10 May Is £45M enough to take the youngsters off the streets?
(Photo: Salmon Youth Centre, Bermondsey © Francisca Silva)
Contribution:
After booking the equipment, Shola and I went to Bermondsey so we could film our interview with Jamie Anglesey, Deputy Director of Salmon Youth Centre. Then we came back to Elephant and Castle and I got us some voxpops.
Not only did I film, but I also edited and colour corrected all the footage.
A new £45M funding project has been announced to help get the young people out of the streets of London. Francisca Silva reports.
Recent figures show that in the last two months London police investigated more homicides than the police of New York. London Mayor’s office has assumed that there is an outbreak on the streets after another weekend of crime. However, knife crime has already been on the rise in the UK for the last few years, especially in London.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is urging the government to act on the problem, however, funding keeps getting cut. Sadiq recently announced he would be using his project Young Londoners Fund to help children and young adults support their education, sports and cultural activities, particularly those with a higher risk of getting caught up in crime. The project aims to help mainly those between the ages of 10 to 25 from low-income households and black and ethnic minorities (BAME).
According to the Home Office “Over 40 charities, (…) have already benefited by receiving grants of up to £20,000 through the first round of the Community Fund which was launched in October 2017.”
Sadiq said: “I have stepped up where the government is letting our young people down. I am providing unprecedented additional funds to the Met police, driving forward a full and comprehensive Knife Crime Strategy and my new Young Londoners Fund will help countless young people to thrive, prosper and make the right choices to avoid being sucked into a life of crime.” Early intervention and prevention will be one of the main messages in the new Serious Violence Strategy to be published later this spring.
Sadiq has tried to call the government many times over the past 4 years to discuss how they can tackle and reduce knife crime in London, “I am investing £45 million to tackle the root causes of rising violent crimes like knife attacks – now the Government simply must act on what is clearly a nationwide problem,” he adds. However, even after revealing the details of how organisations will be able to benefit from the new £45M fund, nothing seems to be done. A report from March 2017 shows that councils in London have faced £36m in cuts to youth services since 2011, and 48% of youth worker jobs lost in that time.
Deputy Director of Salmon Youth Centre in Bermondsey, Jamie Anglesy, says “We’ve received funding from the government before but, in the past few years, it has become much tighter and, as a consequence, you see more and more young people on the streets and not enough into senses like houseware, where real positive engagement can take place. We’d hope that for the future, the government would look at their funding, and look at increasing funding for the youth work and we could have a big impact in people’s lives.”
British senior police officer, Commissioner Chief Cressida Dick, believes gangs are using online platforms to make violence glamorous and that youth disputes become very aggressive in a few minutes on social networks.
