ASB Hot Spot Survey

The Home Office (HO) is seeking to appoint a Supplier to support the evaluation of the Hotspot Response Fund 24-25.

In March 2023, the Government published a new Anti-social Behaviour (ASB) action plan. This included funding for ASB Hotspot Response pilots in ten Police Crime Commissioner (PCC) areas in 2023/24, ahead of an anticipated wider roll out across England and Wales in 2024/25. The aim of the ASB Hotspot Response was to ensure an enhanced uniformed presence in ASB hotspot areas.

Since 2021/22, the Government has also provided Grip funding to the 20 police force areas experiencing the highest levels of serious violence (SV) to support the police's operational response to tackling SV. The aim of the Grip serious violence funding was to immediately suppress and reduce serious violence by increasing delivery of visible patrol activity in hotspots whilst also supporting adoption of strategic problem-oriented policing to address the root causes of violence within hotspot locations.

Recognising the overlap between ASB Hotspot Response patrolling and Grip serious violence hotspot policing, the Home Office has decided to combine these funding schemes and rollout the programme to all 43 PCCs in 24/25.

This merged approach will allow for force areas to use the full range of uniformed visible presence available in their area to conduct patrols in hotspots, for example, police officers, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), local authority community safety wardens, Business Improvement District (BID) patrol staff, etc.

The decision to merge Grip and ASB hotspot response funding streams looks to build on the good practice already established. Accordingly, to avoid duplication and to reduce the number of separate funding streams, we will be giving relevant PCCs a single grant covering Grip activity and ASB hotspot response. Each force area will receive at least £1 million, as promised in the ASB Action Plan. Additionally, for force areas already in receipt of Grip funding, the Grip funding and the ASB funding will be combined given the overlap between the two schemes. The total funding available will be over £66 mill The purpose of this work will be to support the Home Office in evaluating national rollout of the programme. This will build on previous monitoring and evaluation activity that has been conducted related to previous iterations of the Grip and ASB Hotspot Response programmes and align with internal monitoring and evaluation activity that will be delivered as part of national rollout.

The Home Office have existing plans in place to collect monitoring and crime/incident data from PCCs to measure impact of national rollout but require a supplier to support our internal activity, conducting qualitative activity with PCC and stakeholders to capture perceptions of impact of the programme and process related elements, as well as conducting a quantitative public survey to understand the impact on communities in identified hotspots