Meeting for Sufferings: Concern over government funding cut to Circles
Friends heard that government funding for Circles of Support and Accountability has been cut
The withdrawal of government funding from Circles of Support and Accountability was the subject of a minute from Central England Area Meeting heard by Meeting for Sufferings on 7 July.
Circles was originally a Quaker project; an innovative, volunteer-based means of supervising sex offenders, usually upon release from prison.
A Friend said Circles was ‘one of those off-the wall issues that are effective’ and ‘an example of Quakers doing something that looks for that of God in everyone’. The Friend added that axing funding for Circles was ‘a dreadful thing to do’.
Circles was ‘a befriending organisation’, in the words of another Quaker.
One Friend said: ‘It is people – particular individuals – who are involved with this.’
‘It might be useful,’ another Friend remarked, ‘to remind Friends about our criminal justice system as a whole’ and ‘set the minute in the context of the maiming of the Probation Service generally’.
Sections of the Probation Service were being ‘hived off’, leaving it with ‘the most difficult, costly bits’ and in a ‘funding crisis’.
A Friend said they had been talking to another Quaker who had said: ‘I resigned from Circles. It has been taken over by the Probation Service’, which, the Friend felt, has done great damage.
One Friend asked for some clarification on whether the situation applied to Scotland. ‘The Scottish government did not choose to support the Circles programme,’ another Friend informed Sufferings.
A Friend said that Circles was ‘quite a local thing’. Funding varied from area to area.
In the view of one Friend: ‘It makes a lot of difference to use the right tools at the right time.’ He added: ‘There is private work happening’.
In addition to official correspondence with the relevant authorities it was suggested that Friends could write privately.
Sufferings recorded that ‘we have laid our concern’ and asked Quaker Peace & Social Witness Central Committee ‘to keep us updated about this’.
