During a Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny panel hearing Scrutiny Panel, Deputy Gregory Guida revealed that the location of the new facility, which will replace the existing SARC based at Dewberry House on Route du Fort, was selected from nine potential sites.
He added that the new SARC would have extended services including a victim support centre and a separate unit to house abused children.
Deputy Guida said: ‘We are concentrating our efforts on developing that site and it is the Heathfield Children’s Home. We studied nine different sites when we started looking at alternatives and there were two possibilities. One was in town and one was outside [town] and we thought that the extra commute would be offset by the privacy of having it outside of town.
‘Instead of just relocating existing facilities we decided to redevelop it into something much larger. The plan now is to have a victim’s support centre and a child house centre. It’s a much more ambitious project and a multi-agency project as well that we’re developing.’
He added: ‘The SARC will support several services – existing government services and charities – to be a victim support centre. We have taken inspiration from those in the UK.’
Julian Blazeby, Home Affairs director general, said the new centre would be a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all services, with a particular focus on protecting child victims.
‘It will cover medical advocacy, therapeutic services, as well as police and social. Included in that is a centralised victims’ hub.
‘All victims of crime will be able to access support and services from this one location.
‘There may be signposting to other services that won’t necessarily all be there, but certainly the main core will be present and be able to be a one-stop-shop, which will prevent particularly children having to repeat their traumatic experience in front of multiple agencies in different locations at different times.’
During the same hearing, Deputy Guida provided an update on the success of the settled-status scheme, which EU nationals had to sign up to before 30 June to retain their right to live and work in Jersey post-Brexit.
‘As of 30 June, we had received 13,550 applications and 12,524 of them have been granted and the rest basically are being evaluated,’ he said.
‘We made an assumption early on that the population of EU national residents in Jersey was about 20,000.
‘It’s quite probable that it is actually less than that and we are very near the total of the population.’
