Member Services
Think Local

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

Probation trusts are 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 our report Power of Partnership, which showcases various examples of best probation partnership practice, at a study day in January 2011 at which speakers from HM Treasury, the Ministry of Justice and some Total Place pilots gave presentations. The PowerPoint presentations from this day form our Think Local Update 4 which can be downloaded as a zipped file.

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 Think Local Update 3 is formed by 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.