The Coventry Community Safety Partnership Plan 2025- 2028

A key priority of the CCSP is protecting the victims of crime, particularly the most vulnerable in our communities. It is equally important that, as a partnership, we identify those at risk of exploitation and implement measures to reduce these risks, helping to prevent exploitation. As exploitation often remains hidden within our communities, we must raise awareness of these crimes and ensure our frontline agencies are equipped to recognise individuals at risk. This will enable the creation of effective referral pathways to provide the appropriate support.

Within the West Midlands, preventing the exploitation of children, young people and adults is a key priority for the VRP. The VRP have established an Exploitation and Missing Regional Strategic Board to improve the response to children and young people who are at risk to exploitation.

The newly established Coventry Safeguarding Children’s Partnership leads on the legal duties place on local authorities to make arrangements locally to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their areas. Coventry’s Horizon Team lead on Child Exploitation including Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and County Lines.  This is also supported by the work outlined in the Youth Justice plan.

The Coventry Safeguarding Adults Board (CSAB) lead on the protection of vulnerable adults. The CSAB priorities support the CSP by ensuring the safeguarding and protection of vulnerable adults, particularly those with care and support needs.  

Coventry’s Domestic Abuse Local Partnership Board lead on the protection of victims of harmful practises within the context of domestic abuse including Honour Based Abuse (HBA), Forced Marriage (FM) and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Within the CCSP, exploitation is managed through the Harm Abuse Reduction Partnership. The group manages issues such as hate, modern slavery and vulnerable adults.  Over the last few years hate crime has been tackled in partnership with Remedy, West Midlands Police and Citizen through the Hate Crime Forum. The Community Safety Partnership has also used the community safety fund to implement the “Stand by Me” campaign to promote by-stander awareness training through professionals and volunteer groups in the city.

Significant progress has been made in addressing adult modern slavery over the last two years. Significant work has been undertaken to:

• Establish proper reporting and data monitoring processes.
• Effective management of cases of adult exploitation via increased staff training, awareness, and the establishment of a risk assessment conference.
• Form a strategic modern slavery partnership to oversee all aspects of our response to adult exploitation.
• Improve the discharging of our statutory duties under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Work is underway to create new tiered training packages to ensure all levels of professionals have appropriate training to response to modern slavery.

Tackling radicalisation is a key priority for the CCSP. The Prevent Board oversees the delivery of Prevent across the partnership and ensures compliance with the Prevent Duty.  Alongside Prevent sits the multi-agency Channel Case Management Panel, which focuses on early intervention by providing tailored support to individuals identified as susceptible to radicalisation.

The risk and threat of radicalisation are collated and assessed by West Midlands Police Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analysts. This intelligence is shared with the partnership, enabling a strategic, evidence-based approach to prioritising actions, supporting early intervention, and ensuring effective prevention measures, much like the strategic assessment process.

Prevent has delivered significant work across education, community groups, and professional development. This includes embedding clear referral pathways and offering advice to ensure that those at risk are identified and supported at the earliest opportunity. By providing training, raising awareness, and building resilience, Prevent helps to reduce risk, address threats at an early stage, and safeguard individuals and communities.

Preventing exploitation and protecting victims of crime (summary of the issues)

• Honour based abuse has decreased by 29% but is highly likely that these figures are under represented.
• Hate crime has marginally decreased this year (>1.0%).
• Racial hate crime was the top offence accounting for 80% of all hate crimes.  
• There has been a 18.5% increase in county-line offences involving children under 18.
• Males aged 15-17 years old were involved in 68.8% of county line offences.
• Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) has seen a 35.9% decrease.
• Modern slavery cases reported to West Midlands Police have seen a 51.3% decrease in modern slavery offences, however Coventry City Council have recorded 124 cases which has been steadily increasing.
• Within the cases of modern slavery, females fell victim to sexual exploitation across all ages. Females under 25 years old were seeing more criminal exploitation and over 25 years forced labour.
• Males fell victim to criminal exploitation (drugs) across all ages. Younger males (10-19 years) saw higher levels of gang affiliation. Focused labour was seen in victims over 20 years old.  

What are partners telling us?

• They felt that the biggest priority should be dealing with vulnerable people in the city.

• The biggest challenges facing victims was the lack of faith in services and recognising themselves as victims of crime.

• Taking a trauma-informed approach, working in partnerships and making sure we were person-centred were important values to ensure that victims were supported. 

How we will respond

We will train our professionals to recognise signs of exploitation and support other organisations in doing the same.

We will establish strong pathways for victims to access appropriate services.

We will consult with those with lived experience to design services that instill confidence in victims.

Trauma-informed practice and a person-centered approach will be central to our work.