, which will enable partners to share and coordinate information in a timely and secure manner.

Municipalities and other relevant local and regional partners are sought in any other EU Member State. Their role would be to support the pilot in Knowsley by delivering input on their own experience, evaluating results from the pilot and helping to produce a model of good practice based on the pilot results. 

It remains to be decided whether we would ask these partners to contribute a share of the match funding required.  However, the Crime Prevention Programme benefits from a particularly advantageous intervention rate of 90% so any co-financing would be minimal.

Learning from one another

Involvement of trans-national partners would be via the following actions:

• Sharing best practices with our trans-national partners by holding 6-monthly meetings (action learning sets) to find out what works for you, what processes you have that reduce reoffending, what do you do within your organisation to reduce reoffending and how we can incorporate what you have learnt in to the Integrated Offender Management model in Knowsley;
• Developing best practice guides throughout the cycle of the project so the results from the project can be shared to the wider EU partner countries for the purposes of establishing a cross-border integrated approach in support of addressing the priorities;
• Developing a statistically robust evaluation of the whole project to ensure that it is cost effective and meets the objectives.

For more information please contact James Sharples, Policy Manager: +32 (0) 2 229 5378 or james.sharples@merseyside-europe.org.

EUKN, Elizabeth Winkel