Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding her Department has allocated to improving security at places of worship in the South Wales Police area in the last 12 months.

The Places of Worship Protective Security Fund (POW) is a key commitment in the Hate Crime Action Plan published in 2016. The Scheme provides funding to places of worship that have been victims of or are vulnerable to hate crime attacks for physical protective measures such as alarms, fencing and access control. The scheme is currently in its fourth year of funding, and successful applicants for this scheme will be announced in due course. There was only one application from Wales in Year 3. However, the criteria were set across all applications and this application did not meet the minimum requirements to receive funding.

Over the first three years of the scheme we provided £1.5m funding for over 130 grants and have £1.6m committed for this financial year (2019/20). There was not any funding allocated under the POW scheme in the South Wales Police area in year three (2018/19). However, the scheme is open to places of worship across England and Wales, and we will continue to promote the scheme across Wales for future rounds of funding.

Following the attacks in Christchurch, we supported Faith Associates to deliver security training prior to and during Ramadan. They delivered 22 workshops across England and Wales, and distributed advice and guidance to over 2,000 mosques, madrassahs and community centres.

The Jewish Community Protective Security Grant was introduced in 2015 following a series of terrorist attacks against Jews and Jewish locations across Europe. In 2018-19 a grant of £13.4m was provided to fund additional protective security measures, primarily guarding, at Jewish state, free and independent schools, colleges, nurseries and some other Jewish community sites, including synagogues. A grant of £14m is to be provided in 2019-20. We do not keep a breakdown of funding by region.