Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
MS LOUISE
CASEY
12 JANUARY 2010
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. I would
draw the attention of all those present to the Register of Members'
Interests, where the interests of Members are noted. Welcome to
this new inquiry on the Government's approach to crime prevention.
This Committee will look at what the Government has done in preventing
crime, in particular youth crime. We will be taking evidence from
individuals and community groups, as well as the Opposition spokespersons
on behalf of their parties. Our first witness is Louise Casey,
Director-General of the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group.
Welcome, Ms Casey. Thank you for coming to give evidence to us
at the start of this inquiry. I wonder whether you would start
by telling us a little about the Respect agenda, which I understand
was very much your invention. Do you think that it has achieved
what you hoped it would achieve when you set out the vision behind
this agenda?
Ms Casey: Yes.
It is fair to say that over quite a long, sustained time period
reductions in antisocial behaviour have been fairly well recorded
and fairly well known. From the British Crime Survey to the local
government place based survey, their very formidable research
has shown that it has all moved in the right direction. One of
the things I feel quite proud of is the implementation of the
Respect strategy. What was amazingly powerful about the Respect
strategy to me personally was not giving up on an unrelenting—and
I use that word in quite a determined way—focus on enforcement
of standards in communities. That was one of the things we drove
forward as much as humanly possible but at the same time having
a sense of wanting to prevent problems. There are two big things
that are quite symbolic policies. One is Family Intervention Projects.
If you were asked to cite a number of things in your life that
you think are particularly powerful, I would say the Family Intervention
Projects are one of them, and I would like to talk about those
because I think they really, really make a powerful difference.
Q2 Chairman: Yes, we will be coming
on to that.
Ms Casey: The other one is parenting.
I think parenting is the Exocet missile to challenging and changing
antisocial behaviour. Certainly when we published the Respect
Action Plan, by then we had persuaded the then Prime Minister
and others—and the public are already persuaded of it—that
you have to tackle poor parenting and get parents back in charge
of their households. The evidence of that is incredibly compelling.
I would say the Respect strategy has worked, in so far as the
statistics and the evidence show that antisocial behaviour has
moved in the right direction for the public, and I would say the
powerful mixture of enforcement and support was the way forward
that has made that work.
Q3 Chairman: As part of our inquiry,
the Committee staff are looking at all the initiatives that the
Government has announced or launched in the last 13 years, trying
to work out what has happened to all those initiatives. You mentioned
the previous Prime Minister. One of his most famous quotes was
"We need to be tough on crime and the causes of crime."
Do you think the Government has been tough on the causes of crime?
What are the causes of crime?
Ms Casey: I would say you have
to be tough on crime, tough on criminals, and then do rehabilitation
or reform, whatever word you want to use.
Q4 Chairman: If we could go to the
causes of crime, what would you say the causes of crime are? Since
you are an expert in this field—and you cannot have an initiative
unless it addresses a problem—if you were to define, say,
the top four causes of crime, what would they be?
Ms Casey: You have to crack down
on the very small number of absolutely problematical families
that cause the most havoc in communities, and that ranges from
the lowest level of disorder that we call antisocial behaviour
to the nastiest crimes. They are few in number but the problems
that they cause in communities are phenomenal, and it would prevent
a great deal of crime if we got to those people very effectively.
Another cause of crime is poor parenting. It is a subject that
quite often people in public life and politics are afraid to take
on. It is not about having a view on every single parent, but
it is having a view and a judgment to be made on people whose
children are out of control. A significant proportion of the teenagers
who are recidivist criminals—and I could look at my file
and quote the statistic to you, but I think it is something like
90 per cent—had conduct disorder as children. That tells
a committee that is looking at crime prevention that the first
weapon in trying to prevent crime is looking at the family and
looking at the families that are messing up and cannot cope or
are deliberately choosing not to cope.
Q5 Mr Streeter: It is not rocket
science.
Ms Casey: As the gentleman on
the left has said, it is absolutely not rocket science.
Q6 Chairman: Mr Streeter.
Ms Casey: Mr Streeter. Forgive
me, I do not have my glasses on.
Q7 Mr Streeter: I am agreeing with
you.
Ms Casey: You are agreeing. What
is really interesting about this is that the public get it. The
public are not daft when it comes to how they think crime should
be prevented or dealt with: 58% of the public think that parents
are the most important weapon in tackling antisocial behaviour,
and something like 80-plus% think that antisocial behaviour is
the responsibility of poor parents.
Q8 Chairman: May I stop you there,
because there are a number of other questions.
Ms Casey: I am sorry.
Q9 Chairman: All these aspects will
be covered.
Ms Casey: I could talk for Britain.
Forgive me.
Chairman: I am sure you can. Members
of the Committee will come in and ask you questions, but perhaps
we could have briefer answers.
Q10 Mrs Cryer: I want to ask you
about working with parents and families. We are in a position
now, quite possibly because of pressure from the press, et cetera,
where we are losing a lot of social workers. When we are talking
about working with parents and families, are we talking about
social workers intervening with them? Who is going to do this
intervention? Who is going to make a decision that this is a lifestyle
choice and they are entitled to make that choice? Who is it who
is going to do this?
Ms Casey: First, again, forgive
me, it is common sense to the public and anybody paid by the public
that, for example, a ten-year-old being on the streets at ten
o'clock at night on a Thursday is a lifestyle choice we should
be taking a judgment about. Secondly, the Dundee Families Project
(set up in Dundee and run centrally by Dundee Council and what
was then called NCH Action for Children and is now called Action
for Children), in my life when I worked at Shelter, which is a
hell of a long time ago, and subsequently, people had gone in
and out and in and out of that project. Nobody had every replicated
it because it is a difficult thing to replicate. The answer to
your question is, on average, each of the families in that project
had about 14 different organisations taking an interest in them.
The issue here is that the families I am talking about have a
panoply of social workers, YOT workers, housing officers, police
officers, ex-officers, floating support workers, drugs people,
domestic violence people—upwards of 14 different organisations
and individuals—taking an interest in those families, but
my point is that you need a collaborative enforcement effort and
effort made by all of those people to say, "This behaviour
is out of control, it is not acceptable. We will, frankly, punish
you, using enforcement methods, if you do not shape up your act,
but we will give you in equal quantity a huge amount of help."
The evidence is there. Apparently, according to a 2004 piece of
research, the Exchequer showed that the average amount of money
we are already spending on these families—so these people
are already being dealt with, Mrs Cryer, it is not like anybody
is not seeing them already, they are on everybody's radar—is
between £250,000 and £330,000 a year. The average cost
of a Family Intervention Project in the evaluation research that
I was responsible for showed that the cost was between £8,000
and £20,000. As ever with these things, where there is a
will there is a way. People use hundreds of excuses as to why
things cannot be done, and that is, I am afraid, just what we
do not have to have in the world of crime prevention.
Q11 Chairman: Do you think the Government
has used excuses and some of these initiatives that they have
launched in the last 13 years were really not necessary? This
is plain speaking, is it not, what you are telling this Committee?
As Mr Streeter says, it is not rocket science. Have we had too
much spin over this area rather than some practical work that
should have been done?
Ms Casey: That is a question you
might want to put to politicians rather than me. My own view is
that the evidence is that crime is down and, therefore, something
has worked in order to bring crime down. I would imagine that
quite a number of the things that have been in place are working.
Obviously I am incredibly subjective, as is every other person
who comes before this Committee: we all have our own views that
we want you to hear, believe and understand. I think the relentless
focus on tackling low level crime and disorder is incredibly important.
The enforcement of standards relentlessly—no let-up in it—is
really important in preventing crime, and parents and then cracking
down on the worst families are the other two elements where I
feel the evidence is absolutely compelling.
Q12 Tom Brake: You have talked a
lot about clamping down on dysfunctional families and I do not
think people would disagree with you on that point. Do you feel
that it is your role to stop families becoming dysfunctional in
the first place?
Ms Casey: That is one of the most
interesting things about the strategy on antisocial behaviour.
Let me talk about something that is incredibly current that I
am not responsible for and did not set up, so I will try to be
objective about it. There is something at the moment called Operation
Staysafe. Where it works well, a parenting expert, the police
and the local authority antisocial behaviour team and others all
go out and essentially sweep the streets on a particular evening.
They do not just then leave it at that and tell the school or
the parent: they do follow up interventions with those people.
I do not think that on the first occasion you find a 12-year-old
on the streets of South Tyneside with a can in his hand you necessarily
want to lock him up in a youth offenders' institution. I sure
as hell believe that you need to tell him off, you need to get
his parents in, and in many cases put them on a structured parenting
programme. That is the other evidence that I feel passionately
about. There is no evidence that just giving people a little bit
of a parenting chit-chat works. Putting them on structured parenting
programmes, even as short as 12 weeks, does work. You can nip
problems in the bud, which stops that level of dysfunctionality
that creeps. Where you do not nip problems in the bud—and
that is the BMA (British Medical Association) research, by Desforges
(I do not know whether I have got the accent right—I believe
it is French) showing that much more is made of the parent's view
than even the school's view—it just stacks up. I think much
more emphasis around that is needed in the future.
Q13 Chairman: I am sorry, I have
to say it again, briefer answers, and then more questions can
come from us.
Ms Casey: I am sorry.
Q14 Bob Russell: The perception of
crime and the fear of crime is such, and that is why we are having
an inquiry. We are not talking about a little rascal who jolly
japes, are we? Does the Neighbourhood, Crime and Justice Group
have any dialogue with the established youth organisations?
Ms Casey: I would be interested
to know why you are asking that question. Yes, of course we do.
It is our job to have dialogue with anybody who is involved in
tackling crime. It is interesting—and I may as well get
it on the record—that the most fundamental thing that came
across during the course of the review was that the public do
not believe that the criminal justice system is on their side,
and that—in huge letters—would include the youth offending/youth
justice industry. 15% of the public think youth courts do a good
job. It is not a figure to be terribly proud of. The confidence
in the system to stand up for what the public want in terms of
tackling crime is not huge. That matters a great deal, because
if the public are not confident in the fact that criminals face
a consequence when they break the law whether they are 12, 22
or 52, it means that they do not pick up the phone when they want
to report crime. I think that is important. We never hear about
the punishment of criminals at all. We have no sense of what the
service is of the police. That is fundamental. As a Committee,
you want to prevent crime. Can anybody in this room, off the top
of their head, tell me what the single non-emergency number is
for their police? We are really bad at giving the public what
they want and then getting them to help prevent or tackle crime.
Q15 Bob Russell: In summary, the
answer to my question is yes.
Ms Casey: Yes. I work for the
Home Office. You have to talk to endless people all the time about
things that you want to do to improve things. The problem with
all these things is that there is a sense that, if you believe
in enforcement of standards, somehow that means that you are anti-youth.
That is my take on quite a lot of the debate that goes on. That
is a bad place to be.
Q16 Bob Russell: I will keep trying.
Ms Casey, would you confirm that all the evidence suggests that
the vast majority of young people who get caught up in troubles
are not members of recognised youth organisations?
Ms Casey: Structured activities
for young people are very powerful. I have been very, very clear
right from the outset as part of the Respect Action Plan that
there needed to be structured activities for young people. One
of the things I am on record as saying, supported very much by
the British public, is that they want activities for young people
open on Friday and Saturday nights. We still have a way to go
in getting a commonsense approach to youth activities open. One
of the least reformed areas of public service has to be the Youth
Service. In some areas of the country they are working to term
times. It is very reminiscent of when I was responsible for the
strategy on rough sleeping, when we had outreach workers who were
supposed to be working with homeless people at night who were
going out between nine and five and we had to get them to change
their hours to go out in the evenings. I feel some of the issues
around the youth industry are in that place and need reform.
Bob Russell: If I could come back to
where I am with the question.
Chairman: Final question.
Q17 Bob Russell: Chairman, I have
not even asked the question yet because the witness is going all
around the houses. The point I was trying to get at is your survey
by the Engaging Communities review showed that 15% of respondents
said they would be interested in giving up time to help run activities
for young people. Every youth organisation I know is desperately
short of volunteers to run their organisations. Please, a very
simple answer to a relatively simple question: what is the Neighbourhood,
Crime and Justice Group at the Home Office doing to try to engage
that 15% of the population to go out and help youth groups who
are desperate for adult helpers?
Ms Casey: That is a very easy
question to answer. Last year we trained over 4,000 members of
the public who were tenants' leaders, Neighbourhood Watch leaders,
and so on and so forth, key leadership members in their communities,
to do a number of things, including setting up activities in community
groups, knowing what their rights were by the police. The Community
Crime Fighters programme is one of the things I am most proud
of, and that answers your question quite directly.
Q18 Martin Salter: Ms Casey, you
were talking about problem families. I know from my own constituency
that the vast proportion of crime disorder, particularly low level
semi-serious crime disorder, is perpetrated by a handful of people,
a lot of whom were perpetrating it 20 years ago, and it becomes
a generational thing. We do not appear to have broken the cycle.
In respect of what we do with young offenders in youth custody,
our youth re-offender rates are appalling. Over 70% of young people
who go into first-time custodial sentences re-offend within two
years. I totally agree with you on the inadequacy of the Youth
Service, and it clearly needs to be brought up to speed. But is
this not one of the missing pieces in the jigsaw—that we
have to be serious about what we do with young people when they
are in a custodial situation for the first time? Surely it is
crazy to be moving them around the prison estate, sometimes for
two weeks at a time, and not giving them proper detox or literacy
programmes or the host of things you can do with somebody when
you know you have them in a defined place for a specific period
of time?
Ms Casey: It is fair to say that
I have never been responsible for that area of policy. I think
you are seeing the people who are and who have more expertise
in that area. I can only say that I think we would prevent an
awful lot more people ending up in that situation if we took a
more robust approach, particularly in the youth criminal justice
system, to involving parents in every single stage. I am so sorry
to sound like a broken record on this, but it frustrates me that
in the run-up to people going into custody and secure units and
so on and so forth, it seems to me that sometimes we do not deploy
the toughest methods we can to stop people ending up in the position
you have just described—and then they end up in that position.
I took a quick look yesterday. It was quite hard to find statistics,
but when we eventually found the statistics I saw that in youth
courts, in the disposals (that is the sentences handed out to
individuals), in something like 60,000 individual offenders only
about 1,000 or 1,500 were also getting a parenting intervention
simultaneously. I just cannot urge the Committee enough to think
about the ASBOs again. I was so frustrated over those years. It
seemed to me that people did not grip that if you did an ASBO
on a young person, you had to look at what was happening in their
families. So many of those individuals in those institutions have
siblings growing up in exactly the same situation, and parents
who have been there before them. If we want to stop this, we have
to take a really tough approach which involves support, but a
tough approach to dealing with those families and those individuals.
Q19 Mr Streeter: Two questions from
me, and I am very much enjoying your evidence. If you had an unlimited
hand in this and the systems were working correctly, as they should,
how good could things get? There have always been problem families,
there has always been crime of course, but what is your vision
for this? How much could we really do if things were working well?
Ms Casey: Again, I am on record
as saying that I have been frustrated at points. The Home Secretary
used the expression "coasting on antisocial behaviour".
I would agree with that. You cannot coast on low level disorder.
They are all crimes. Me spitting at an old lady in the street
may not end up in a court but it cannot be left unchecked. There
is a sense that that is sometimes difficult to do. The National
Audit Office took a long hard look, the previous Home Affairs
Select Committee, the Audit Commission, and what is interesting
is that we cannot leave bad behaviour and low level crime and
antisocial behaviour unchecked. That is my first thing. I feel
sometimes that we do, and I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Secondly, on Family Intervention Projects my advice to the Government
would be that I am very, very clear that we need to have residential
projects, core units that I would almost equate to taking a family
into care. Literally do not just deal with one individual: take
the lot. That is what Dundee, Manchester, Sheffield and Redcar
have done, but it stops there. A brave approach would be to have
a small number—we do not need a lot because there are not
a lot of families where it is bad—that you have targeted.
It is not about everybody being a problem; it is about a minority
being a problem. You zero-tolerance them and give them huge amounts
of support so that they change. Again the evidence is compelling:
85% of people in that original FIP evaluation, which would include
the residential as well as the others, stopped behaving that way.
They come off at-risk registers. If I could wave a magic wand,
I would open up youth clubs on Friday nights, when everybody is
out and creating problems. It is not just the Government we are
trying to encourage but everybody.
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