Case Studies

Cash for places of worship

by Mark Rowe

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has awarded more than £700,000 to schemes to tackle hate crime and to protect places of worship.

Nine community projects will benefit from over £300,000 for schemes to help tackle specific types of hate crime. And £405,000 has been awarded to 59 places of worship: 45 churches, 12 mosques, one Hindu temple and one gurdwara, to help pay for security measures such as CCTV or protective fencing.

This comes after the Home Secretary and Communities Secretary Sajid Javid met faith leaders on Wednesday, November 16, to discuss ways to beat religious hate crime. Minister for Vulnerability, Safeguarding and Counter Extremism Sarah Newton, Solicitor General Robert Buckland, hate crime charities, law enforcement leads and representatives from major social media firms also attended the meeting, held during national Interfaith Week.

Amber Rudd said: “This funding is the latest step in this government’s mission to stamp out all types of hate crime, which has absolutely no place in a Britain that works for everyone. These innovative community schemes will help local groups get to the heart of the issue in their area and show others what can be done to tackle hate crime. Alongside this, the security funding will help protect a cross-section of faiths from attack. Working together we can beat hatred which is why we brought together experts and representatives of those affected by religious hate crime to discuss what is currently being done and what more we can do.”

As featured in the September 2016 print issue of Professional Security, it’s the first cash to be granted from the £900,000 community demonstration project scheme and the £2.4 million fund for protective security at places of worship, launched by the Home Secretary alongside the UK Government’s ‘action plan’ against hate crime in July.

Separately, Twitter announced several changes to their safety policies, after what the UK community safety body for the Jewish community the CST called constructive dialogue with it and several other groups. CST says that it’s pleased that after extensive reporting by CST and others, several antisemitic accounts who harassed Jewish users and spread Holocaust denial and antisemitism have been suspended from the platform. For more, visit the CST website. And for Twitter’s ‘progress on addressing online abuse’, see its blog.

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