Hot spot policing in England and Wales, year ending March 2023: Evaluation of Grip and bespokefunded hot spot policing

Product Description

Following 2 successful pilots, the Home Office (HO) announced in April 2021 that 18 police forces with the highest levels of serious violence (SV) would receive funding to deliver enhanced hot spot policing. The aim of this programme, called Grip, was to deter SV through visible patrol activity in hot spots while also adopting strategic problem-oriented policing (POP) to address the root causes of violence within those locations. In September 2021, 2 further police forces were awarded bespoke funding to conduct hot spot policing, as they had the next highest volumes of SV. The 20 forces had a single-year Grant Agreement for the year ending 31 March 2022 and then a multi-year agreement for the next 3 years (though see below), to deliver the hot spot policing programme. Following consultation with leading hot spot policing scholars, we believe this is the first attempt to implement a national hot spot strategy and evaluate it robustly.

A separate Innovation Fund was made available in the year ending 31 March 2023. Police forces had the option to bid for additional funding to test new, innovative approaches to hot spot policing that would not have been delivered as part of their core Grip activity. Five police forces were successful in bids to receive Innovation Funding.

For the year ending March 2025, the Grip grant was replaced by the Hot Spot Response programme (a single-year grant), which expanded the programme to include all 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales and to focus on reducing actual and perceived antisocial behaviour (ASB), as well as SV.

This evaluation is the second in a series of reports measuring the impact of the hot spot funding. The first report, Evaluation report on Grip and bespoke-funded hot spot policing, covers the year ending 31 March 2022. It estimated that Grip and the bespoke hot spot funding resulted in a 7% reduction in violence and robbery offences in the hot spots on days patrolled versus days not patrolled. This second report mainly contains results for the year ending March 2023, but it also includes some new results that were generated for the previous year.