Commissioner awards £300,000 to secure millions of pounds in funding to tackle domestic abuse

A multi-million pound project to reduce domestic abuse has been secured after the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire pledged final funding of £300,000.

David Lloyd gave the money from the Community Safety and Criminal Justice budget to enable the £3.2m enterprise to run over the next two years.

Following a successful joint bid by his office and the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire, the Home Office pledged £2m to create the new Chrysalis Centre.

The latest award is part of the additional £1.2m in pledged funding in cash and kind from Hertfordshire Constabulary and multiple local authority partners including Hertfordshire County Council.

The Chrysalis Centre operates as an intervention hub and will work with domestic abuse perpetrators to prevent or break the cycle of their behaviour. This offending type can include spousal abuse, as well as abuse against children and parents.

Mr Lloyd said: “This programme is about radically reducing the number of domestic abuse victims in our county. The Chrysalis Centre will be working with perpetrators to intervene and act before any harm is done.

“The best way to reduce the number of victims is to try and ensure that the crimes don’t happen in the first place. Rather than convict more perpetrators for domestic abuse the better long-term solution is to tackle their pattens of offending.

“This principle is central to Hertfordshire Constabulary’s Prevention First strategy which is embedding policies to tackle the root causes of crime.

“My office, alongside colleagues at Bedfordshire, successfully brought millions of pounds of government funding to our area and this latest award will ensure the project can run for at least the next two years.”

The project is mostly being funded from a £39m Home Office scheme which will see 50 projects rolled out nationally over the next two years, supporting initiatives to stop abusers from repeatedly targeting victims and terrorising vulnerable people.

Many domestic abusers are repeat offenders with 83% of male offenders repeating their offences within a six-month period. This makes intervening to stop their pattern of behaviour paramount to protect victims.

The Chrysalis Centre is now open for referrals, including self-referrals, and more details can be found at https://chrysaliscentre.net/.