Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
278- 288)
RT HON
IAIN DUNCAN
SMITH MP, RT
HON GRAHAM
ALLEN MP AND
MR ALAN
GIVEN
2 FEBRUARY 2010
Q278 Chairman: Could I first of all
thank you, Mr ` Smith and Mr Allen, for sending every member
of the Committee a copy of your very helpful book; we are very
grateful for all the work that you have done. This is an inquiry
that looks into the causes of crime; how do we prevent crime?
We are looking for innovative ideas to try and help us fashion
a new approach. We are not here to criticise the Government or
other political Parties; we are trying to draw together, as you
have done in your very interesting work, some thoughts which we
could develop for the future. Can I start by asking you, Mr Duncan
Smith—and obviously Mr Allen and Mr Given will speak after
you—how would you describe the interrelation between poverty,
family breakdown and offending?
Mr Duncan Smith: Thank you, Mr
Chairman. Can I just say, before I answer that question, that
this work I have done with Graham Allen is deliberately set to
be non-party political, so you do not have any problems with us
being party political today. Secondly, if I could just recommend
to the Committee some other work that the CSJ carried out in the
field of criminal justice: a report on policing, courts, sentencing,
on prisons and on street gangs within about the last five or six
months and some of the evidence we heard earlier is already dealt
with and on which we have made recommendations. Certainly I actually
came to this on the basis that there were concerns about Britain's
peculiarly high level of family breakdown, which is peculiarly
high when compared to continental Europe; and what does that mean?
It is not about pointing fingers at anybody, it is simply saying
that the outcomes for many children for what then become in the
poorer areas very dysfunctional family relationships are progressively
worse; and the numbers engaged in those dysfunctional family set-ups
are growing. It was Perry, was it not, who said that over the
next 20 or so years it will move from somewhere between being
about 10% of the population to anything up to 20% or 25% of the
population. The reason for that is these peculiarly dysfunctional
and broken families, where you are getting three and four generations
passing down very little that is constructive, where girls grow
up having no self-esteem or boys never seeing any role model that
is positive and constructive and that they do not get any nurture
or support in the very early years; and our report is hugely about
those first three years. The thing that has really skewed us on
to this comes off the back of that point about family breakdown,
that actually when you look at the children growing up in these
dysfunctional relationships it is not an airy-fairy idea that
somehow in sociological terms they would be better off if they
did this or that the truth is that there is a physical change
that is happening to them, which is that in the first three years
their brain does not develop at the rate it should develop, which
in turn puts them at about the age of three into the hands of
the beginning of their formal education at a distinct disadvantage
with their peer group, in the sense that at that point their brain
is probably at the level of a child of one but they are being
asked to comprehend and make decisions at that of the level of
a child of three or even four. So it has a detrimental effect
on them. It can be demonstrated—Graham has been on this
longer than I have, but he was one of those who convinced me that
this is necessarily the case—from that group, that very
single group, we disproportionately draw most of our residual
unemployed, most of our drugs addiction and criminal behaviour,
a good example is to look at who makes up the prison population
and you will see that this is not just drawn from the wide society,
it is distinctly concentrated—over a third come from care
homes, over two-thirds come from broken families; two-thirds of
drug/alcohol abusers have the reading age on average of a child
of about 11 or 12. All of this is because they are being left
behind, long before they arrive in the education and that is because
of this breakdown.
Mr Allen: To answer your question
directly, Chairman; yes, there are inextricable connections between
poverty, social deprivation and the outcomes sometimes 16 years
later in respect of crime, but also in respect of educational
under-achievement, aspiration to work, people who have spent a
lifetime on benefits. All these things can be broken into if—and
I am sure that Members of Parliament will understand this—we
get intergenerational casework from grandpa, to pa to son et cetera.
It really is an intergenerational problem and if we can break
into those families and give the babies, the children and the
young people a possible future and way forward then not only will
we tackle antisocial behaviour and criminality, but many of the
other social ills. For us in Nottingham—and speaking here
not as a Member of Parliament but as the Chair of the Local Strategic
Partnership who set the ambition for Nottingham to be an early
intervention city—our view is that if you give a baby, a
child and a young person social and emotional capability, the
ability to interact, the ability to learn, listen, to resolve
arguments without violence, if you give a child those things,
which most of us get from our parents, then you will end up with
a rounded and capable person and a rounded and capable person
is highly unlikely to fall into criminality, antisocial behaviour,
drug taking, alcohol abuse, low educational aspiration, et cetera.
So in many senses what we have attempted to do in Nottingham is
to ensure by the 16 policies from zero to 18 that we are giving
each child the opportunity to make the best of itself, and if
you can do that—and the Chief Executive of the Crime and
Drugs Partnership Alan Given will tell you a bit more precisely
the actual results that we have managed to obtain in Nottingham—then
I think you are giving that child a great start. The reason I
think that this is now evermore important is because if you intervene
late you spend vast amounts of money with very little effect;
if you intervene with a quarter of a million pounds a year on
a deeply intensive anti-drug programme that is far less effective
than dealing with youngsters—and I could say that we probably
get to most youngsters in Nottingham—for a comparable amount
of money that it takes to get three people off drugs 16 years
later.
Q279 Chairman: We will come to those
points later.
Mr Allen: We will reference that,
but what I am saying is that it is very much cheaper, very much
more effective and in a time of economic constraint I think we
have actually started to develop a new economic model which will
help all parties overcome the deficit that we are currently looking
at because a little bit of investment early will save billions
and billions of pounds fire fighting in ten or 16 years' time.
Mr Given: I do not have much to
add to anything that has already been said by Mr Duncan Smith
and Mr Allen.
Q280 Chairman: We will come on to
Nottingham in particular later, but if you have anything to add.
Mr Given: There are two things
worth adding in there. Firstly, I spent 32 years in the Police
Service before going to Nottingham and anyone who has spent any
time in the Police Service will tell you that they know where
the difficulty is going to come from; they worked with difficult
families and they know that the children of those families were
very likely to be difficult in the future, and you will hear story
after story where a police officer has dealt with the grandfather,
the father and the son and/or daughter and other siblings of the
same families. So it should not be a surprise to us—we know
where we should be working. The other thing to stress is that
we work with partners in Nottingham around early intervention
but, even there, there are some misconceptions and I try and make
the point regularly that early intervention is different to early
reaction. People often say, "What we will do is bring this
programme much earlier into somebody's offending behaviour"
or, "We will deal with them as soon as it happens rather
than wait three months." That is reacting early to the same
problem and people often think that is early intervention. Early
intervention for me is getting right ahead of that problem, getting
right to the front end of the sausage machine where we know the
volume is going in and working with a cohort of people that we
know the difficulties are going to come from. It may not be every
young child in the city—although we would like to do that—but
we know that from certain areas of Nottingham city we are going
to pick up a cohort of people who are going to cause us difficulty
in the future and we should be working with all of them in an
effort to catch the few who may become difficult later on.
Chairman: Thank you. We will come back
to all these points with our questions.
Q281 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Allen, in your
book you talk about the expanding dysfunctional base in society
but can you give us an idea of the scale of it? Can you give us
an idea of the numbers that you would categorise within that?
And, perhaps more importantly, how many of that number are actually
receiving early intervention or family intervention at the moment?
Mr Allen: I think the last part
of your question, Mr Prosser, is easier to answer than the first.
Not many are receiving what I would term early intervention. There
are some fantastic experiments, as it were, going on in the city
of Nottingham; Birmingham with its Prudential Borrowing, Northern
Ireland with its PATHS Programme; excellent work in devolved assemblies,
may I say, both in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Parliament
in Scotland that has a White Paper out; and the Isle of Wight
is doing excellent work with Groups of Empathy. There is lots
of good work but it is sporadic and one of the things I would
like to see would be all political parties agreeing that we should
pool this knowledge—bring that knowledge together in a national
policy assessment centre of the sort they have in America. In
terms of your question, a little more directly in terms of how
many, I would refer back to the work done by Bruce Perry in America
where he says that if you are looking at a percentage of people
in this at risk group—as currently being, I think 5% to
10%—that in three generations because this group have their
children earlier and faster then on average it will go up to about
25%. I think it was in three generations. So there is a really
serious public policy agenda question here to address: do we tax
people ever more to pay for the police officers and the magistrates'
courts and the drug/drink rehab to combat that sort of level?
Or do we take a different turning and actually start, as Mr Given
said, to cut off the supply by early intervention both at a volume
level, by which I mean things like the social and emotional aspects
of the learning programme which every primary child does in Nottingham;
the 11 to 16 life skills, which every teenager goes through in
the city of Nottingham now; the Family Nurse Partnership, which
is 0-2, with health visitors intensively helping mums and their
babies; and Sure Start, of course, which is well established in
Nottingham. Those volume things with some very specific things
assist the children of prolific and persistent offenders; the
early mentoring scheme, which does not wait until a child is 16
and gone wrong but goes to the eight year olds and nine year olds.
A whole range of very specific things—the children who have
suffered trauma because of witnessing domestic violence who need
help really quickly if they are not to be completely traumatised.
So there is a whole range of possibilities there and I think that
if we deploy those and, above all, if we go to scale, if Government
take this seriously—of all political complexions—rather
than have isolated experiments then I think we will actually be
able to make a very strong difference to the numbers of people
who are coming through the system, who do not have the social
and emotional capability to make the best of themselves. That
gift is, I believe, in every human being and if we can just release
it with the right sort of parenting skills and the sorts of programmes
I have described then I think we will save, as I mentioned, billions
and billions of pounds and have a much happier and less dysfunctional
society.
Q282 Mr Streeter: The Prime Minister
actually gave you an answer the other day which suggested 50,000
"households of chaos", I think he called them. Did you
agree with that number? Where did he get it from, do you know?
Mr Allen: I have no idea. As far
as I am concerned I was delighted that the Prime Minister recognised
this as an issue and I was also delighted, may I say, Mr Streeter,
that you came in and equally asked a very important question of
the Prime Minister. I think the fact that leaders of political
parties—the Prime Minister, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg, who
Iain Duncan Smith and myself have met on this issue on a strictly
non-partisan basis—are all now very, very close to adopting
not just bits of the policy mechanism and trying to find the magic
bullet, but I think they are actually quite close to looking at
early intervention as a philosophy and as a vision, which we can
certainly do in our city of Nottingham. You pinpointed I think
the fact that we are all quite close to actually having this as
a sea change in the way that we deal with problems of dysfunction
in society.
Q283 Mr Streeter: Predicting which
young children will turn to crime—we have heard a bit about
that all throughout the morning. Obviously I totally support that
but to get the balance right between intervening, helping them
and stigmatising, could you speak to that, please?
Mr Duncan Smith: I agree with
everything that Graham said just now, but I would draw your attention
on page 51 (of our book on early intervention) to the Dunedin
Study. One of our recommendations is that we carry out a proper
study here which has never been done and I cannot understand why.
The Dunedin Study in New Zealand is absolutely unequivocal. Over
a period of time where they looked and identified the at risk
families—and that is the key, we have termed them as "at
risk" and they are children at risk—you will find that
when they followed up at age 21 the at risk boys had two and a
half times as many criminal convictions as the group deemed not
to be at risk. The people that were identifying them were not
stigmatising, they were simply looking at them and their behaviour
in a not particularly long assessment either, by the way—of
the people they marked out as in difficulty subsequently, 21 years
later, they had two and a half times as many convictions as the
not at risk group. There is a lot more that can be said but I
raise that issue. The second thing is that I draw your attention
to page 47 of our work which talks about the brain's capacity
for change versus public spending and you will see hugely there
that our public spending programmes are tilted at the far end
of the development cycle and very little at the front end. Our
reaction to the Prime Minister's answer about 50,000 at risk children
is that you take anything that you can get hold of when a Prime
Minister tells you that. The truth is that if you look at Perry's
10% of society figures, you would be looking more in the order
of six million individuals. So it is more than 50,000, obviously;
but, frankly, it is important that each of the political leaders
understands this issue as being vitally important. In supporting
everything that Graham has said I have to say that if you asked
me what is the number one thing that any Government, incoming
or continuing, should say if they want to really make an impact,
it is that early intervention is vital—there is no question
now from America, from New Zealand and everywhere else that we
have to tackle this.
Mr Allen: If I can answer very
quickly on your two points. Stigma—can I say that I do not
think we recognise that concept in Nottingham because the people
we deal with want the help? Those mothers love their children
as much as we love our own children and if you can say, "I
can give you a health visitor who can help you raise your child
in the right way and help you to learn" mums are falling
over themselves to join the Nurse Family Partnership. We actually
do not have the capacity currently to take all the mums who would
like to use it. Secondly, who are they? Who is this group? I think
that every Member of Parliament can tell you 20 or 30 families
that should be in the group; and your councillors, your head teachers
who say, "Little Johnny is only five but unless we get some
help for him he is going to be one of those." The same with
health professionals. Mr Given is more expert in this than I am
but I think that data tracking, actually getting the group of
people pretty early on, knowing who they are and knowing how to
supply the help they need when they need it is one of the key
things to crack in a local partnership, and that is why I think
our success in Nottingham has been that this is not just a police
matter but we have the health service, we have business, we have
the third sector, we have children's services all at the same
table—at the One Nottingham table.
Q284 Mrs Dean: You obviously put
most of the blame on parents. How much blame should be attached
to the education system or wider community breakdown?
Mr Duncan Smith: Can I just take
issue with the word "blame"? What we are doing here
is in no way trying to blame parents. The fact is that some of
the parents we are talking about are the product themselves of
an incredibly dysfunctional upbringing, so they do not know any
better; and in many of these cases these women have been abused
and so they are passing on incredibly damaged lives to their children.
So the word "blame" is a word that I would certainly
shy away from because it does not fit within the category of what
we are trying to achieve. What we are asking them to do is to
identify at risk children and recognise that first of all. The
answer to your question, how much is it parents and how much is
it education, the whole point about the studies that have been
made and the work that has been done shows that the critical period
for intervention in the child's life is in the first three years.
So clearly the person or persons that are most likely to be involved
in their child's life at that point are the parents and/or grandparents—ie:
extended family. So the issue here is not about blaming them,
it is about saying that they are the group—if you can get
to them early enough and work with them and their children—then
it is through those parents and their children that you will change
the children's lives. But then Graham has also written in the
paper that of course they did not come via some immaculate conception,
you have to go back, because of course that parent himself or
herself became a parent early, and those parents becoming parents
early has been part of the problem and it goes on. So you have
to cycle back to try and stop that process happening before it
begins to get older parents. Again, I refer you to the Dunedin
Study and I wish and hope that you will have a good chance to
look at this because what is fascinating is the ability for them
to predict now on the back of what was happening then. I talked
about the boys committing crime but actually of those girls that
had conduct disorders 30% of the at risk conduct-disordered girls
had become teenage mothers where there had not been a single teenage
birth of the conduct-disordered girls but from the not at risk
group. So, in other words, in identifying the at risk group you
can see exactly who is going to be continuing this pattern of
dysfunction later on. Also fascinating, of that conduct-disordered
at risk teenage mothers group, 43% were in abusive, violent relationships,
intriguingly having found their partners from the within male
at risk group identified. So a fascinating link—that they
were selecting fathers and the father of their next child was
drawn hugely from the at risk group who themselves would be passing
dysfunctional behaviour down that chain. It was interesting because
before the study was even completed it was able to conclude that
immature mothers with no strong parenting skills and violent partners
had already given birth to the next generation of at risk kids.
So the point that we are simply making is that the reason for
focusing at this stage on the 0-3 children is because that is
the critical period of brain development and from which they will
derive all of their capacity to cope and change and learn. Yes,
schools play a part, nurseries play a part but by the time a child
gets to nursery at four years' old with some of those children
the amount of money that you will have to spend on that child
to rectify this dysfunctional behaviour is enormous and it is
a real question mark whether you can exact major change. So it
is not about blaming, it is about getting to them and saying,
"This is the critical path here, at 0-3."
Q285 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Duncan Smith,
the Government's Cutting Crime strategy does talk about early
interventions to a degree. How much have they picked up on your
joint thinking and how would you describe the biggest gap between
the two approaches?
Mr Duncan Smith: First of all,
can I say—and I know that Graham will want to say something
about this—that I know within the hurly-burly of politics
and the run-up to an election that one Party can never say anything
good about the other. So let me break that by saying I think that
credit where credit is due to the Government, the Sure Start stuff,
the definition of early intervention early on was the right thing
to do; it was in the right direction and I think that the Government,
the Labour Government coming in took a step in the right direction.
For me the concern about Sure Start is not that it is a problem
but other things started to be loaded into Sure Start in some
areas, like childcare, and it started to become more self-selecting.
So the basis of what it is doing is right. But the question really
ultimately is recognising the sheer scale of this. That is a big
challenge to the present Government and a big challenge to the
others. So when we look at the work that we are recommending it
is the scale of that, the need now to do this stuff in a very
joined-up way; to recognise that just Sure Start alone in that
sense is not going to work but what we need to do now is to recognise
that there are a whole series of other programmes that we need
to centre around it and one of the areas that we recommended was
to start recognising the need for things like family hubs where
there are a whole variety of other options available. We need
to be able to increase dramatically the number of people in the
community—nurses, health visitors—who will go out
and identify the at risk groups. We need much more recognition
in advance of the at risk groups and then getting out to them
to bring them in, because if it is still self-selecting, these
are the groups that will never come near authority. So that has
to change. I think the Government has recognised that but the
question is scale, about capacity to do it, about money. So what
we are advancing here is a real step-change in what we are doing
now, starting from the good base but really expanding it.
Mr Allen: Could I just add that
this is not the property of one Party and never can be. If you
are talking about intergenerational change clearly we cannot have
one Party come in and then ditch what everybody else has done.
To an extent there is the Swedish model where if you have done
it for 40 or 50 years it becomes part of the climate anyway. So
I think it is very important that we do seek to establish a consensus
on this so that this lasts. If you are going to make intergenerational
change it must itself be over a generation. Finally, all Governments,
all Parties find it very hard to change, particularly this massive
Public Sector Leviathan that is there to pick up all the pieces
and pretty ineffectually and very expensively. There are lots
and lots of people with futures tied up in their big budgets and
their big staffs and some are not too keen on saying "We
will take a tiny slice of that and actually start to reduce and
deflate that enormous balloon at the long end of the spectrum."
So everyone feels like that regardless of Party and that has to
change in all Parties too.
Q286 Mrs Dean: A lot of the evidence
you base your early intervention policies on comes from America.
How easy is it and to what extent will that directly transfer
to the UK context?
Mr Allen: It is a great pity that
we are not sitting here talking about lots—I have mentioned
some of the UK examples but there should be lots more and I think
that is another debate, in a sense, about how we free up particularly
local government and our devolved settlement, and I think we would
get a lot more. The US has a constitutional settlement that bubbles
up lots of different ideas from lots of different levels. But
we have to be really careful in just transposing something from
the US. It is possible to learn and a classic example is the Nurse
Family Partnership, which has been rolled out now on the fourth
wave—there are about 50 cities now that have this intensive
health visiting for teen mums and their babies. The person who
invented that, David Olds, insists on what he terms "fidelity"
to the scheme, so that the evidence base is intact, which is quite
sensible. There is other stuff: for example, what is the best
value for money programme rather than us all inventing our own
and having pet schemes, where the University of Colorado took
7000 federal programmes, involving bullying, drug taking and emotional
development, to distil them into 12—take the best 12 blueprints.
Similarly, in Washington State Steve Aos takes programmes for
the Washington State Legislature and does: what does a dollar
save you or what does a dollar cost you? He has pointed out a
number of programmes that cost you more than they save, and he
is saying ditch those. So there are theories about how this works
which we can bring to the UK but we also need to make sure that
much of this, like the SEAL Programme and the 11-16 Life Skills,
et cetera, are home grown to meet UK needs.
Q287 Mrs Dean: How can you assess
the impact of such policies when they reach the next generation?
Mr Duncan Smith: Can I pick this
up, because Graham mentioned it? What we agree on and what I want
to work on now is a change for Government, which is accepting
some limitations of any Government. If you look at what is going
on in Washington State, what is most interesting there is not
the absolute transferability of what they are doing in programme
work but it is actually the concept that they have created over
there, which is that they have set up an office independent of
the legislature, rather like the Audit Office in the sense that
it is completely independent. The difference is that his office
looks at programmes prior to their implementation and is set up
to adjudicate whether or not any programme has a return on investment
which is positive. So, in other words, this gets you to the point
of saying: from all the evidence that has been produced do we
believe that that group will actually end up saving the state
money—let us say Nurse Family Partnership or like Roots
of Empathy or the SEAL Programme or whatever—and they calculate
any savings to give a bottom line figure; it is pretty hardnosed
stuff. And if it is a positive ROI, then basically they say to
the legislature, "As far as we are concerned that programme
can be implemented." Then they go further, they adjudicate
the implementation; rather like Ofsted they will go in and if
it is changed they will recommend cutting the programme. So fidelity
is absolutely critical; discipline in the Civil Service and at
local government is something that we really could and should
look at doing because too often Governments of all persuasion
under pressure create some programmes, thump them in, put money
behind them and say that will be fine; but they have not looked
at it properly and it ends up costing us money with no tangible
saving—and there are plenty of things we can look at, whichever
political Party has been in. With this organisation that process
should eventually cease and what you should be able to say is,
"When we initiate a programme, beyond reasonable doubt we
believe that that will actually save us money." Because after
all, getting kids and changing their lives should save money on
unemployment, on education, on crime, all the way down the line.
That has to be calculate, but should be possible even over as
short a time as a five-year period.
Mr Allen: They have just dropped
two prison-building programmes from their programme, so they have
saved several million dollars as a consequence and that several
million will be reinvested in other things.
Mr Duncan Smith: They recommended
that signing on at Job centres—driven by the political cry
of "Sign on every week" for unemployed people—they
came to the conclusion that it saved not a penny and in fact it
cost money as a result of the extra staff required, so that was
dropped. So that is how they work—independently.
Chairman: Mr Prosser has a question to
Mr Given on Nottingham.
Q288 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Given, from
your perspective how does One Nottingham differ from other strategic
partnerships and what challenges have you had to overcome in order
to get all of your partners working together and pushing in the
right direction?
Mr Given: One Nottingham is the
overarching partnership for the city. I am the Chief Executive
of the Crime and Drugs Partnership, which is one of the themed
partnerships that report into One Nottingham. There are a number
of challenges associated with trying to bring the partners around
the table, but most of that can be offset by showing those partners
that their contribution to a particular agenda will help their
own agenda. For example, in the National Health Service, a reduction
in crime prevents them being overloaded at A&E on a Friday/Saturday
night, and bed space et cetera. There is a lot that partners can
do to help. In terms of the partners themselves, they need to
know that if they are going to get involved in an agenda like
this something has to be paid off to them at the other end, and
we know that a crime costs society on average £2,000—the
Home Office figures. Some are much more and some are less but
the average is £2,000. Some of that goes into the health
service and some of that goes into sick time off work, some of
it in transport costs, et cetera; it is wrapped up in investigation,
and the other bits are associated with the crime being committed.
But £2,000 is the average. There has been a reduction in
Nottingham city of about 40,000 crimes over the last four years
or so. That represents a saving to society of about £70 million—£68
to £70 million. I appreciate that that does not go into somebody's
bank account somewhere; it is not a bottom line on a budget somewhere,
so people do not necessarily feel the benefits of that reduction,
but they sure as eggs are eggs feel the pain of crime going up.
Everyone feels pressure on their budgets as crime goes up. So
it is felt one way and not the other. What I think we need to
do with our partners is to find a way of taking some of that money
that either comes from Central Government to some of those other
agencies or departments, or directly from Central Government,
take some of that £70 million and put it at the front end,
so that we can start to manage some of these difficult people
that we are coming across. If you speak to any police officer
they will talk about a problem-solving triangle of victims, offenders
and locations. We do that and we have driven crime down in Nottingham
city—I have a couple of graphs here that I can share with
you later on—and the crime in the city is dropping like
a stone. But everyone will know that there is a plateau to that.
We will get to the point now where it becomes very, very difficult
and so we will have to do something different. There is more to
be had but the something different will be about early intervention;
it will be about getting to the front end of these problems and
preventing some more of these issues. So I would say take some
of that money from the front end, get partners to engage, get
them to show that it is a part of their business, get them to
understand that crime reduction for society is of benefit to all
of those agencies, which we have managed to do in Nottingham city—they
do accept that—and then get them to engage with something
like an early intervention programme.
Mr Allen: I would say that as
Chair of One Nottingham for four years, with a budget of around
£15 million only £3 million to £4 million each
of those years was spent on early intervention. So what we have
managed to achieve, even over four years in one city, costs no
more than £16 million. As I have said, if you bang up a 16-year
old in a secure unit for a year that is a quarter of a million;
so effectively for the same price as 60-odd children being banged
up we have a complete panoply of 0-18 of policies that will actually
influence thousands of young people to develop their full potential.
Chairman: Mr Duncan Smith, we did note
the fact that you were in a tower block last night as part of
the Channel 4 suggestion, so you are really taking a practical
interest in this. We were sorry to hear about the illness of your
wife; on behalf of the whole Committee we hope that you will pass
on our best wishes to her and we hope she gets better as soon
as possible. Mr Allen, Mr Given and to you, Mr Duncan Smith, we
are extremely grateful to you for the evidence you have given
today, for your book and for your continued interest in this area.
Certainly you have made sure that Parliament recognises how important
early intervention is and I can assure you that we will look at
what you have said with great interest when we publish our report.
Thank you very much.
|
