Home Office Programmes (Hansard, 5 April 2004)

§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Scotland of Asthal)

Home Office funding that could be accessed by sport organisations includes: Positive Activities for Young People, Positive Futures, the Building Safer Communities Fund, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate's Purposeful Activity for Asylum Seekers and the Youth Justice Board's Youth Inclusion Programme. Although Home Office funding does not go directly to sports organisations, sport is recognised as a key mechanism for engaging individuals and communities. Indirectly sports clubs and organisations contribute much to the development of active and safe communities.

For example, diversionary schemes that engage young people in sports or recreational-based constructive activity targeted to steer those young people most at risk away from crime are a key to the Government's programme for reducing youth crime.

Positive Activities for Young People (PAYP) is a national scheme to provide developmental activities during all school holiday periods for young people at risk of becoming involved in offending.

PAYP received £25 million single pot funding for 2003–04, to which the New Opportunities Fund, Department for Education and Skills and the Home Office contributed, bringing together funding streams previously going into Connexions Summer Plus, Splash, Splash Extra and community cohesion activities.

The programme aims to reduce youth offending and encourage and support young people to return to education or training. The emphasis is on providing quality sports, arts and creative activities that are not only appealing but focussed on the young person's individual needs, equipping them with new skills, improving their self-esteem and breaking down ethnic and cultural barriers. Key worker support—provided through the Connexions service—helps those most at risk.

Another programme is Positive Futures, which is a national sport and activity-based programme for young people and is addressing the multiple issues associated with problematic substance misuse. It is targeted at marginalised young people in the 10–19 age range living in the top 20 per cent most deprived communities, according to the indices of multiple deprivation.

Although Positive Futures is primarily a drug prevention programme it addresses issues of social inclusion, crime reduction and community cohesion. 20 per cent of the 14,000 project participants last year were from black and minority ethnic communities.

Positive Futures brings together in one programme the support of a number of government departments and agencies including the Home Office, Department of Health, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Connexions (Department for Education and Skills), Sport England, Youth Justice Board and the Football Foundation.

191WA

Positive Futures is managed through local partnerships that appoint lead agencies to deliver sports, educational and drug awareness programmes. These lead agencies can be sports organisations (e.g. Toxteth Tigers Basketball Club, Leyton Orient Community Sports Programme, etc) crime reduction, drug services, charities, local authorities or voluntary/ community agencies.

There are 107 projects in England and Wales in the top 20 per cent most deprived areas in the country (according to the index of multiple deprivation). There have been just fewer than 35,000 participants since its launch in 2000. It is funded nationally by:

the Home Office (£15 million over three years from SR 2002),
the Football Foundation £3 million over SR 2002 period),
Sport England (£0.5 million for 2003–04).

All Home Office funding has been allocated for the SR 2002 period, however Football Foundation funding can be accessed by applying directly to it. Sport England funding is targeted at the evaluation programme and workforce standards initiative.

Sports agencies could potentially be allocated funding under the Building Safer Communities (BSC) Fund to promote crime and drugs reduction. This fund, which totals £74 million this year is primarily allocated to crime disorder reduction partnerships (CDRP) to fulfil a number of crime reduction priorities, both national and local. But where CDRPs can demonstrate a clear link between certain youth inclusion interventions (such as sports activities) and crime reduction, BSC may in theory be used for that sort of activity and CDRPs may sponsor those activities and bodies to carry out local activities on their behalf.

All of the Youth Justice Board's prevention and early intervention programmes promote social inclusion, crime reduction, drug-use reduction, social cohesion and anti-racism. The Youth Justice Board's (YJB) funding is mainly channeled through youth offending teams (YOTs) and does not directly fund sports organisations to run any projects such as Youth Inclusion. However, sports organisations are involved in the delivery of activities within some of the projects funded by YJB. The 2003 evaluation of the Youth Inclusion Programme (YIP) did show that sporting interventions were the most popular form of intervention with young people at risk of becoming involved in crime. Many YIPs are linked to Positive Futures and have the same client group.

The Purposeful Activities for Asylum Seekers scheme provided funds for 38 organisations in 2003 that ran sporting activities. It is our intention that sports activities run under this funding scheme would help to promote social inclusion and anti-racism by bringing together asylum seekers with members of their local community in a friendly situation encouraging co-operation and communication.

Any organisation wishing to apply for Purposeful Activity funding is eligible to run sporting activities as long as they do promote social inclusion and community 192WA cohesion. Organisations running sports-orientated events as a means of entertainment that could be interpreted as serving only asylum seekers and excluding the local community would not be eligible for funding.