Member Services
Think Local

Crime is a local issue. The working context for trusts is, and always will be, local.

Probation trusts will soon become Responsible Authority partners with the police and local authorities to deliver crime reduction strategies. The Policing and Crime Bill will formally reinforce arrangements requiring probation to engage with local authorities in the production and implementation of Local Area Agreements.

We published a Local Partnership Strategy to help trusts to engage with this local agenda in order to maximize their unique contribution to local crime reduction at a strategic and operational level. We are working closely with the Local Government Association to drive forward this "localism" agenda.

We published a Discussion Paper entitled Probation Trusts in Partnerships: The New Local Performance Context last year to inform and stimulate debate about how the localism agenda can be synthesised with the national system for monitoring and evaluating probation performance. The paper received unanimous support and its key points were accepted by the Ministry of Justice.

This was followed by three Think Local updates: Update 1 reports on the feedback received to the initial paper; Update 2 contains scrutiny guidance for trust boards produced in collaboration with the Centre for Public Scrutiny; and Update 3 carries the PowerPoint presentations given at the launch of our Local Partnership Strategy.

All these documents can be downloaded in pdf from the list on the right.