11. Written evidence from Blaenau Gwent
County Borough Council, Community Safety Partnership
MAIN PROBLEMS FACED BY COMMUNITY SAFETY PARTNERSHIPS
1. SPEED OF
CHANGE:
The Crime & Disorder Act 1998 is nearly
six years old but in reality it is still a relatively new piece
of legislation. Because of its far-reaching implications and impact
upon the key partners—particularly local authorities—it
should be viewed as very much in its infancy in terms of its implementation.
The Act prompted a massive cultural and directional
change for local authorities and, like many large institutions,
councils cannot negotiate such radical manoeuvres overnight. Issues
such as breaking free from deeply ingrained silo mentalities and
embracing the concept of "mainstreaming" crime and disorder
reduction take time to assimilate.
For example: objectively, the argument that
education and leisure departments should invest in improved streetlighting
near schools and leisure centres to reduce crime and disorder
makes perfect sense. The long-term benefit will include reduced
cost of repairs to vandalism and graffiti for the authority and
less fear of crime for the community. Subjectively, however, education
and leisure departments are wrestling with a range of other priorities,
targets and tight budgets so new streetlights are likely to come
well below new school books and extra teachers or new gym equipment
and sports pitches in their departmental spending plans.
Progress has also been hampered by the unprecedented
growth of Government expectations in crime and disorder reduction
during the past five years and the rapid succession of related
legislation (Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Police Reform
Act 2002, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, Fireworks Act 2003,
Licensing Act 2003) and guidance (Prolific & Other Priority
Offender Strategy, Substance Misuse Action Plans) that community
safety partnerships have to grapple with.
There has been no "bedding down" period
for the 1998 Act—no period of stability to allow partners
to adapt and evolve, to achieve the transition of organisational
cultures required. Community safety partnerships, and thus the
partners themselves, have been asked to meet an unrelenting stream
of fresh and ever more ambitious demands from the Home Office
and we are rapidly losing the ability to keep pace.
2. MAINSTREAMING:
One of the key drivers in achieving organisational
cultural change, particularly within local authorities, is the
statutory requirement to mainstream community safety. The weakness
in the driver is that, since the 1998 Act came into force, Section
17 has been largely toothless.
Community safety officers within local authorities
advise and encourage participation in crime and disorder reduction
activity. One of the "frequently asked questions" is
"what happens if we don't participate?". The risk of
being taken to court for failure to comply with Section 17 is
minimal and the likelihood of any sanction is even more remote.
Therefore the incentive for changing a service or redeploying
a resource to meet a crime and disorder reduction objective, as
opposed to any other statutory requirement backed by real sanctions,
is negligible.
It's not that local authority departments are
being stubborn or do not want to co-operate with the crime and
disorder agenda. It is simply a matter of priorities, particularly
where budgets are tight and resources are limited.
Furthermore, implementation of the Section 17
requirement to mainstream community safety is dependent upon awareness-raising
and training elected members and officers—not only in what
the statutory requirement means, but how it can be met within
their own areas of expertise and service delivery. We have embarked
upon a major training programme for members and officers but that
will take time to bear fruit.
The Government's proposals to strengthen Section
17 with rewards and sanctions, as outlined in the new White Paper
Building Communities, Beating Crime, will certainly help
strengthen the case for crime and disorder reduction objectives
to be given greater priority in local authority departmental and
divisional plans.
3. CAPACITY BUILDING:
Community Safety Partnerships come in all shapes
and sizes and operate a variety of structures to suit their local
needs. One thing they all have in common is the need for dedicated
staff to support the development, implementation, monitoring and
evaluation of the partnership's strategies and action plans. It
is not sufficient to allocate a proportion of a community safety,
admin or finance officer's time to ensure that the partnership
functions effectively. With the ever-increasing levels of expectation
and funding, partnership working is now a full-time operation.
Safer Blaenau Gwent now has its own team of
dedicated partnership staff, managed by the local authority community
safety officer, and the partnership could not have managed without
this team. The problem we now face is who pays for that team?
The additional staff—a finance & monitoring
officer, a substance misuse co-ordinator, an anti-social behaviour
co-ordinator, a domestic abuse co-ordinator and an admin officer—are
all afforded thanks to Home Office and Welsh Assembly Government
funding streams. We have been advised that this is only a short-term
measure (March 2006) and that we should be looking to mainstream
these posts in future years.
Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council is far
from being a wealthy local authority and Gwent Police will be
looking for savings of approximately £750,000 in C Division
in the next financial year. So who should pay? We are told by
the Government Office that the team can be paid for by efficiency
savings achieved through lower crime and disorder . . . but in
reality that is almost impossible to quantify.
Savings achieved through reducing vandalism
to schools, leisure centres, libraries, public toilets, bus shelters,
car parks, playgrounds, council houses and civic amenities will
not automatically be re-routed to pay for the community safety
team. Directors and portfolio members work very hard to protect
their budgets and where efficiencies are made, the first call
on them is to improve or expand the actual service in question.
Building capacity is only half the story. As
partnerships we recognise that we can achieve more by establishing
co-located, integrated multi-agency community safety departments—bringing
together the law enforcement and criminal justice agencies with
local authority community safety officers and the departments
that have significant roles to play in reducing crime and disorder,
such as education Welfare, environmental Health, trading standards,
CCTV, streetlighting, housing wardens, etc. This will require
significant investment in both financial and resource terms from
the key partners.
4. FUNDING:
Community Safety Partnerships certainly welcome
the additional funding provided by both the Home Office and the
Welsh Assembly Government and a great deal of excellent work has
been achieved as a result of this support. We can always complain
we need more, and that will never change.
However, funding does bring its own problems.
The targets, performance measures, outcomes and resulting paperwork
that comes hand-in-hand with funding streams present a significant
challenge for our practitioners. But the greatest challenge of
them all is the seemingly short-term and last minute approach
adopted by the Home Office when it comes to funding.
As partnerships we are required to develop three-year
strategies and accompanying action plans. The funding we receive,
however, lasts for just 12 months. There is no carry-over and
no indication of the allocation we will receive in future years
or what the terms and conditions will be. This means we cannot
plan long-term and the emphasis is on spending the money quickly.
In 2001-02 we had the Partnership Development
Fund (PDF), Safer Communities Initiative (SCI) and Communities
Against Drugs (CAD). These were supposed to be three-year funding
streams, although allocations were announced annually and the
potential for carry-over was limited. In 2003-04, just two years
into these three-year funding streams, they were replaced by Building
Safer Communities, with new terms and conditions to abide by.
It's not just a question of moving the goalposts.
Allocations are announced very late in the financial year and
partnerships are given very little time to negotiate and submit
spending plans. Even after they are submitted it can take months
for these plans to be approved.
We have recently been informed that the new
BSC will be the Safer Stronger Communities Fund (SSCF) from next
April. It is now late November and we still don't have answers
to the following fundamental questions:
— How much we will be allocated on
1 April;
— What the terms and conditions of
funding for the new SSCF will be;
— How long we will have to submit spending
plans;
— When we can expect WAG and Home Office
approval;
— Whether or not there will be a minimum
capital spend requirement and, if so, what percentage this will
be;
— Whether or not we SSCF will be one-year
funding with no carry over or three-year funding with carry over.
How can we be expected to provide best value
for public money in this kind of funding regime? Our partnership
funding should be tied into the three-year strategies. In other
words, as we develop our 2005-08 community safety strategy we
should be told what funding we will have from 1 April 2005 until
March 31st 2008, what the terms and conditions are for those three
years and we should be allowed to carry over underspends from
years one and two into year three.
Furthermore the current minimum requirement
of 27% to be spent on capital, when many of the partners are in
desperate need of revenue support for new initiatives.
We have also had cases where additional funds
have been announced to support initiatives and spending plans
are required within a week or two, or sometimes just days. Other
funds are awarded on the basis of completing an online questionnaire
(domestic violence grant), awarded to Assembly Government initiatives
that do not always fit in with partnership strategies (Include/Turnaround
Project) or are handed out to selected partnerships and not open
for all to bid for (first round or arson reduction monies).
5. UNREALISTIC
EXPECTATIONS
Community safety partnerships are asked to sign
up to deliver "measurable outcomes" within their three-year
strategies and one-year spending plans. There is no argument that
the use of public money should be properly monitored, evaluated
and accounted for, but the only measurable outcomes the Home Office
and Assembly seem to be interested in are percentage reductions
in crime.
For example, if we have a particular problem
with shed break-ins in one of our sections, we might propose to
fund a target-hardening project aimed at reducing shed break-ins.
The Home Office and Assembly would insist that our measurable
outcome should be an x% reduction in shed break-ins, not how many
locks were fitted or how much safer beneficiaries felt.
So which has a bigger impact on the shed crime
figures six months later—100 extra British Standard locks
being fitted to vulnerable sheds in that locality and 1,000 crime
prevention advice leaflets delivered to homes, or the release
of two prolific shed burglars who immediately return to their
old stomping ground and commit a significant spate of break-ins?
The answer is, of course, unknown. It depends upon so many factors
beyond the control of the community safety partnership.
Even more complex is a youth diversionary activity
or substance misuse education programme. How do you tell what
impact such initiatives will have on reducing levels of youth
crime and substance misuse without commissioning longtitudinal
studies involving the young people who participated? Yet we are
asked to sign up to an "x% reduction in" as our measurable
outcome.
To properly monitor and evaluate and assess
the cost benefit of BSC or SCF funded projects would cost more
than many of the projects themselves. It's so often a case of
being so busy weighing and measuring the cow that we forget to
feed it. So-called "soft outcomes", such as "number
of young people engaged", are frequently frowned upon and
discounted as "outputs" and irrational emphasis is placed
upon an unrealistic, unscientific "guestimate" of how
many burglaries and take-and-drive-aways will be reduced by the
project.
Which brings me to the question—what is
expected of our partnership?
The Rt. Hon. Jack Straw, Home Secretary at the
time the Crime and Disorder Act was introduced, said: "The
Act represents the culmination of a long held ambition to empower
local people to take control of the fight against crime and disorder
in their area. The people who live and work in an area are best
placed to identify the problems facing them and the options available
for tackling those problems."
The Home Office and Assembly, by asking us to
sign up to the type of measurable outcomes described earlier,
are clearly under the impression that community safety partnerships
have more control and influence over crime and disorder than we
do.
In fact we can do little more than provide added
value to existing mainstream crime and disorder reduction by working
more closely together. Local authorities and LHBs are governed
by targets and priorities that are set by Westminster and Assembly
Government departments.
The police and other criminal justice agencies
are governed by targets and priorities set by the Home Office
that often do not match local priorities (eg gun crime, street
robbery, terrorism). Police forces have limited resources and
if Chief Constables are impelled to direct those resources to
meet national and force-wide targets that may differ substantially
from local needs, partnerships will continue to be a lower priority.
It is still very much a "top-down" approach to tackling
crime and disorder rather than the "bottom-up" approach
suggested by the former Home Secretarys .
Until community safety partnerships are empowered
to direct police, local authority and other partners' resources
and until community safety strategies take precedence over other
national and regional operational plans, we will never be in a
position to "take control of the fight against crime and
disorder in our area".
Negotiated crime reduction targets and the new
White Paper's proposals for giving divisional commanders more
autonomy and police authorities more responsibility to take account
of community safety strategies when drawing up local policing
plans will, of course, assist community safety partnerships in
this respect.
A close look at the expectations of POPOS demonstrates
that the Home Office and Assembly have unrealistic expectations
of what community safety partnerships can achieve. Under the "prevent
and deter" strand we are asked to identify a group of between
20 and 50 young people in our area who are on the "cusp of
offending" and to put programmes in place that divert them
from criminal and anti-social behaviour in a case-managed way.
The partnership is being given no extra funding
to meet these ambitious objectives. Therefore we have to depend
upon three other partnerships—the Children's and Young People's
Partnerships and the Health, Social Care and Well Being partnership—to
provide the services required for the targeted group we have identified.
Our Youth Entitlement Partnership, and our own statutory youth
service, is well within its rights to ask why these 20-50 individuals
should be singled out for special treatment when their remit is
to consider the needs of all young people in the area.
Under "rehabilitate and resettle",
is it right that housing departments, employment training schemes
and job-placement programmes give priority to individuals targeted
by community safety partnerships—particularly when those
individuals are more likely to have a detrimental impact on achieving
their own measurable outcomes as dictated by their non "crime
reduction" funding streams.
And nowhere is unrealistic expectation more
clearly evidenced than in the area of anti-social behaviour. As
a partnership we would be delighted to make greater use of Anti
Social Behaviour Orders to curb individuals behaviour. However,it
would appear that advice to magistrates is that because breach
of an ASBO is a criminal offence punishable by custodial sentence,
they should only impose an ASBO for anti-social behaviour of a
sufficiently serious nature. At the same time, Lord Chief Justice
Woolf's appeal court ruling this year stressed that ASBOs should
not be used to tackle criminal behaviour for which individuals
can be prosecuted. We are therefore left with a narrow gap of
opportunity between behaviour that is so serious it should be
dealt with by criminal prosecution and behaviour that is too minor
to warrant a custodial sentence if an ASBO is breached.
It is one thing to introduce legislation and
another altogether to ensure its effective implementation by the
judiciary.
6. PARTNERS:
Community Safety Partnerships are largely led
by the local authority and police. Our LHB does get involved and
actually contributes finances toward partnership working, but
it is our only health sector partner.
Also Police divisions can be highly committed
to local partnership working but hampered by the force priorities
and targets, set independently of and without regard to community
safety strategies.
Again, the clear indication from the new White
Paper that divisional commanders will be awarded greater autonomy
in directing police resources and that police authorities will
have to take account of community safety strategies when developing
local policing plans is long overdue and most welcome.
Partners within the CSPs also suffer from serious
culture clashes. The structure of the police frequently works
against partnerships because the constables, sergeants and inspectors
we work with are not always empowered to make decisions on behalf
of the police, while senior officers who are in a position to
make decisions are unable to attend all the meetings where decisions
are required. It is also frustrating when you discover that the
main police partnership contact you've just built a close and
effective working relationship with has been transferred at a
week's notice.
With every set of guidance issued by the Home
Office comes the impression that community safety partnerships
are fully staffed, stable and well structured virtual organisations
of individuals whose time and energy is dedicated to reducing
crime and disorder. The agency representatives sat around the
partnership table vary from meeting to meeting and few organisations
empower their representatives to make decisions at those meetings
that commit real resources or funding. Most decisions reached
are either "in principle" and have to be ratified back
at base or made on the basis of nil cost and zero resource commitment.
Police efforts are focused on detecting crime—detection
figures are paramount in the police performance assessment framework,
followed by reduction figures in the key crime categories. Anti-social
behaviour was not even measured by the police until the new set
of anti-social behaviour categories was added to the police national
crime recording standard.
Yet year-on-year our recorded crime statistics
are falling and detection rates are rising but fear of crime is
at record levels. In Blaenau Gwent the fear of crime is nearly
twice the national average (in comparison to British Crime Survey
findings). Our domestic burglary figures are among the lowest
in the UK and still falling, and we keep telling the public this
fact. It does not stop 78% of our population stating that they
are fairly or very worried about being burgled.
Perhaps the primary driver of police performance,
as set by the Home Office, should be to reduce the fear of crime.
Maybe then police commanders' minds (and resources) would focus
more on high visibility policing, public reassurance, rapid response
and serious investigation of all the minor crimes that are currently
dismissed…all the minor crimes that are ruining people's
quality of life .
People in Blaenau Gwent have a high fear of
burglary because they read national newspapers and watch national
television and equate the horror stories they see with the gang
of perhaps rowdy but otherwise law-abiding youths hanging around
on their street corners. They see pictures of drug-crazed muggers
in the media and they see similar-looking people near their homes.
They see images of void properties, broken windows, graffiti and
fly-tipping in those national newspapers and on television, and
they see void properties, broken windows, graffiti and fly-tipping
in their neighbourhoods and the fear of it happening to them is
cemented. No amount of positive local media coverage of falling
burglary figures will persuade them they are not at risk.
Better resourced, local authorities could do
a great deal more to provide facilities for young people, to remove
graffiti and vandalism more quickly and to repair and restore
void properties and broken bus shelters more speedily. But we
have to use our limited resources to meet targets and performance
indicators that are not necessarily linked to crime and disorder
reduction.
Perhaps the paramount performance indicator
for all partners within the community safety partnership should
be to reduce the fear of crime. Then we would all be singing from
the same hymn sheet instead of trying to harmonise a disparate
set of sometimes clashing agendas. That would be a true partnership.
Robin Morrison
Chief Executive
6 December 2004
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