Issue details

The VRU’s current 3-year funding settlement with the Home Office is due to end on 31st March 2025. The VRU have engaged extensively with the Home Office ever since the new government took power in July 2024 to understand what the landscape for serious violent crime reduction would look like post- March 2025. As a result, all 20 VRUs nationally have been extended, with a new, 1 year funding settlement covering financial year 2025/26 confirmed in a letter to the Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester and the Director of the Greater Manchester VRU from the Minister of State for Policing, Fire & Crime Prevention.

Due to this being only a 12-month funding settlement, it has been agreed that to avoid interruption of the VRU’s programmes for young people most at risk of becoming victims of- or perpetrating- serious violence, time to re-procure services via the open market is not available. Therefore, the GM VRU will maintain its existing contracts via contract variations for each. This will also mitigate the risk of experienced staff leaving both providers and GMCA VRU positions, which would have a detrimental effect on programme provision. In the first instance, the VRU will extend contracts expiring on 31st March 2025 by 3 months through 30th June 2025. This is due to the fact that a grant agreement from the Home Office will not be received until June 2025. The initial 3-month extensions will be underwritten by Greater Manchester Combined Authority capital financing reserves, to cover the highly unlikely eventuality that the grant agreement from government does not come through.

It is a requirement stipulated by the Home Office that VRUs must spend a minimum of 10% of their yearly budget on programme evaluation. The Violence Reduction Unit commissioned ManMet in 2022 to deliver multi-year programme evaluation, and participatory youth framework activity to assist with the creation of the Greater Than Violence strategy. The VRU will continue to require evaluation support in 2025/26, including a potential focus on systems change evaluation to identify and evaluate the impact of the GM VRU across the wider system in which it operates. ManMet continue to have a direct link to GMP Data via its Big Data centre.