UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 242-iiiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
THE GOVERNMENT'S APPROACH TO CRIME PREVENTION
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, 45 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 3LT Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Home Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Keith Vaz, in the Chair
Mr James Clappison
Mr Janet Dean
Gwyn Prosser
Martin Salter
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
________________
Memorandum submitted by Home Office
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Sebastian Conran, Home Office Design and Technology Alliance, and Mr Jack Wraith, Telecommunications United Kingdom Fraud Forum, gave evidence.
Q215 Chairman: Good morning. I would refer everyone present to the Register of Members' Interests, where the interests of all members of the Committee are registered. This is an inquiry into crime prevention. We are looking at the Government's initial phrase: "Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime," and we are assessing what the Government has done in respect of crime prevention over the last 13 years. Welcome to Sebastian Conran and Jack Wraith, both of whom are involved in this area. We have looked at the intervention by the state. Your role today is to give us evidence about other aspects of crime prevention, specifically designing out crime, and we are hopeful that you will give us particular examples of what you have done to try and design out crime. I will start with a question to both of you. Are there examples of areas where crime can be designed out, therefore ensuring that the opportunity to commit crime is not before those who wish to become criminals?
Mr Conran: Without a doubt. When designing products and designing services and the way things work, we can put in anticipatory features, with benefits and consequences, at an early stage of their conception.
Q216 Chairman: Are the benchmarks cost benefits? Are they linked to statistics or figures which show there has been a reduction of crime in a particular area? How do you know that what you are doing in designing out crime is successful?
Mr Conran: There will be evidence. We are halfway through a process where we are analysing where the problems are, gathering information, understanding what the problems are, synthesising concepts for dealing with those problems and then looking to implement them. We have some early examples to demonstrate how this works, if you would be interested.
Q217 Chairman: Thank you. We will certainly look at those examples as the session progresses.
Mr Wraith: To give you a comparison: in the late 1990s we had handsets which contained security aspects which could very easily be manipulated by just about anyone; today we have handsets which make that manipulation, not impossible, because of the way the unit is designed, but certainly a lot more challenging technically. As you will see as we go on during the morning, we have introduced a number of security measures within the handset, based around something which is called the International Mobile Equipment Identity number, or IMEI, and it is the IMEI which gives the unit a unique identity. The UK have very much led this particular initiative in getting both the handset manufacturers and the GSM Association, both global organisations, to make the IMEI as robust and as secure as possible, thus enabling us on the backend of that to be able to do security types of activity against those particular units.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q218 Martin
Salter: In your view where does the current risk lie
in terms of products or services that are most vulnerable to criminal
exploitation? Is it credit cards? Is it accessing details online? I have had my credit card skimmed twice now:
once as a result of a purchase online and once as a result of a purchase at a
garage. Is it copying, for example, with
innovative products immediately being sent across to
Mr Conran: Identity theft is a key area. About 800,000 phones a year are stolen, and 80% of users carry personal information on them and 18% keep their bank details on them as well. This highlights the focus on mobile phones. We are looking at quite a few non-technical areas, like alcohol-related crimes, and at fairly low-tech things, like designing safer kitchen knives, and at setting standards of best practice in housing design as well. The high-tech hot product area is an opportunity for crime that we should anticipate, but it is just one of five streams that we are looking at.
Mr Wraith: My answer would be: all of the above. There will always be theft and there will always be people who will target items which they can sell on or use in an illegal way. It is very, very difficult to prevent that. The position the industry has taken is to accept that will happen and to see what we can do after that event to mitigate the impact of someone losing the phone or someone losing the credit card. Most of the procedures and the processes that we have put into place are geared towards that. Education of the consumer is a very important area which is often overlooked. We have seen consumers change their attitude quite significantly over the years. The current economic climate has seen a change in the way people treat their personal possessions. They are more likely to take much more care, consciously, of their mobile phone than they would have done, say, five or six years back. There has been a change in attitude since we have introduced the smart phone. As Sebastian has indicated, there are phones now which are holding a lot of personal details, and people are conscious of that. They are conscious of the various adverts, the educational aspects of identity theft. They have made them aware, and in fact sometimes have gone a little too far and put them in fear. There is always this balance of trying to educate people without making them too fearful of using the product, and so getting the best out of the product as it was designed to be.
Martin Salter: Thank you, Chairman.
Q219 Mrs Dean: Could you tell us where the demand for designing out crime tends to come from? Is it from the consumer or the manufacturer? Is it from police forces, local authorities, or even the Government?
Mr Conran: In the case of business, there is a bit of a paradox: if a product is stolen, there is a displacement sale for the business. Although initially business may seem to benefit inadvertently from a theft, the reality is that, as the thief becomes more sophisticated, he will begin to target business itself and so that will be self-defeating. Another issue is that, as people become more aware of the benefits of crime-resistant design, it will become a sales benefit and a feature that people will look for, in the same way that maybe environmental issues have now become features that people are conscious of and for which there is a demand. There is probably a similar paradigm to follow with designing out crime as has happened with the popularity of environmental issues.
Mr Wraith: It comes from two main areas. One is the consumers themselves, who are looking for an article or an item or a product which they feel they can operate in a safe environment. It also of course comes from the manufacturers, who are looking for that niche market in order to get ahead of the competition. We have seen a move within the market-place of using safety as a marketing tool, where, again, if one goes back ten or 15 years that was never the case. People would never mention the safety; it would be at the back of the pamphlet, in annex whatever. There is now much more encouragement to put that upfront and to say what the security aspects of the item are. If one takes the iPhone as an example, one can set the iPhone up so that if it is illegally accessed a number of times it will automatically wipe the information that is therein.
Q220 Mr Streeter: How do people go about the process of designing out crime? Who do you speak to? Obviously the police, consumers, experts - but would you talk us through the process.
Mr Conran: The methodology is to identify the problem, either through historical statistics, engaging with law enforcement. We have criminologists. Gloria Laycock - from whom you will be hearing later, I believe - has been identifying crime patterns and trends directly with Merseyside Police, and this seems to have been successful. Also, by anticipating social and technological changes, which are driven by cause and effect, we seek to understand what opportunities there are for the criminal, how the criminal will try to take advantage of these trends, and the ramifications and the issues that arise from them. Then we will seek to engage with experts, with professionals in the field (for instance, communications technologists), and look to develop robust solutions which are also convenient and usable to the customer. We do not want fortress products; we want products which are engaging and useful to use, which people will feel safer with, as Jack was saying earlier. We seek to validate these through testing and quantifying the results, and we then implement action through establishing best practice and policy and inspiring business - both the manufacturers and, most importantly, the retailers, because it is the retailers who will drive the manufacturers.
Mr Wraith: Over the years, we have tried
to listen to the consumer and take on board what the consumer has been telling
us with respect to design. This is in
all age groups. Over the years, we have
held a number of workshops with very young people and we have had some very
good ideas in that respect. We have held
workshops with people who are directly concerned with the security of the
product and we have had feedback in that respect. The challenge is feeding those ideas into the
manufacturing chain, because, inevitably, that is outside a national
focus. We have had a varying degree of
success: what we have wanted to be taken on board has not always been taken on
board. That is where market forces come
into play. A global market-place, when
it comes to mobile phones, is very much where manufacturers want their
focus. If it is something which is
Q221 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Wraith, you have told us this morning, in effect, that there will always be theft and there will always be misbehaviour and perhaps the best we can do is to reduce the impact of theft. Does that mean we are never going to be keeping up with the game?
Mr Wraith: No, I think we are keeping up with the game. The British Crime Survey of last year would show that mobile phone robberies have maintained a very low percentage, as for the previous year, despite a fairly significant increase in the number of mobile phones which are in the market-place. One has to be realistic: there will always be thefts. Whilst there is that level of crime against the person, be it a burglary or be it an individual, the robber is not going to leave a device which will enable the person to alert the authorities of what has occurred, so there will always be that theft. There will always be theft with young people which has a lot more other social aspects to it, in terms of bullying and the like. How do we mitigate that beyond the point of it occurring? That is where the blocking of handsets comes in. That is where the educational aspect for young people comes in. Since 2003, year-on-year, we have had an annual project in conjunction with the police and the Home Office to educate young people within the school environment/within the youth club environment of the dangers of mobile phones and how to be more mature in the use of mobile phones.
Q222 Gwyn Prosser: Martin Salter mentioned that he has twice had the details of his card cloned or stolen. I have never had that experience, thank goodness, but I once had my mobile phone snatched out of my hand in the high street. In those days - and I speak as a lay person - there was the feeling that, although I reported the theft immediately, the Sim card or the phone itself could be used. There was then a discussion, was there not, between the likes of yourselves and the manufacturers to take on your recommendations for stricter controls? If that were to happen today, what immediate benefit would there be to the person who stole my phone?
Mr Wraith: If a phone is stolen, once the network is informed - and that is the key: the network must be informed - the Sim card will be disabled almost immediately. Under the agreement we have with the Home Office, that home network has 24 hours to disable the handset on its own network and to pass that information to the other networks for them to be able to action it in the following 24 hours. I personally have the responsibility of running an independent test each year against those networks, to ensure that they meet the criteria which the Home Office has laid down in what is called the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum Charter, which says that 80% of all phones must be disabled within 24 hours on their home network and within 48 hours on the other networks. You might be thinking, and I would not blame you, "Why does it take so long?" Quite simply, it takes so long because the initial contact with the home network will disable the account, and that is not a problem, but we must then ensure that the IMEI, which we are now going to use in a security function, is the correct one. In order to do that, we must go back into the network to find out what unit was being operated by that Sim card at the time of the reported theft or loss. That may take some time, because the network might not feed that information down to a terminal where it can be fed into for four or five hours. We have to allow that to happen, and, once that IMEI is identified, then the unit, the actual handset, is disabled on the home network and it is that information which is passed, in the case of the United Kingdom, to the other four networks via a central platform which is operated globally by the GSM Association. They will then use that information to populate their own networks, so that within 48 hours that handset will not work. We have found that the mere fact that that is in operation, the knowledge that that is in operation, has cut down on a lot of the types of handset sales that used to go on on a Friday night in the pub or a Thursday night in the pub, because people know that, yes, the phone might work if it has just been stolen outside, but come Monday morning it will not work. We have had that impact. We would like to improve on those times and we are under constant pressure by the Home Office to do so.
Gwyn Prosser: Thank you very much.
Q223 Mr Winnick: Would it not be a realistic viewpoint to take that the criminals will always try to increase their game? They will find new ways. Criminal gangs will certainly use all the intelligence that they have - too much on many occasions - to commit the sort of crimes we have been talking about. It is a matter of trying to catch up with them, and minimizing the harm which obviously they do, as well as the tremendous amount of commercial loss involved.
Mr Wraith: Yes, the criminal will always
try to exploit whatever situation, and they are much, much more flexible and
have been much more flexible in the past than some of the industries in their
response. For example, since the
blocking database was introduced in 2003, we have seen a shift in the way
mobile phones are disposed of after they have been stolen. We have seen the growing exportation from the
Q224 Mr Winnick: A constant battle.
Mr Wraith: Absolutely.
Q225 Chairman: I am a bit concerned and I think the Committee is that crime prevention is not the priority that it ought to be. If you buy a house after 1 January the vendor has to provide you with an Energy Performance Certificate. There is a huge concern about the environment, an important concern about the environment. As far as business is concerned, should there be more responsibilities put on business to ensure that they have buildings that will prevent crime occurring? Should there be much more of an onus placed on them by the Government to make sure that this happens?
Mr Wraith: I believe that is an unfair comparison. If one is buying a house, one is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. If one is buying a mobile phone, one might only be spending £30 or £40.
Q226 Chairman: I am not talking about mobile phones, but the cost to the taxpayer of crime runs into billions, does it not?
Mr Wraith: Yes.
Q227 Chairman: Do we know what the figure is? It runs into billions. Should we not be doing more? Mobile phone crime is just one aspect.
Mr Wraith: The cost of the unit and the competitiveness which there is in the global market-place means that ----
Q228 Chairman: But I am not talking just about mobile phones. I am talking more generally here, away from mobile phones to the general point that the cost of crime is enormous. Should there be a greater onus on business to be more responsible?
Mr Conran: As we heard the other day, the cost of fraud against the Government is £17 billion a year. That is not overall fraud; that is just the cost to government and the taxpayer. Housing is a very good point. You have picked up on a pet subject. In the HIPs report we had been working with CABE on looking at exploring the design and layout of new housing and housing developments to optimise safety and security. There are issues of security: too much security can compromise fire safety and exits and things like that. As I have said, we are working with the Committee for Architecture and the Built Environment to establish standards of best practice.
Q229 Chairman: Is there any research that suggests that a burglar alarm in a house or in a business is likely to deter somebody from breaking in? If you have a functioning burglar alarm, is it more likely that people will not try to break into your house? Is there any research that supports this?
Mr Conran: There is research. I do not have access to it at this very moment.
Q230 Chairman: What does the research tell us?
Mr Conran: Without a doubt, that having a functioning burglar alarm and one that is linked to the police response system will reduce your likelihood of being burgled. We have been lobbying to have a Home Security Assessment as part of the HIPs Report. The resistance, rather unbelievably, has been that if criminals come across this they will be able to access, through estate agents, which houses are vulnerable, and so we have to overcome that sort of resistance.
Q231 Chairman: You have some examples, I understand, of simple measures that people can take in order to reduce the level of crime.
Mr Wraith: Yes. I would like to draw your attention to a number of things. First of all, I have this particular pamphlet. When we started this campaign back in 2002/2003, the challenge was to educate the consumer.
Q232 Chairman: The leaflet will be passed around. Are there other examples?
Mr Wraith: There is also this item. When we started to educate the consumer on the importance of the IMEI number - which is contained within the mobile phone, normally underneath the battery and normally in very small print - we provided this type of item, in order for them to be able to magnify that number and read it off. It was another process of education.
Q233 Chairman: This is publicity material.
Mr Wraith: It is publicity and educational material. I will give them all to you.
Q234 Chairman: These are all leaflets, but are there any examples you can give us?
Mr Conran: Perhaps I could put a focus on violent crime. There are 87,000 violent incidents involving glass each year. The cost to the NHS for dealing in hospital with alcohol-related harm, including assault, is £2.7 billion a year. One issue is that current beer glasses are used as a weapon.
Q235 Chairman: Those in pubs and clubs, you mean?
Mr Conran: Yes, and bottles.
Q236 Chairman: You have one that is already broken.
Mr Conran: We have one here which is made of glass. It has been broken. It has an encapsulating film, so that the shards are contained and there is less likelihood of serious injury. We have been working on another one, which works a bit like a car windscreen, which will break into very small pieces.
Chairman: That is very helpful. It would be very useful for us have a look at that glass. Mr Conran and Mr Wraith, thank you very much for coming in to give evidence to us this morning. It has been extremely helpful. If there are any aspects of your evidence that you want to expand on, or any further information you want to provide, please do so before the inquiry is concluded.
Witness: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rod Jarman, Association of Chief Police Officers, gave evidence.
Q237 Chairman: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman, thank you very much for coming to give evidence this morning. This is an inquiry into crime prevention, how the Government has done in preventing crime rather than dealing with crime, and of course the mantle of greatness is given to those who win wars not to those who prevent wars. I want to know, to start with, how much of a priority for the police is crime prevention, as opposed to dealing with crime after it has occurred.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: If you go right back to Lord Peel and the beginning of policing in London and across the country, the focus has always been discussed as preventing crime being the primary object, and detecting crime when it has occurred being the secondary object of policing. An awful lot of what we do is around preventing crime. The last few years have seen a movement away from detection being the primary issue for policing into reducing the levels of victimisation and the levels of criminality, and that has worked through and such programmes as the local area agreements and the PSAs have moved the focus away from just what do we do when a crime has happened into how we work in partnerships to reduce crimes happening in the first place. In terms of a direction of travel, it is definitely where we have been going and definitely what we are focusing on. However, we are the part of the partnership, if you like, the part of the structure which is responsible for enforcement activity, and therefore a very large part of our role is about catching and putting before the courts those people who commit crime. It is part of the agenda to reduce crime and it would be wrong for us to not keep that focus.
Q238 Chairman:
There
was an article in The Times this week about the Scilly Isles. You may have seen it. It said that this is the most wonderful place
to live in the
Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Jarman: You need to have a model of what you mean by
crime prevention. From my specific
position, there are a number of strands within that. Some are giving straightforward advice and
assisting with the design of issues to prevent crime happening. The neighbourhood policing agenda is all
around increasing confidence and reducing the fear of crime. There is an awful lot of research which shows
that where you increase confidence and reduce fear, people comply more and
commit less crime, so there is a direct crossover. In
Q239 Chairman: A lot of what you have described are duties that could well be conducted by PCSOs going around to a person's house and advising them, "You need a burglar alarm" or "Are the windows secure?" et cetera. Giving a house a crime audit is something that can be done by someone who is not a police officer. You do not have to be a police officer to do this, but those are the structures that have been created over the last 12 years. We know how much time a police officer spends on bureaucracy. We know that. We know how much time they spend on the beat. We do not seem to know how much time is spent on crime prevention.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: If you take all those things I have described and then add onto that the arresting and detaining of offenders as being about preventing them from committing further crimes, almost all police activity - and I include in that all other parts of the organisation as well as police officers, so PCSOs and police staff - when it is not doing things like bureaucracy or when we are not hanging around for other things that we get involved with, is focused on preventing crime. My position would be that, once you take the bureaucracy out, almost everything is around preventing crime. If you want to look at how much time we spend on crime prevention advice, I do not have that measure - although, as an organisation, the Metropolitan Police would be able to provide it. Other forces may not be able to provide it.
Q240 Chairman: Do you have crime prevention officers in the Met? How many deal just with crime prevention?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: We have 96 crime prevention design analysts. We have 4,600 people within the neighbourhood policing teams who have had training to give advice around crime prevention. Then we have a very small number, a residue number, of about 20 specific crime prevention officers. There are reasons for the difference. For instance, you talked about alarms just now. For us to give professional advice around alarm systems and which ones would work in particular areas, the person giving that advice has to have a level of competence which is above normal. The vast majority of advice that we give is really about British Standard locks, shutting windows and doors, and those sorts of things.
Q241 Chairman: There is no doubt in your mind that if somebody has a burglar alarm on their house it acts as a deterrent.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: Absolutely no doubt in my mind, but there are a number of other things which act as a deterrent as well: the way that buildings are open to give natural surveillance; the way they are designed to prevent through-flow of people. For instance, cul-de-sacs are far less likely to be subject to crime than through roads. Private roads are less subject to crime. Where there is access from the rear of a property, that increases the risk of crime. There is a whole range of things which you can do, burglar alarms being definitely one. The previous evidence talked about advice. One of the key issues is that most crime happens opportunistically, and most crime happens because people have not shut doors/ have not locked windows.
Q242 Chairman: Something very basic. You are a distinguished police officer; you have been around for a long time. Our discussions are also focused on the causes of crime. If you had to pick off the top of your head the top three causes of crime, what would they be?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: If I start with violent crime: specifically over the last couple of years, we have seen a massive rise in the number of young people being involved in murder and being the victims of murder, and then getting back in control of that, if you like. The whole issues around violent crime are how people grow up from a very early age. There is a whole issue around the involvement of the health services and social services with very young people, neglect within families, support within young families. There is a whole series of issues around how safe young people are in primary, junior and secondary schools, how safe they feel, how supportive they are, and then there is a whole set of issues around where do they turn to for peer support. Do they turn to something constructive and positive, or do they turn to a group of people who are getting them involved in a sort of gang type network? That is the sort of framework. Around violence, it is that whole issue around the interconnectedness of all of the bits of the state and family that support people growing up. If you look at acquisitive crime, many of the same things apply. An awful lot of acquisitive crime is committed by young people. That is not to say all young people; in fact the minority of young people commit crime, but when you look at the peak offending age being 21, it is in that ten to 21 year age range that the majority of acquisitive crime is committed. The issues there are two-fold. One is around how to intervene in young people's lives, to deal with those who are going to commit one crime as they are growing up. They need a short, sharp shock of some description, part of which could just be being arrested and being addressed. The other part is about what are their family ties and connections, to prevent them going off the rails further. I suppose the third thing which we really ought to be focusing on is how we design buildings, premises and locations to reduce the likelihood of crime happening. You mentioned a little earlier whether there is any evidence of this working. Secure by Design is situational crime prevention. There is a lot of evidence showing that those places where those principles are being used are up to 60% less likely to have crime committed in them than those that are not. That whole thought about how we design new things is one of the issues that I think we ought to get a grip on.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q243 Gwyn Prosser: You have just told us about some of the agencies and initiatives in place which, with correct intervention, should reduce crime amongst young people. There are a lot of others, of course, including Sure Start and Children Centres and intervention with families. With all that going on, to what extent do police officers feel that all they can do is plug the gaps in those areas? You also talked about interconnectivity. Do you feel that there is the correct level of co‑ordination between all the agencies, all trying to do the same thing? How could it be improved?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: There are probably three levels to think about how we provide services in this area, if you want to use that terminology. The bits where I think we are well connected and where we work really well together is about the targeted provision of services to those people who are committing crime, who are already into that cycle. Most of those now, through youth offending teams, through youth projects, through the various arrangements, are well co-ordinated. At the very high level, for those people who are probably going into prison, who are having detention orders, I think it is well organised. The area where it becomes quite difficult for people to understand is at the sort of universal, provision-to-everybody type area. How do we all work together to assist all young people growing up? - if I may put it in that generic way. The police role quite often has been to fill the void in youth provision out-of-hours. We will have provision during schooling hours and quite often provision mid-week during the evenings, but on Friday and Saturday nights we have seen a lack of provision and young people hanging around on street corners, getting into trouble and creating that sort of emphasis for police intervention. That is the bit where, historically, and still at the moment, we have not been as tied up as we could be. I think the police have a real definite role in being the front end of joint services around those types of people, because we are the ones out on the streets in uniform identifying them, but I do not think we are always as capable as we need to be to intervene appropriately with them.
Q244 Gwyn Prosser: We have all heard stories from people of my age looking back at the time of their youth. If a policeman, a copper, came along the road, there was due deference and respect, et cetera, and just a few words would be enough to send you scampering. Today we hear stories from community support officers of some real-life attitudes, where young youths are being cheeky, at best, and insulting and abusive, at worst, without any sort of recourse taking place. What has happened in the meantime? I know it is a big question, but what is your view and with all your experience?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: I am still reeling at the Chairman's comment that I have been around a lot, so perhaps I am not the best person to comment on that. I think there is a very significant problem for young people in their interactions with the police. Many of the sorts of structures around society generate an environment where young people think they should challenge where they can push boundaries, where they can be cheeky, if you like. Without check, that being cheeky can lead into antisocial behaviour and then into violence. When they meet police officers and PCSOs, that is often the first time when they will meet someone who has to draw a line and say, "This cannot happen."
Q245 Gwyn Prosser: Because the line has not been drawn at home perhaps.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: Because I do not think the line is drawn enough in other places. That often puts us into a position of confrontation - and it is quite right, that is what we are here for, but that confrontation is exacerbated by the fact that the young people do not believe that the line has been drawn, and so a lot of our work is dealing with setting that boundary and enforcing that boundary and making it real, when other people, for a number of reasons, have not done that.
Gwyn Prosser: Thank you.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr Prosser. I cannot imagine you scampering away from anybody, including police officers.
Q246 Mr Winnick: Mr Jarman, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has requested or instructed - whichever is the appropriate word - police officers to go round singly in patrols. This has apparently caused some concern, although the point has been made by the Commissioner that, where clearly it would be inadvisable for there to be just one police officer, that will not occur. Can you let us in on what is the current situation?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: Single patrol is the default position for patrol in the Metropolitan Police Service. All patrols should start with an officer working on their own. There are two strong principles behind that. The first is that a risk assessment has to take place beforehand to make sure it is appropriate for officers to work on their own. Can they achieve their aims if they are on their own? Do they have the ability to patrol singly? The second is where they are in their training cycle, so a number of officers do not have independent patrol status because of the way we train at the moment, so they have to patrol with somebody else. When I joined the organisation - which was over 30 years ago - single patrol was the way we did business. Somewhere between 30 years ago and about two years ago, we had drifted into a way of working which meant that officers were always in pairs. For the vast majority of activity, the officers do not need to be in pairs. They can complete their tasks on their own. When we have surveyed - we have done borough by borough reviews of their frameworks around patrol - most boroughs have said the same thing, that, apart from a small number officers who are responding to emergency calls and officers who are working at particular times of day and in particular locations, almost everybody can patrol on their own. That is where we are moving to at the moment. We are having to rethink how we train people, because we have trained them for working in pairs. We are thinking about how they give evidence at court, because, again, they have got used to there being two of them. All of those things are things which we can overcome. We want our officers out on the streets, engaging with the public, talking to the public, making sure that they have that interaction which leads to good intelligence, and making sure that people understand that they can walk confidently and safely on the streets.
Q247 Mr Winnick: The report I saw indicated that there was a feeling that, apart from anything else, if two police officers are together they will inevitably be in conversation, and there will be a greater reluctance on the part of the public to come and speak to them if there is a problem. Is there any sort of substance in that?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: That seems to make sense to all of us who do this activity: if you are with somebody else, you will talk to that person and there is a barrier to overcome. The substance is probably academically not sound. It is just what we believe to be appropriate. We do know from talking to the public that the public feel safer in areas where they see more officers on patrol on their own. There could be a whole number of reasons behind that - probably because they are seeing more officers, but also because of the interaction.
Q248 Mr
Winnick: My constituency is not in a Metropolitan area,
it is in the
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: There is a whole range of things that have happened in the last two years. The Youth Crime Action Plan brought in some targeted provision on Friday and Saturday nights. It also brought in Operation Staysafe. It brought a focus on delivering services at the time that they were needed in the high crime areas. Our indications are that, in those areas where additional funds have been made available and, in particular, an additional focus has been made, there has been a decrease in the amount of antisocial behaviour and violence. I think, though, that there are so many complex things happening at the same time that it would be wrong to draw a conclusion that it was just that one element that made a difference. That is a really important element, but we also know that things like the provision of Kicks, a football engagement programme in high crime areas at the time when crime happens, having something which engages young people and takes them off the street and gets them doing something positive, makes a difference on crime. We know also that, where we have police officers working closely with young people on problem-solving, on the things that are causing problems and leading to crime, that has reduced crime in those areas. There are a number of different models which have all been brought in at the same time, unfortunately, so to unpick and say, "That's the one that made the difference," is really difficult, but our indication would be that it makes sense that that has happened and it has happened and led to reductions in crime.
Mr Winnick: Thank you very much.
Q249 Martin Salter: Mr Jarman, I am concerned about generational crime. I have stood in playgrounds in some parts of my constituency with the then area commander, who has pointed out to me kids whose fathers' grandfathers he has arrested and dealt with, where subsequent conversations with the teachers show already that generational pattern of behaviour continuing. How do we break that cycle?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: There is a huge amount of evidence about this, about the fact that the way that your family and your peers behave will affect the way that you behave. I do not know why we need a lot of evidence to drive that out, but we do have that. There are a number of things that have to happen. First off, not everybody who grows up in those families gets involved in crime. A big chunk of people who live in a family where they have had that generation will make the choice to go on a different path. The sorts of things that make a choice are where they are given options of things that provide them with, if you like, an alternative family. I am thinking of things like the Scouts, the Guides, the Military Cadets, those sorts of long-term engagements with young people that give them an alternate view to that coming from the family. That works. Working with the whole family programme at the moment is an interesting concept. It seems hugely expensive, this new plan, where in some places we seem to have an awful lot of people working with a family, almost man-to-man marking, if you like, and an independent worker coming in. I am not quite sure how that will work when they pull that independent worker out from the family. I think it is really important to look at the interfamily dynamics and how you work with them. Also, we just have to deal with those people who are committing crime and setting the standard. Where a parent is committing crime and setting the basis, we need to be seen to be taking that person before the courts and showing young people that there is not a gain from it. There is that mixture of things. I also think the whole concept of taking some young people away from their families, whether it is fostering or whether it is putting them into care, is something that we ought to be considering. One of the problems is that the outcomes for young people in care are so poor at the moment that that is not really a viable alternative, but if we could get that outcome different for that option, that would be a really important one in some cases.
Q250 Martin
Salter: We are working in
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: It is probably a number of things. One of them is getting them into a process over a long period of time where they are engaged with other people who set a series of values and expectations for them and enforce them.
Q251 Martin Salter: Those can be different values from those they might receive at home.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: From what is at home. The importance of sport or the arts or some activity is that that is what hooks young people - if you will pardon me sticking with hooking and fishing - into that behaviour in the first place, and once they are in there, that is the element that gets the slightly different dynamic. I also think these sorts of activities change aspirations for young people. When I was a borough commander in Southwark we surveyed lots of young people on what would make a difference to their lives. I remember one young boy who came to me afterwards and said, "The thing I would really like to do is to go fishing, but I haven't got a rod, I don't know where there is a river, and I don't know how to fish, so that's the end of that idea." That whole concept of generations of young people who may not have the aspiration to try these things unless somebody else sets up a programme which says "Come and have a go and get involved," is really important. Once you have changed the aspirations, they have got something to work for; whereas if they do not believe they can achieve anything, why would they buy into an education system, why would they buy into the state?
Martin Salter: The answer, of course, is the
River Wandle, and the charity is Thames21, which does a lot of work in
Chairman: As we keep explaining to Mr
Salter, we cannot all move to
Q252 Mrs Dean: To what extent have ASBOs been a successful tool in preventing more serious offending?
Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Jarman: If you just took ASBOs on their own, I would
probably not be supportive of them as a tool.
But I think they are a really important part of a range of
different interventions. There is a
project in
Q253 Mr Streeter: What is your experience of intervening with at-risk children over the 30 years that you have been a police officer? Do you think the current policy procedures are getting this right? If they are being removed to a place of safety, what then for the life chances of those children? What have you observed?
Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Jarman: The terrible outcomes of cases such as
Victoria Climbié have quite properly focused us on the very serious end of
child protection and have brought most of the joint agency working, looking at
how do we protect young people from serious abuse and sexual abuse. One of the downsides of that is our focus on
neglect and those young people who are at risk of a different type of failure. The Every Child Matters Agenda, the whole
concept of looking at outcomes, is a very good concept. That is exactly what we should be doing. I know operationally children's services
would say one of the problems from that is that they are getting far too many
cases referred to them for them to be able to intervene. Overall in
Q254 Mr Streeter: Have you come across anything in your experience to date which can turn a poor parent, a neglectful parent into a positive parent?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: I think again quite often we have large numbers of very young people trying to struggle with bringing up other young people and there are several initiatives across the country where there is support for young mothers particularly - because these initiatives tend to be focused on single parent families - and supporting them in helping them get their lives out of chaos makes a significant difference to the children and how the family grows up.
Q255 Chairman: You clearly give the Government ten out of ten as far as dealing with the consequences of crime because crime figures have gone down, the Government tells us. How many marks would you give them out of ten for dealing with the causes of crime?
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jarman: I would go back to the ten out of ten - probably I would only give them eight out of ten anyway! Crime has come down but I think we could always do a lot better than we have done at the moment. There is a lot more that we could address on that.
Q256 Chairman: So eight out of ten for dealing with crime. The causes of crime?
Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Jarman: I think we have seen over the past few years a
significant change in emphasis into the causes of crime and how we deal with
them. I think that the ability for me to
sit here and talk to you about young family intervention and understanding how
young people growing up leads to crime has only come because the agenda in the
public sector is about how do we work together, from pre-birth until adulthood,
on reducing the criminal aspects that might affect young people. So I think there has been a massive change in
the way that we work - a massive positive change. I do not want to give them a mark at all
actually because I realise I have got myself into trouble with the eight out of
ten. The point for me is not an issue of
have we dealt with this - we clearly have not dealt with it. We are in a very complex society with lots of
different pressures, both on individuals and on the community as a whole, which
lead to the crime and the criminality; and we are in a community that is
constantly changing. If you come into
the major cities across the
Chairman: Deputy Assistant Commissioner, thank you very much for giving evidence today.
Witness: Rt Hon Chris Huhne MP, spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, gave evidence.
Q257 Chairman: Thank you very much for giving evidence to us this morning. The Committee is looking at the issue of crime prevention, basically going back to the former Prime Minister's statement that this Government would be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. If we are to believe the opinion polls and there is a hung Parliament you could well be the Home Secretary in a hung Parliament. So you arrive there on your first day and what will a Liberal Democrat administration do in order to deal with the causes of crime?
Chris Huhne: Let me start by saying that our approach to cutting crime is relentlessly focused on what actually works and I think a lot of the debate that we have seen, particularly between the Conservative and the Labour Party, has been a debate about the severity of punishment, when we know from the evidence of the Home Office and indeed of international criminologists that punishment is actually the least effective variable and that we as policy makers have to tackle crime, compared, for example, with prevention measures and compared with detection. Roughly at the moment about one in 100 crimes in this country - if you take the British Crime Survey and you take business crime and you take crime not recorded by the British Crime Survey because it is of teenagers - actually ends up with a conviction in a court of law, from which it seems to me very clear that trying to change the severity of the punishment is very unlikely to have a serious deterrent effect. If we want a serious deterrent effect we need to work on prevention measures and on improving police detection. So our focus is very much on those two aspects - improving policing, more police on the beat and better policing and it is on prevention.
Q258 Chairman: If you were looking at the top three causes of crime why do people commit crimes? What do you think they are?
Chris Huhne: I noted that your previous
witness was talking about the fall in crime that has been going on in this
country now for a number of years. I
would merely point out to you, Mr Chairman and the Committee, that I think it
is absolutely crucial to put that in an international context. In every single Western European country,
except for one, which is
Q259 Mr Winnick: You say that there would be no credit to the Government, Mr Huhne?
Chris Huhne: On this I am shocked to say that there has been a very long period when we have not been doing this. I can remember - because I did model building not in this area but in other areas many years ago - that there was work on this in the 1970s and 1980s, which then appeared to stop. I am told that it is beginning to restart under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice; but it is time to do that.
Q260 Martin Salter: Mr Huhne, I am sorry that this relentless focus has not reflected back to your two Lib-Dem colleagues to actually turn up, and this is a poor turnout by us, I must admit. But my question is that there has been a lot of debate - and you heard it earlier - around focusing on causes of crime and particularly parenting and patterns of generational crime and criminality or tendency to crime and criminality as a result of young people taking negative role models from within the family. How do we break that cycle, Mr Huhne? There are some good programmes up and running but in my view they are a bit patchy - you can get a good service in one place and virtually no emphasis on this in others.
Chris Huhne: I do not think there is a single solution. It is fairly widely recognised - although more anecdotal than hard evidence, but I would certainly accept on the basis of anecdotal evidence - that you do get these cycles of criminality in much the same way as it is surprising on how many occasions you see children following their parents' particular job or particular profession. They see somebody earning a living and doing something and they tend to pick up the lessons of that and, sadly, that happens in families where parents have a criminal pattern of behaviour as well. One of the things that we clearly have to do is to work very hard on making sure that the prison system is not the college of crime that effectively it has become. We need to make sure that the work is there, that the training is there, that people are prepared for life outside much more effectively than they have been. So that works, if you like, at the parental level and the older level. I think that parenting orders certainly have a role to play and can be effective. I think that that ideally needs to happen early on. Early intervention in the education system to identify where there are problems - I am certainly very supportive of Sure Start, of Children Centres, of attempting to identify early on when a child is not being adequately parented. So I would tend to suggest that we have to work at a whole series of different levels but also to say that if a child begins fairly early on to go into a pattern of antisocial behaviour it is important to get there as quickly as possible with informal measures that do not in the first stage criminalise them. Involving the family in Acceptable Behaviour Contracts involving the family in that, trying to find the diversionary activities - youth centres, for example - we have mentioned the Youth Volunteer Force, which we would like to see piloted by local authorities that want to find diversionary activities for young people. So I am afraid that on a lot of these social issues there is not a simple silver bullet; there is a whole range of things that we need to do to try and break that cycle.
Q261 Martin Salter: Just one follow-up question - and I do not disagree with what you said - it seems to me that we are making up in many ways, either at school or in the criminal justice system or elsewhere, in the youth service, for often bad parenting or inadequate preparedness for life. That is a given. What is starting to emerge, probably in this Committee, are some concerns about the experience of first-time offenders in a custodial sentence - 70% if not more are reoffending. Does that not lead us to the conclusion that actually very short first-time custodial sentences are a total and utter waste of time, and if we have young people with drug problems or literacy problems or whatever then actually we have to give the prison estate time to put them on the relevant detox course, the relevant training course and the rest of it, and that actually means being perhaps a bit tougher in some circumstances; but also on the other hand making sure that the right people have the custodial sentence and not the wrong ones. I would really be interested in the Lib-Dem view on that.
Chris Huhne: I am completely sympathetic to that point of view. The figure that I had in my mind, actually, is even worse than the one you cite, which is that for young men serving their first custodial sentence the reoffending rate is actually 92%. If it is that high then frankly it is very clear that the custodial sentence has been completely ineffective. What is more, what we do not have - because we do not have the evidence base - I suspect that the reoffending is at a higher level, in other words it is more sophisticated, it is more trained, that the criminality is actually worse than it was for the offence when they went in; therefore, I do think that it is actually very important that we should be looking at those short sentences. As we know, there are alternatives in terms of non-custodial sentences. I think one of the reasons why magistrates are reluctant to use non-custodial sentences in these circumstances is because of worries about the way in which they are supervised and the increasing number of tales, which are not just urban myth, I fear, that effectively non-custodial sentences are not honoured and that they are so often breached that they effectively do not do what they are meant to do. But I think that if they do what they meant to do, if they are properly supervised, they are much more effective not least because we keep people who are going into first-time custodial sentences away from that college of crime aspect where they are effectively picking up tricks that we do not want them to pick up.
Q262 Mr Clappison: I was very pleased to hear what you said about training young people in prison, who sadly have to go to prison, because that is something that the Committee has come to time and time again and when we have visited prisons we have noticed the difference in regime and the difference in the constructive elements of the regime. Can I probe you a little on what you were telling us a moment ago about first-time offences - and this is an important point - that young people are sent to prison because the magistrates or the judges take the view that their offending is so serious that only a custodial sentence can be justified? Do you have any thinking as to where that line should be struck about seriousness? If you are saying that fewer people should be sent to prison then are you changing the line there?
Chris Huhne: I am not sure that I entirely accept your premise. As I said in my previous answer to Martin Salter, I think that in a lot of cases magistrates actually decide to use custodial sentences because there have been breaches particularly of non-custodial sentences and those breaches are, in many cases, because of lack of proper supervision, because the non-custodial sentences have not been properly organised and I think that that is something we really have to work on. It is crucial that magistrates and indeed crown court judges are confident that if they use non-custodial sentences they are actually going to be applied and will work, and I think that is the problem; it is morale in the Probation Service and so on. I think that magistrates and judges need to have that menu so that they can graduate their response all the way through. Obviously there are going to be circumstances in which custodial sentences are appropriate, either for serious offences or for serial offenders who continue to cock a snook at the justice system by, for example, not fulfilling their obligations under non-custodial sentences. But I do think that that is the key element we need to work on.
Q263 Mr Clappison: There has to be a custodial sentence where the organiser of community service or the Probation Service think that it is being breached - that has to be available, does it not?
Chris Huhne: Absolutely. Let me make it absolutely clear that I do not know any society that does not have custodial sentences. Custodial sentences are absolutely essential for serious offences and for serial offenders. The difficulty we have as a society is not any lack of custodial sentences because, as you know, we have one of the highest prison populations relative to population in the world, but the difficulty we have is actually the other aspects of the criminal justice system and making sure that those work because at the moment we are not giving judges and magistrates an adequate menu of options for dealing with criminality, going right the way through in the graduated response from relatively minor offences up to much more serious ones.
Q264 Mr Clappison: Can you give us an example, so that we can have it in mind, of a case where you think somebody has been sent to prison where they should not have been?
Chris Huhne: One of the things that my Party has traditionally stressed - and we get into trouble with, with both Conservative and Labour - is pointing out that the rich tapestry of life is so varied that we are very pleased to have magistrates and judges making judgments on individual cases and they have to take into account what the particular track record of the person before them is; they have to take into account whether or not they have breached any previous non-custodial sentences and so on. Therefore, coming out with mandatory rules on what should be the sentence for a particular offence is something which we have traditionally been rather cautious about.
Q265 Mr Streeter: Mr Huhne, I must confess that I have not yet studied your Party's policy in this area in great detail.
Chris Huhne: I am shocked, Mr Streeter; it would benefit you enormously!
Q266 Mr Streeter: I am sure it would! I understand that you advocate an expansion of youth work schemes.
Chris Huhne: Indeed.
Q267 Mr Streeter: Targeted on a high risk group. Could you explain how you think that might help and how many young people might be affected by this?
Chris Huhne: Yes. Again, I would start by saying that I wish we had more very clear evidence on what works, and certainly we are committed to turning the National Police Improvement Agency to have a general remit for looking at what works; but a lot of the professionals in this area say that diversion - youth diversion in particular works. That means youth centres; it means catching early signs of bad behaviour before people, kids start getting sucked into the criminal justice system. One of the ideas that we have put forward is for a Youth Volunteer Force which we would like to see piloted by local authorities that are interested in it. The ideal would be effectively to establish a list of projects which are of demonstrable public value, which might be cleaning up areas, improving sports' facilities and so forth, and actually getting the local authority to pilot that by inviting young people to get involved. It may be that in some cases those young people would be actually volunteering to do so and in other cases it might be suggested that it would be a good idea to avoid other particular consequences. But I think that it would be one of the lists of things that we would like to try in terms of youth diversionary activity.
Q268 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Huhne, in your brief you talk about the need to give prisoners the life skills to equip them for outside, and we have had this discussion this morning. We would all sign up to that; that is the warm cuddly side of the issue. Then you have told us this morning the reason you say that judges and magistrates are not giving non-custodial sentences in lots of cases is because they have lost confidence in it. We have all seen the anecdotal stories and the Daily Mail sort of headlines, but is there any real evidence that judges and magistrates are actually making that decision? And, if they are, are they feeding that back into the justice system so that things can be corrected?
Chris Huhne: A repeated refrain, which I am afraid you will hear from me, is that all of us rely so much on talking to the professionals and getting what are often basically anecdotal views. I am not aware of serious research on this, but I am certainly aware - not least in my own area of Hampshire - about morale in the Probation Service, about the problems of the whole reorganisation and therefore difficulties with the policing and supervision of non-custodial sentences. That is, I think, something that you hear back from magistrates and from crown court judges on many, many occasions and I would like to hear much less of it.
Q269 Gwyn Prosser: There is a serious weakness in the system, surely, if judges and magistrates are making their decisions on what they see as the effectiveness of a particular line of custodial or non-custodial.
Chris Huhne: I think that is absolutely right, and I think that if you are looking for a cause for this quite extraordinary continued increase in the prison population this is one of them.
Q270 Gwyn Prosser: How would the Liberal Democrats' approach tighten up the non-custodial incentives?
Chris Huhne: We have to make sure that when people are given a non-custodial sentence that first of all they can do it, that there are plausible arrangements for getting them there and that they are actually being supervised and that there is a clear sign off; so that at the end of it you know that the non-custodial sentence has been performed. In many cases I have heard stories, and no doubt you have as well from your own constituency, of where people, for example, get into trouble because they have turned up on one occasion and there was nobody there to make sure that they were actually doing what they were meant to be doing. Then they did not bother turning up the second time and they got into trouble for that, and this is a real difficulty. So we have to make sure that the system actually is not overloaded, that it is capable of dealing with what it is being asked to do.
Q271 Gwyn Prosser: Something we all agree on is that short custodial sentences are simply too short to allow this rehabilitation and this retraining to have any effect. One of the obstacles of course is the churning effect of prisoners, moving from one prison to another, and indeed that is related to the shortage of prison places. The soft cuddly approach is: let us give them more training and equip them; but the hard decisions are, shall we have longer sentences and shall we have more jail places? What is the Liberal Democrats' view?
Chris Huhne: There is a clear view, as you probably know, that the prison places in this country are in the wrong place; that effectively a rather large number of prisons ---
Q272 Gwyn Prosser: So would you start building new prisons in different places?
Chris Huhne: The difficulty is clearly that there is much more criminality in the south-east of England in particular than there are prison places in the South East; so there tends to be a churn through the system, as I understand it, as it has been explained to me by prison governors, of people moving around. That actually has two effects which I think are pernicious. One is that it makes it more difficult for prisoners to stay in touch with family and local community, so that when they come out they do not have that network that they should have. The other effect is that because of the churn they do not have that settled ability to go through training courses, and indeed even when they do do training courses the training courses are often arranged in such a way that they are most convenient for the prison and the prison authorities rather than for the prisoner. So, for example, you might learn to be a bricklayer on a fairly long sentence but the course to become a bricklayer is fitted in at the convenience of the prison authorities, which might be early on in the prison sentence and actually by the time you are released you are no longer up to speed. So a lot of that has to be refocused. I think that there are three things we need to do to try and relieve the pressure.
Q273 Gwyn Prosser: You might have lots of other things that you want to tell us but I am asking you about new prison places, expanding the prison estate.
Chris Huhne: I hope I shall leave you with a very clear understanding that our policy is to try and shift resources in the criminal justice system away from what we see as the excessive use of prison, particularly for short term custodial sentences but also for dealing with mental health problems which are more appropriately dealt with in secure mental health institutions, and for dealing with drug problems which are more appropriately dealt with in drug rehabilitation units; and our whole strategy as a Party is to shift away from the excessive concentration on this idea of punishment through prison towards an emphasis on detection and an emphasis on prevention because the criminological evidence suggests that that is what works. If you look at when Liberal Democrats are in power in local authorities, where obviously there is a clear remit to deal with preventative measures, you can actually see that Liberal Democrat local authorities invest in preventative measures in a way that actually now shows clearly that crime has fallen more rapidly in Liberal Democrat controlled local authorities than it has fallen in either Labour or Conservative controlled local authorities, and that is a very substantial piece of work, which I would I suggest to you that you should be learning from; and rather than banging your head against a wall with an approach that has failed you should actually start thinking about an approach to cutting crime which works, which is concentrating on prevention and detection.
Q274 Gwyn Prosser: When you have finished, Liberal Democrat local authorities are not responsible for providing prison places, but you evaded that and now we pass on to the next question.
Chris Huhne: But that is precisely why it is so important to have a change at national level as well in the approach to crime because it is important to make sure that we are doing at every level - national and local - what works as opposed to what clearly does not. The approach that you appear to be suggesting clearly does not work.
Q275 Mrs Dean: Mr Huhne, you want to expand prison labour. How can we incentivise employers to participate?
Chris Huhne: One of the schemes to which I would point you, which I think was a very useful one, was the successful pilot run by the Howard League for Penal Reform, which paid prisoners at much nearer the market rate and they actually paid tax, national insurance and so forth, and indeed they paid into a compensation fund for victims, but it was nevertheless in some years that that pilot was self-financing and I think it would make a lot of sense to try and roll out schemes like that. The incentive to participate is clearly there because you are paying nearer the market rate and, hopefully, you are also developing some of the skills of routine and of work which will stand those prisoners in good stead when they leave and hopefully will then find some useful employment outside.
Q276 Mrs Dean: My question is how do you incentivise employers and not prisoners?
Chris Huhne: Employers, I am sorry. This is when people leave prison?
Q277 Mrs Dean: No. Whilst prisoners are in prison how do you incentivise employers to actually take part in providing employment within prisons?
Chris Huhne: I think that there are a number of employers who have been attracted to the wider social goals. I am thinking particularly of the scheme whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment, but when prisoners leave prison where they are actually employed, and that has been rather a successful way of providing people with employment outside. If you have a group of employers who are interested in trying to make an effort in this area I think that you can encourage them to come in and work within prisons as well. But the obvious response if there is a problem then and if you actually are in the happy position of wanting to do more than there are employers to do it then clearly the thing to work on is the gap between their costs and what they get back. So the obvious solution if there is a shortage of employers is to subsidise some element of the pay that is given to the prisoner.
Chairman: Mr Huhne, thank you very much indeed for sharing your thoughts with us this morning. If there is anything else that you want to add to your evidence please write to us; the inquiry will end in about a week's time.
Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, Rt Hon Graham Allen MP, and Mr Alan Given, Chief Executive, Nottingham Crime and Drugs Partnership, gave evidence.
Q278 Chairman: Could I first of all thank you, Mr Duncan 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 we have done, which 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 in that regard.
Secondly, if I could just recommend to the Committee some other work
that the CSJ did, which is that we have done a report on policing, courts,
sentencing, on prisons and on street gangs within about the last five or six
months and some of the stuff that we heard earlier has been raised with issues
there upon which we have made recommendations. Certainly when I came to this I
actually came to this on the basis that there were concerns about
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 do. 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 or parent and/or grandparents - 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 their lives. But then Graham has also written in the paper that of course they did not come from some immaculate conception just there, you have to go back because of course that parent himself or herself became a parent early, and those parents themselves coming early have been part of the problem and it goes on. So you have to cycle back to try and stop that process happening and so you have to get to older parents. Again, I refer you to the Dunedin Study and I do 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. 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 from the not at risk group. So, in other words, identifying the at risk group and you can see exactly who is going to be continuing this later on. What is also fascinating, of that conduct-disordered at risk teenage mothers 43% were in abusive, violent relationships, having found their partners from the within at risk group identified. So a fascinating link - that they were selecting and the father of their next child was coming hugely from the at risk group who themselves would be passing 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 absolutely 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 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 - certainly from my standpoint may be a different way of putting it - is to start recognising that we need things like family hubs where there are a whole variety of other applications. We need to be able to increase dramatically the number of people in the community - nurses, health visitors - who will go out and recognise the at risk groups. We need much more recognition in advance of the at risk groups and then getting out to them to get them in, because whilst 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
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
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 he is set up to adjudicate whether or not this has a return on investment which is a positive return on investment. 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, that this will actually end up saving the state money - let us say Nurse Family Partnership or Groups of Empathy or the SEAL Programme or whatever - and they drop that to a bottom line figure; so pretty hardnosed stuff. And if it is a positive then basically they say to the legislature, "As far as we are concerned that can be implemented." Then they adjudicate implementation; rather like Ofsted they will go in and if you change what is on 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 a pressure from somewhere creates some programme, thumps it in, put money behind it and say that will be fine; but they have not looked at it properly and it ends up costing us money - and there are plenty of things we can look at, whichever political Party has been in. With this organisation that eventually should cease and what you should be able to say is, "When we put a programme in 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 calculated in, but for them it is only 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 high levels - in other words, the great cry was "Sign on every week" for unemployed people - they came to the conclusion that it saved you not a penny and in fact it cost you money, so that was dropped. So that is how they work - independently.
Chairman: Mr Prosser has a question to
Mr Given on
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
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.