|
Violent crime has fallen in recent years in line with crime generally, but more serious violent offences, such as homicide and wounding, have not fallen as swiftly. It is these crimes that cause the most harm to individuals and communities. There are a number of worrying trends. For example, the number of recorded crimes involving a firearm doubled between 1998-99 and 2005-06, as did the number of 15-17 year olds convicted of carrying a knife in public.
The fall in crime and violence overall has enabled the Home Office (the Department) to concentrate on tackling more serious violence and gang-related activity. Yet its efforts have been undermined by poor distribution of funding and by the Department's mixed performance in spreading good practice. The Department's key delivery bodies, Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (Partnerships), usually receive funding for tackling violence late in the financial year, and money is often one-off and short-term. This approach to funding results to expenditure being targeted at the consequences of violence, and not its causes.
Partnerships often lack the information, analytical capacity and strategic approach necessary to understand and, therefore, tackle violence in their communities effectively. More than 40% of Partnerships did not consider themselves to have sufficient resources to analyse the violence occurring in their areas. More than half of Partnerships had never used information about violent crime from the ambulance service, and almost as many had never used Accident and Emergency unit information. Fewer than half of Partnerships had a designated violent crime group in place, and only a third had a violent crime strategy.
An important role for the Home Office is to spread good practice about tackling violent crime. Yet only half of the Partnerships thought the Home Office was effective at this. In part, this was because the Department had not collected reliable data on the use and effectiveness of interventions such as Safer School Partnerships, despite both police and schools seeing these arrangements as an effective early deterrent to violent behaviour.
On the basis of a Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General,[1] we examined the Home Office on how effectively it was tackling violent crime through distributing funding to Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, how well it had spread good practice, and how it was working with other national government departments.
| 
