The government launched the £25 million funding for the third round of the Safer Streets Fund (SSF3) in March 2021 to support locally based solutions that aimed to prevent or reduce violence against women and girls (VAWG) in public spaces, and improve perceptions and feelings of safety in public spaces for all, with a particular emphasis on improving the safety of public spaces for women and girls. VAWG in this report is used to describe a range of crimes, including rape and other sexual offences, stalking, ‘upskirting’, and many others. VAWG crimes are known to disproportionately affect women and girls, but men and boys can also be victims.

The Fund was open to civil society organisations (charities, community and voluntary organisations, social enterprises and cooperatives), local authorities, Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), and the British Transport Police.

SSF3 funded 57 successful projects, delivered between August 2021 and March 2022. Each project delivered a different combination of interventions across 8 categories[footnote 1] and 23 discrete intervention types. Most projects aimed to address multiple types of VAWG, anti-social behaviour (ASB) and acquisitive crime across a range of public spaces including high streets and commercial areas, including the night-time economy (NTE), on public transport or at transport hubs, and parks and open spaces.

The government commissioned Verian (formerly known as Kantar Public) to conduct a process and impact evaluation of SSF3 to understand the specific impact of SSF3 funded interventions and the factors affecting the processes of implementation in funded areas.

The process evaluation explored the setup, delivery and implementation experience of SSF3 bid areas to uncover the key enablers and barriers of delivering interventions, and to identify good practice emerging from SSF3. The impact evaluation aimed to determine the net impact of the funding across the target populations in funded areas through in-person and online surveys. This was supplemented by using the Qualitative Impact Protocol (QuIP) methodology, which used qualitative data to understand the causal factors underpinning changes to perceptions of safety. Evaluation of the Fund began in September 2021, and qualitative and quantitative data collection took place from February to July 2022.