UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 242-vHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
THE GOVERNMENT'S APPROACH TO CRIME PREVENTION
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This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Home Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Keith Vaz, in the Chair
Tom Brake
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Ann Cryer
David T C Davies
Mrs Janet Dean
Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
________________
Witnesses: Professor Gloria Laycock, Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, gave evidence.
Q364 Chairman: Can I call the Committee to order. This is the final session in the Committee's inquiry into the issue of crime prevention. We are very pleased to see you here today, Professor Gloria Laycock from the Gill Dando Institute. Can I refer all those present to the Register of Members' Interests where the interests of members of this Committee are noted. Can I start by asking you, Professor Laycock, about the causes of crime - that is what we are primarily concerned with. We know about the effects of crime, and we are conscious of the current issues concerning the reduction in crime (whether, indeed, the statistics show there has been a reduction) but can we go to the reasons for the causes of crime. What kind of progress do you think this and recent Governments have made in identifying the causes of crime?
Professor Laycock: The causes of crime are many and varied. People talk about education, poor parenting, the economy, jobs, and so on and so forth. My feeling on this is that in a civilised society we should all be doing our very best to make sure our children are educated, and so on, we should not be doing it because if we do not we might get mugged. Therefore, I am setting aside those major risk factors, as they are called, which tend to push people in the direction of committing crime and are called causes, and I am particularly focusing on the fact that we regard opportunities as a cause of crime - the more opportunities the more crime - and that is something we can do something about because it relates to the immediate situation.
Q365 Chairman: But if you were listing your top three reasons why people turn to crime, leaving the opportunities aspect aside, if you look at the social reasons and other reasons of that kind, what would they be?
Professor Laycock: Money.
Q366 Chairman: Money, money, money?
Professor Laycock: More or less, yes.
Q367 Chairman: So not a dysfunctional background, not poverty, not social deprivation, not any issues of that kind, just money?
Professor Laycock: I think money, because it is not only people from poor backgrounds, it is not only socially deprived people who commit crime. In fact I am actually not sure, and would love to know proportionately, it would be very interesting to know whether there is actually a discrepancy. I am thinking of bankers at the moment.
Q368 Chairman: I think we all are. Do you think recent Governments have placed the right balance on measures to reduce crime rather than deal with criminality after it occurs?
Professor Laycock: I think not really. I think a lot of progress is being made. There is still a very persistent bias towards offender-based interventions, and we should have them - I am absolutely clear about that - but I am not sure that until really quite recently enough emphasis has been placed on controlling opportunities.
Q369 Mr Streeter: Professor, I would welcome your thoughts on designing out crime. Can you think of some of the best examples of how that has happened in recent years and what kind of benefits that brings?
Professor Laycock: I am actually spoilt for choice. I am tempted to ask you whether you locked your car this morning and locked the house.
Q370 Mr Streeter: I travel by public transport, Professor. I am trying to save the planet!
Professor Laycock: A good plan, but you get the point.
Q371 Mr Streeter: Yes.
Professor Laycock: Yes, we all do that - industry, commerce and all of us as individuals try to protect ourselves from crime - and those are opportunity-reducing techniques and it would be nonsense to say it is not cost-effective: it is. If you are asking me about the enormous type of things, then I suppose my very favourite example would be the action the Government took in the early 1990s to do something about car crime in this country. It was top of the league in international comparisons. The Home Office published the Car Theft Index, which was a massive lever over the car industry to put deadlocks and immobilisers on vehicles, and that was just a technological change which has resulted in something like a 65% reduction in theft of vehicles since 1995, and that is substantiated by the British Crime Survey figures; so there have been 2.8 million less crimes simply because they were, I am tempted to say, bullied, but persuaded, to put better locks and immobilisers on vehicles.
Q372 Mr Streeter: Why did not that displace car crime on to other crimes, do you think?
Professor Laycock: Because displacement is presumed to occur far more than it does. There is very strong research evidence across a wide number of offences that displacement is relatively unusual. There is always a net gain according to the research. Indeed, there is some evidence that if temporal and geographic boundaries are kept fairly fuzzy when you are announcing a crime prevention measure, you get what academics call a diffusion of benefits; in other words, the positive effect spreads beyond the area that you are acting in, and so does it temporarily. It lasts for longer, in other words.
Q373 Mrs Dean: We have received evidence suggesting that cutting-edge technology on its own is not enough to deter and prevent crime, but the different partners involved in crime prevention must work together to deliver a coherent and unified crime prevention strategy. Do you think this happens at the moment?
Professor Laycock: Before I touch on whether it happens at the moment or not, can I slightly challenge the premise that cutting-edge technology on its own is not enough to deter and prevent crime. The example I have just given, which is of car crime reduction, was simply a technological innovation and it had a massive effect. It required no partnership other than between the Government and the manufacturers. Setting that aside with more complex offences, for example, it may well be that different partners need to work together. A good example might be street robbery, where if you actually analyse the data - and that is something we push a lot - a lot of it may be school bullying rather than well described as robbery, and then you might want the police, and so on, the local authority, education and transport authorities to work together. Does it happen at the moment? Not anything like enough. It is very patchy, I think. Partners do come together but the responses are not driven by data and sometimes there is a reluctance to take action if it means that the people who have got to take that action have got to spend money. It is not necessarily the case that these partnerships are warm, cuddly meetings. Sometimes you want people within the partnership to do something they do not want to do or cannot afford, and sometimes you want someone outwith the partnership to do something - maybe the Sainsbury's manager in a local car park who is not taking care of the customers' vehicles. It is all about leverage. My greatest disappointment, if you like, is that the Crime and Disorder Act, which I think was a brilliant Act, has not really led to good analysis and that analysis has not driven the activities of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships.
Q374 Mr Winnick: The position about crime is historical, is it not,
Professor Laycock? If you took the
nineteenth century, for instance, the criminality was such that there were
large parts of
Professor Laycock: Absolutely; yes.
Q375 Mr Winnick: Is the situation all that different to then?
Professor Laycock: I think there is a lot less crime today actually. We have not been very good, historically, at measuring it over a long time frame. If you look at the growth in crime since the end of the First World War, throughout the last part of the last century particularly, I think crime grew at 5.5% per annum according to police recorded statistics throughout the twentieth century, but crime is evolving, it changes, it comes and goes with opportunities. The internet, for example, has provided a whole host of new opportunities for offending, credit cards have, for example, all sorts of new things coming onto the market provide opportunities, and we need to get ahead of the game and do something about them before we get a crime wave.
Q376 Mr Winnick: In reply to the Chairman at the beginning of the session you said that the motive for criminality, understandably, is financial. I am in no way condoning it, and of course criminality of any kind should never be condoned, as you would be the first to accept, but those who come from a prosperous background, with exceptions, are hardly likely to want to engage in criminality, leaving aside white collar crime, and it is inevitable that those with less money, and certainly those at the bottom of the pile, though the large majority are not involved in criminality, are more prone to see criminality as a means for getting benefits which they do not have.
Professor Laycock: I think it depends on what
you mean by criminality really. We know,
for example, that something like 33% of adult males born in 1953 will have a
criminal conviction by the age of 46.
That is an awful lot of adult males.
It is certainly more than you would find in the poor populations of
Q377 Mrs Cryer: Can you talk to us about the
Professor Laycock: I do not think current
police systems are designed to identify emerging trends. They are designed to help the police respond
to crime, quite reasonably, they are designed to provide statistics for the
Home Office, again, quite reasonably, but they are very poorly designed if they
are intending to find emerging crimes that might suddenly tip and cause a
massive great crime wave. The work that
we have been doing with Merseyside Police, which is supported by the Design and
Technology Alliance, is attempting to pick out early on whether there is going
to be a tipping point with new products.
It is early days. What we have
done with Merseyside is designed software which allows the analysts to
interrogate big datasets over several years, for example, not only the coded
data, but also free text. This is hugely
boring in some respects, but from an analytic point of view it is extremely
important, because what they can do now, at the touch of button, is analyse several
years' worth of data and very quickly show what is coming up as the next
possible product. We were looking very
specifically in Merseyside to see whether there was any evidence that flat-screen
digital televisions were going to start to kick off because of switching off
the analogue signal, which is going to create, we think, a potential market for
nice digital televisions. So far there
is not enormous evidence that that is happening, but it is very difficult to do
because the police will record "theft of a television", they will not say it
was a "nice flat-screen digital". That
is why the work we are doing in Merseyside, which is about software
development, is quite detailed, but it is early days. We hope, if we can get continued funding, to
develop that into a tool that all the analysts can use throughout the
Q378 Gwyn Prosser: Professor Laycock, you have told us that, as far as designing out crime, there has been quite notable success in terms of motor vehicle thefts and you said it was a case of bullying, and then perhaps persuading, the manufacturers to do that. I want to ask you, in general terms, what progress overall has been made to provide incentives for manufacturers to do likewise and how did that bullying or arm-twisting work?
Professor Laycock: It is a really interesting
question and one that is quite difficult to answer. The Home Secretary's
Q379 Gwyn Prosser: In fact, it could be to their benefit if lots and lots of flat-screen TVs get pinched.
Professor Laycock: That is absolutely right. In fact, years ago when Vauxhall disaggregated the car radio so the speakers were here and the knobs were there and the rest of it, the sales of replacement car radios into Vauxhall cars went through the floor, they kind of shot themselves in the foot, and that is not uncommon. That is one of the problems that we have got. I think it is going to be a fairly long haul, and one of the reasons why I think it is extremely important that the Alliance, or something like it, stays in place is because getting leverage over manufacturers, especially if they say things like "Well, give us the evidence", which is sometimes extremely difficult to do, they just will not do it. My favourite story on this actually happened when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. We knew that 40% of burglaries on local authority houses were related to the theft of money from gas and electricity coin meters. It was a huge problem. The fuel suppliers would not do anything about it because if your meter was broken into you had to pay them and you had to pay them to fix the meter, so they lost no money. Margaret Thatcher said to them, "If you do not do something, the Department of Energy has the power to deregulate 18 million meters overnight, so change them", and they did, and that is why we now have credit things.
Q380 Mr Streeter: That is leadership!
Professor Laycock: That is one way of putting it. It was a very nice use of data and an understanding of the need to use levers over industries where it really was not their problem but it was the people's problem.
Q381 David Davies: It is a pleasure to follow that answer, Chairman: another reason why she was a great woman! Has the Government supported this scientific approach to crime reduction which you espouse?
Professor Laycock: Can I say what I mean by
crime science? It is not just about the
design and crime agenda; in fact it is significantly more than that. As you may know, UCL houses the only
Q382 Bob Russell: I am still trying to come to terms with the vision of Baroness Thatcher as a meter maid! Professor Laycock, you have been given a general overview about how we need collectively to design out crime. Is there a specific one which perhaps the Gill Dando Institute has come up with that has found resistance, either within the commercial sector or at government level, that perhaps we as a Committee could focus on?
Professor Laycock: I guess my current favourite
example would be car registration plates, which in the
Q383 Bob Russell: There is legislation, because I was on the committee that dealt with the Bill and I know what you are saying, because Parliament put in place measures which means that all vehicle registration plates have to comply with the law in manufacture and be displayed on the vehicle.
Professor Laycock: Yes.
Q384 Bob Russell: But every day we see illegal vehicle number plates, do we not?
Professor Laycock: We do. The issue really is the whole of the Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology relies on the integrity of that number plate. They are very insecure, there is no technology at all in that number plate, and there could be. I think we were told by the Department for Transport that they would have electronic vehicle identification systems by 2007, and we did not get that. In the Department for Transport's defence, what they are saying is, "Give us the evidence that the car registration plate is a problem for crime," and it is actually quite difficult to do. It is a bit like saying to the police, "Tell us about credit card fraud." They cannot do that because your cards are stolen in a burglary, a car crime, a handbag snatch, they are all over the place, and it is the same with car registration plates. The police find it very difficult to sum up, across a whole range of offences, the extent to which these registration plates are involved in crime, but the Department for Transport says, "In the absence of evidence, we are not inclined to do very much."
Bob Russell: Chairman, it is not for today, but the legislation was passed to deal with the very issues that Professor Laycock has said, and if we have government departments and the police saying that it is inadequate, then somebody needs to address the inadequacies, because we were assured that the legislation would deal with the very issues that we have just heard about.
Chairman: On the basis of what Mr Russell has said, I will write to the relevant minister to find out precisely what is happening about this issue. It is clearly an important matter that the Committee is concerned about, and we will pursue it.
Q385 Mrs Cryer: Where I live, in Shipley, we had a whole plague of thefts just of plates, during the day sometimes, because it is very easy to do. Is that widespread? Presumably those plates were going to be used in furtherance of a crime using a car, and then the person who owned that car originally would be hounded by the police because it would be their number plate?
Professor Laycock: Sometimes they are stolen so as the owner can say, "Someone stole my car reg plate", and that means they do not have to pay the speeding fine, or something, but let us set that aside, because it is relatively trivial. You are quite right, this is one of the tipping points we were looking for in the Merseyside data. Is there any evidence that an awful lot of car reg plates are now being stolen? There was some evidence that it has gone up, and this, again, comes back to the Department for Transport's complaint. If we had an epidemic of it, they might be persuaded to do something. It is difficult to prove there is an epidemic because it is so spread out, but my general point is I do not think we should be waiting until we are in the middle of a crime wave before we do something. We know enough about crime and enough about the opportunities that cause crime to be able to pre-empt these things, and that is the difficulty.
Q386 Chairman: One final question about the DNA database. I do not know whether you were involved in the controversy over the use of the statistics. Was that one of your colleagues?
Professor Laycock: One of my colleagues did a piece of work for the Home Office in relation to it, yes.
Q387 Chairman: What was the concern about the use of statistics by the Government, that they were presumably not completed when they were given to the Home Office or they were using data that had not been properly analysed?
Professor Laycock: In relation to DNA?
Q388 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Laycock: I am not entirely sure I am on top of the topic you are talking about, but the DNA piece of work we did do was to try and address the issue that the Government had in terms of the retention of samples of people who were arrested but not convicted or prosecuted - the retention of their DNA - how long should that period reasonably be? We did a piece of work to try to answer that question. Is that what you are talking about?
Q389 Chairman: Yes. It is not in your area; we will pursue it with one of your colleagues. Yesterday the Committee met a group of young offenders, some of whom had just come out of prison, from a group called User Voice, and they were telling us about the difficulty that they had in getting their voice heard; that the Government consults the professors, the experts. There is a huge industry around offender management, but people who can actually help and explain why they are involved in crime are not consulted. Do you think there is any truth in that? Do you think more time should be given to actually ask young people why they are committing these crimes, and what could we do that is different in order to stop this becoming a cycle? Some of those young men are the fathers of children who would be going through exactly the same set of circumstances again.
Professor Laycock: I think we do do that. I am not sure the Government necessarily does it routinely, but just to give you a very specific example, we are going to be doing some research for G4S on armed robberies and robberies in general and that will involve us going into prison and talking to robbers, not about why they do it, but how they do it. Coming back to our point, it is fairly obvious, in fact one of my academic colleagues once asked a bank robber, "Why rob banks?" and he said, "That's where the money is." It was a silly question as far as he was concerned. He was a serious armed robber. You are talking about young people.
Q390 Chairman: It is about breaking the cycle.
Professor Laycock: Yes. I think the way to break the cycle is to help them not get into it in the first place.
Q391 Chairman: Exactly.
Professor Laycock: There are all sorts of things you could do, including talking to them, if you like, but I am assuming that this country is doing the best it can in helping young people in terms of reducing poverty, in terms of educating them, in terms of getting jobs. What else are we going to do? I think the thing we can do which would be really helpful is to make it much more difficult for them to steal cars, to do burglaries or shoplift. I pick those three offences because if you look at the criminal careers of offenders, they get into it through those easy routes.
Q392 Chairman: Usually just after primary school and just into secondary school. That seems to be the crucial time, does it not?
Professor Laycock: It is when you transition from primary to secondary, secondary to leaving school - those transition points are problematic. Can I come back to the street robbery issue, which we call street robbery but which is sometimes bullying? One of the things I think we have got to do much more systematically is deal with school bullying, especially where it involves theft. To take a concrete example, in Ealing, when we looked at street robbery in 2006, the figures were going really high. The biggest increase was an 84% increase in 16-year-old victims, 16 and below - children in other words - and the perpetrators were other children. If you just think about what they are learning - and they were not all poor children, they were not all from horrid backgrounds - is that you can steal things and nothing happens.
Chairman: Fortunately, the next witness is the Minister for Schools, so we will be putting this very point to him. Thank you very much, Professor Laycock, for coming this morning.
Witnesses: Maria Eagle MP, Justice Minister, and Rt Hon Vernon Coaker MP, DCSF Minister, gave evidence.
Q393 Chairman: Ministers, welcome to this evidence session. Ms Eagle, thank you for coming again. Mr Coaker, thank you for coming back in your new capacity: it is like old times!
Mr Coaker: It is very good to be here.
Q394 Chairman: Ms Eagle, could I start with you. In today's Express there is a story. I do not know whether you have seen it. "Mother slams soft justice that failed to curb her robber son. A mother has exposed the hapless nature of Labour's 'pathetic' criminal justice system for repeatedly failing to tackle her out-of-control son. Armed robber James Korer, 19, was last week locked up for three years after carrying out a series of attacks on delivery drivers. But his mother Ruth Dutton said her son's offending was not prevented by officials in a justice system which does not impose tough punishment." Do you recognise that criminal justice system?
Maria Eagle: Chairman, it is a pleasure, first of all, for me to be back here again before all of you. I am reluctant to engage in discussing a particular case, for reasons which the Committee will understand, and I can understand a mother's concern in respect of her own son, but I do not recognise the description of our criminal justice system and our youth justice system as being soft in that way. That is not to say that there are not mistakes made in individual cases or things that go wrong in individual cases, but I think that the courts and other agencies which intervene have a wide range of capacity to try and deal with young people's offending behaviour from an early stage, including the capacity to imprison for a significant period of time. That, of course, is up to individual sentencers in respect of the particular case they see before them.
Q395 Chairman: But she is joined by 13 parliamentary colleagues of ours who have put down a motion this morning saying: "This House believes that the record high prison population and reducing budgets have undermined the National Offender Management Service's objective of tackling reoffending, considers that this undermines the ability of the Probation Service", which is your Department, "to function effectively and calls on the Government to create separate operational structures with their own directorates for prisons and probation." Is there a problem here in tackling the causes of crime rather than dealing with what happens after crimes have been committed?
Maria Eagle: I think there are two parts
of the criminal justice system, one to try and prevent crime. If you can stop somebody going into the
criminal justice system, either as a juvenile or in adulthood, it is obviously
cheaper, more efficient and better socially, financially and in every other way
to keep them away from the criminal justice system in the first place, so there
is a role for that. In terms of the
National Offender Management Service, whilst it is true that the prison population
has increased by 36% over the past 12 years, we are not currently at record
levels in the adult estate, although we are at a high level. We had a prison population of 83,665 at the
end of last week. We have got 86,000
places; so we are not over full in that respect. I believe that joining up prisons and
probation, allowing custodial arrangements and offender management in the
community to meet and be properly arranged from one end to the other of the
offender's journey is actually a very good way of making sure that people do
not fall between the two stools, so that people's problems addressed in custody
can continue to be addressed out in the community because NOMS is joined up
between prisons and probation. I
recognise the argument, which has definitely come from
Q396 Chairman: Yesterday members of the Committee met informally with a group of about ten young offenders, some of whom have just come out of prison. They talked about the fact that they felt the system had let them down. Some of them are going to go back into prison because they do not have homes when they leave prison. The probation officer comes to visit them, but there is no pathway for success. They are not given an idea of the kinds of courses they wish to go on, so they go in for short periods where there is not enough time to get them rehabilitated, they come out and they reoffend because they have no hope. They talk about a billion pound industry, the criminal justice system, which actually is not helping them. How does your Department engage with those who actually commit crimes in order to stop them committing crimes again?
Maria Eagle: We do so in a number of ways. We have a lot of interventions, both for short sentence and longer sentence prisoners in custody, to try and tackle the causes of their offending behaviour. Whether that is substance abuse programmes to try and stop them from abusing substances, which can often be one of the causes of criminal behaviour, whether it is education and training, we have seen a 15-fold increase in resources going into drug treatment in our prisons and custodial settings, we have seen a three-fold increase in education and training such that now 38% of young people coming out of custody go into educational training, 25% of them go into employment and 80% of prisoners coming out of custody go into settled accommodation. We are tackling the risk factors which can lead to reoffending and, as a result of that, Chairman, we have seen a significant fall in the frequency rate of reoffending for both adults and juveniles. Adult reoffending has fallen by a fifth between the year 2000 and 2007, when the last figures were available, and in the juvenile estate by going on for a quarter - so an over 23% fall in the frequency of reoffending. What we are seeing is fewer people are coming into the system and offending in the juvenile side, those who do reoffend reoffend less frequently and, generally, less seriously and we are seeing interventions which work. That is not to say, Chairman, that there is not still a lot to do to tackle some of these people who still are offending when they come out of custody and to tackle the underlying causes of their offending behaviour.
Q397 David Davies: To either of the ministers really. We know that most people going into the estate go in with very low educational achievement. If we are going to have automatic early release, which I have problems with, but if we are going to have that, why not make it conditional rather than automatic on people in prison undertaking some sort of basic educational skills and vocational requirements, either inside the prison or outside afterwards, and recalling them if they are not fulfilling that obligation?
Maria Eagle: 38% of those who come out of the juvenile estate do go into educational training. I think it is important to realise that you cannot force people to be educated, you have to tackle some of the problems which are preventing them behaving properly in the first place. Often it is substance abuse, it is abuse and neglect when they are growing up, so you have to tackle the underlying causes of their offending behaviour and then draw them into learning and on to a better path in life. I think it is important to realise it is not just a question of will: it is a two-way street. You have to make sure that the people who are in either the YOIs or in the prison estate are ready to learn. We have seen increasing success in that respect. Whilst I understand, Mr Davies, that it is frustrating that the numbers are not as high as you would like, we have seen significant progress with significant extra resourcing and I hope that we will be able to continue and see even better progress in the future. Certainly I think that the Offender Learning and Skills Service (OLASS) being now able to provide also bite-size chunks, shorter modules towards real qualifications means that even short sentence prisoners can undertake some learning and some training that is really meaningful to them and will be important to them in changing their lives when they get out of custody.
Q398 Chairman: Short-term custodial sentences produce poor outcomes in terms of reoffending. That is right, is it not?
Maria Eagle: That is right. It is correct that the shorter the sentence the less it is possible for us to do with them in custody and the more difficult it is for us to tackle effectively the causes of their offending behaviour.
Q399 Mr Winnick: The argument, Minister, as you know, is that, instead of short-term custodial sentences, community service would be much more effective, but the point is made: what does all this community service amount to, what sort of discipline, and there is general disappointment. Is that disappointment justified and that community service does not really amount to much in practice?
Maria Eagle: I think, taken in isolation, it can work, or it may not work, depending on the individual, but we now have, from last November, the youth rehabilitation order which allows the court to choose between a menu of ten or so different interventions which they can pick and mix for the needs of that individual. That might involve some reparation, making things good with the victims of whatever the offence was, it might involve unpaid work, it might involve an educational requirement, it might involve mental health assessment, a mental health treatment requirement, it might involve any or all of these things. We also have the intensive alternatives to custody - intensive fostering and intensive supervision - which are often focused on those who abuse drugs to make sure they get drug treatment, to take them to employment or training, to really wrap some interventions around that individual to try and tackle the cause of their offending behaviour so that, at the end of that youth rehabilitation order, that individual ought to be in a much better position not to go back to the kind of crime that has got them into trouble in the first place. We have a lot of hope that this focus on the needs of the individual, choosing from a menu of options which might include educational requirement, a training requirement, a drug treatment requirement, is a really good and positive way of making sure that we can deter these young people from the life of crime that they have embarked upon.
Q400 Mr Winnick: I appreciate what you have said, but if a person has been sentenced to community service as an alternative to a custodial sentence, what sort of fear would exist in that person that, if he breaches that order, he will end up in prison? In practice, again, how many custodial sentences have been awarded, say, in the last 12 months for breach of community service?
Maria Eagle: I would have to write to the Committee with the precise number.
Q401 Mr Winnick: In which case, if you are writing to us, which I am sure the Chairman would appreciate, perhaps we could have the last five years?
Maria Eagle: Indeed, I would be happy to provide whatever figures we can provide to the Committee in that respect, but what I can say generally is that the number of people being sent into custody for breaching their community orders has been increasing. We take breach of orders much more seriously now than was the case ten or 12 years ago, and that is one of the reasons why the numbers in custody have increased over the general estate by 36% over that period of time. People are now much more likely to be breached and taken into custody for not carrying out their community order, and they are also much more likely to be recalled if they are out on licence and they breach the terms of their licence; so we have really cracked down on that in the last few years.
Q402 Mr Winnick: These figures will reflect what you have just said?
Maria Eagle: They will indeed.
Chairman: Thank you. If you could write to me that would be very helpful.
Q403 Gwyn Prosser: Ms Eagle, is it correct that the funding for the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund is to be cut by 50% next year?
Maria Eagle: This is a Home Office fund, but my understanding of it is that the capital element of this fund is to be cut by 50% next year. There is a revenue element as well that is not being cut. My understanding is that that amounts to some £10 million. My understanding also is that there will still be £90 million available and that this is 0.2% of the £7 billion pounds that we provide to local organisations, whether it be the police, whether it be local authorities, to deal with the impact of crime. Yes, but it is a small amount, and it is in the capital funding.
Q404 Gwyn Prosser: At the same time as that reduction has taken place the Crime Reduction Partnerships have been given a statutory duty to reduce crime on top of all of their other existing responsibilities. Do you think it all adds up? Do you think that is deliverable?
Maria Eagle: I do actually, Mr Prosser. The Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships and the local Criminal Justice Boards - there are a number of local organisations that bring together the criminal justice agencies and a wider range of public service agencies and the voluntary sector that can help here in a local or regional context - the more they join up what they do, the more they arrange between themselves what the local interventions are, the more they pool their budgets the more effectively and efficiently they can tackle the particular areas of crime in their locality. I believe that there is no contradiction between that very small reduction in the capital element of a particular Home Office special fund and the requirement for local agencies in the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships to come together much more effectively to tackle the causes of crime in their locality.
Q405 Mrs Dean: Ms Eagle, how can we ensure that offenders moving between different prisons receive seamless interventions in terms of education, training and behavioural support?
Maria Eagle: In terms of education and training, we have developed a way now, using IT, of being able to transfer the offender learning record between prisons or custodial settings when that offender moves. For a start off, the full learning record will be there when they get to the new place, so you will not have to start undertaking new and repeat assessments, which is a good start. Therefore, it ought to be easier to make sure that the interventions can be continued, and I think that that is a positive prospect for making sure there is a seamless kind of move, that moving custodial setting does not call a halt to all your efforts to tackle your offending behaviour as an individual; so that is a good thing. I also believe that the Offender Learning and Skills Service, which is not only able to provide educational courses in custodial settings which are the same as those outside of custodial settings - so you can move from an NVQ level one to an NVQ level two in the same subject or continue to do that same course once you are released from custody - means that it is much more motivational for a young person to know that the work that they are doing is going to mean something, is going to result in a qualification that will be recognised and that can be completed. I think that the move to shorter modules will enable even short-sentence prisoners to do something towards an educational qualification which will still be of value to them and which they can continue with when they leave a custodial setting. One of the great advantages of offender management is, I believe, this joining up between the custodial setting and the community setting of education, of health, of drug treatment and of other interventions, and I think that is one of the reasons why we are seeing a reduction in reoffending.
Q406 Mrs Cryer: Very briefly, Minister, I went to Canada a couple of years ago and met the Chief of Police for Toronto and he was very committed to restorative justice (ie instead of putting people in prison, making them face up to the damage they have caused to the person attacked), and he was finding that the reoffending rate was going down from something like 80% to about 40%. I am going from memory now. Are we doing anything more to move towards this sort of thing?
Mr Coaker: Can I give one example? We are doing lots of things like that. Part of it is to build the confidence of people that restorative justice and the sorts of things that you have talked about are meaningful and do tackle crime and criminality but also try and rehabilitate. I went to a police station recently where a young person had stolen a purse from the bag of a teacher and it was not dealt with as theft. The teacher and the young person, with the mother of the young person and the colleague of the teachers, sat in a room. The young girl wrote a letter of apology to the teacher; the teacher accepted the apology. I was brought into the police station for the police and everyone who had been involved to hear that particular story. I thought it was excellent, because the teacher just wanted her purse back, it was the first time that young person had done anything seriously wrong - and everyone accepted it was serious - the young person accepted the consequences and it was a much better way of doing it than putting a 14 or 15-year-old girl before the court for theft. The teacher was satisfied, the young girl had learnt her lesson, the parents were satisfied and the police were satisfied. I think that has its place, and I think if we tell these stories and talk about these things, then, of course, where it is possible and appropriate, that sort of approach is to be commended.
Q407 Mrs Cryer: What are we doing to make sure that there are jobs for young people to go to once they get out of prison, or whatever? Do the public sector have any particular part to play in offering jobs by setting a good example?
Maria Eagle: Across our prison estate, including some of our YOIs, there are prison industries that train for job-ready training. We have a corporate alliance of over 100 employers, including serious, large employers - DHL, Timpsons, Travis Perkins - who train specifically for the kind of jobs that they want, and some guarantee jobs to people who have successfully gone through that training when they come out. We are seeing an increasing level of people coming out of prison into employment, even though we are in quite a difficult economic environment, and I think that that is good because it did not used to be the case. Of those who are not going into employment, many are going into education and training and 80% of them are going into settled accommodation. Therefore, we are seeing some real impact on the causes of offending behaviour. We cannot guarantee a job for every young person coming out of prison. Of course one of the great problems that being in prison causes is the stigma that attaches, and it is difficult to get through to employers that people who have been in trouble can be good employees and, perhaps not unnaturally in a difficult labour market, they are not necessarily the first people that employers would choose. I think the corporate alliances and the impact, the training, the prison industries and the qualifications that we create out of the custodial settings that we look after are all important in trying to tackle that very important issue.
Q408 Chairman: Thank you. Now let us turn to Mr Coaker. You have been sitting very patiently. You are a former Police Minister, you are a former headmaster, teacher in a school; you have now gone to the Department for Education. Yesterday the Committee met informally with User Voice. We are going to write to you to ask whether both of you could meet them at some stage, a group of young former criminals who are crying out for help and who desperately feel that they can make a contribution to stop other young people becoming criminals. We feel that the school setting is absolutely crucial, and the key point is between primary school and secondary school, and that is the context of this inquiry. From your own personal experience as a teacher, as a police minister and now in the Department, are there one or two key issues that you think we need to address in order to prevent, not crime itself, but the causes of crime?
Mr Coaker: There are a number of things which are really important: early intervention, which I know you have taken evidence on from a number of people. I think we need to intervene early to support families to support young people. I think that is really important. One of the questions is what early intervention means and what actually works. I know you have looked at the Family Intervention Projects, and so on, and the impacts of Sure Start and Children's Centres, and the early research from that shows that they do make a difference, and so early intervention is very important. But you cannot just intervene early and then let it go, you have to intervene early and carry on the support as you go through. That would mean that schools have to be of the right quality, there has to be engagement with the young people and engagement with parents as well.
Chairman: We will come on to that in a second. Mr Davies has a question on that. That is very helpful.
Q409 Bob Russell: Mr Coaker, is there any evidence within your Department linking potential criminal behaviour amongst young people relative to the size of the school? In other words, in a bigger school children get lost in the system, whereas in a smaller school perhaps there is greater pastoral attention and care.
Mr Coaker: I have not seen any evidence of that. What I have seen is that if you have got a good school, it is the quality of the teaching and learning, the quality of the pastoral arrangements rather than the size, I think, that makes the crucial difference.
Q410 Bob Russell: There is no link between those two.
Mr Coaker: Not as far as I am aware, no.
Q411 Bob Russell: Why did the
Mr Coaker: As always, what we said was that the data that UNICEF had used was data that was out-of-date. You have reports. They come out and say this is wrong about our children; that is wrong. I just thought that it took an unnecessarily gloomy view of the children of this country and reflected on the problems of some and equated that to all. The Children Society, as you know, have just published a report a few days ago which said that the vast majority of young people in this country were happy. What you have to do with these reports is look at them, understand them and try to learn from them, but I think the sweeping comment that was made that seemed to say that all of our youth was disaffected and unhappy is not the case.
Q412 Bob Russell: Where is the evidence to support it is not the case?
Mr Coaker: The Children's Society report that came out a few days ago.
Q413 Bob Russell: So UNICEF are wrong?
Mr Coaker: I would not say they are wrong. I do not want to get into saying UNICEF are wrong. What I am saying is that UNICEF produced a report, it used data from 2000 and they came to the conclusions that they did. I just pointed out that another report has come to a different view.
Q414 Bob Russell: Should more children be taken into care: because that is what we have been told by ACPO?
Mr Coaker: What you want is a situation where those children who should be in care are in care. I think it is difficult to put a number on that. I think the whole system has to work to ensure that if it is appropriate that a young person is in care, then of course they should be in care, but I do not know what that number is or who that should be.
Q415 Mrs Cryer: Minister, the Member of Parliament for Warrington South the other week had a ten minute rule bill and it was about children leaving care. She was suggesting that many of the children leaving care are not being protected in the way that they should be and perhaps more should be done following that, because many of these kids finish up, within six months, being homeless, and from homelessness they are getting into criminal behaviour, prostitution and other things. Is there more your Department could do to protect such people on leaving care until they get to an age where they are responsible for themselves?
Mr Coaker: Certainly. The local authority has responsibility for young children, or children, as defined by the law. Of course, if they are leaving care or leaving custody, a plan should be put in place for dealing with them in terms of where they are living, what support they need, how they are going to be cared for, all of those sort of things. You are quite right: what you do not want is somebody, in whatever situation, simply going back to the situation which was causing them the problems in the first place. When I go to meet some of these young people some of the stories that they tell are heart-rending. Sometimes when they are taken into care or even into custody, for the first time, it is almost unbearable to hear them say, they have a structure and a support around them. What we need to do as the state is to build that support and that structure for them outside of the care setting, but it is difficult if there is no family; the family are either not there or it is inappropriate for them to go back for protection reasons, but clearly it is an issue that we are addressing and we are trying to improve.
Q416 David Davies: Mr Coaker, some of our colleagues have said that if children are not helped within the first three years then their life chances are severely diminished. On this issue of taking more children into care, should we not be looking to do that, particularly when there are risk factors? One which I have come across, if you like, is where one or both parents are heavy users of Class A drugs. Do we really think it is appropriate that people who are abusing themselves with Class A drugs, or even with alcohol, should be left in charge of a child? We would not let them drive a car and yet we leave them responsible for the upbringing of children. I am sure many people would think this is wrong.
Mr Coaker: I agree with the importance of early intervention, which was the point I made to the Chairman earlier on. It is the same answer really to Mr Russell. These are difficult decisions. I think it is very difficult to make a generalisation that anybody in a particular circumstance deserves to have their children taken away or the whole family should be put in care, or whatever. What is important is that the needs of the child are addressed, that individual decisions are made. Of course you do not want children left if they are at risk, of course you do not want them left if it is inappropriate for them to be in that circumstance, but it is difficult to make generalisations about it. It is the individual decision which is of such magnitude you would hope that all of those factors, and I believe that in most cases they are, are taken into account and then the child, if necessary, put in care or the family supported in the way that is appropriate to deal with the particular problems they have.
Q417 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Coaker, on the subject of multi-agency working, we had Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rod Jarman in front of us, and he said that while multi-agency work was quite successful in dealing with criminals and young people on the cusp of going into criminality, it was far less effective and almost missing out in applying help universally to young people as they grow up. I think the expression he used was "to assist all young people in growing up". What is your view of that?
Mr Coaker: As you know, Children's Trust Boards will be statutory from April. Police are part of that. The Children's Trust Boards will be required to produce children and young people's plans, they will be required to produce a plan which will be about what should be provided, all of the agencies coming together, including the police, which will be about the provision of services for young people in that area - youth services, crime prevention, whatever the different needs are - and that is trying to address the point that Mr Jarman was making, to try and get greater co-ordination in terms of the delivery of services in a particular area, and I think that will help to make a real difference with respect to that.
Q418 Tom Brake: On the Children and Young People's Plan, is there much point in these plans being drawn up if, as the National Youth Agency told us, people are being asked to plan for significant cuts in youth services? Are they not going to include things in their plans that in fact are not going to be delivered because of budget cuts?
Mr Coaker: If I just talk from a Government point of view, there is £3 billion over this spending period up until 2011 going into Children's Centres, there is £124 million over virtually the same period going into family intervention projects, there is nearly £1 billion from Government going into various positive activities, the building of youth facilities, all of these sorts of types of development going on in local authorities in particular targeting areas of disadvantage. We do not make those decisions as to how that money should be spent. We make that money available to local authorities and to local service deliverers. It is for them to determine what is the best way of doing that, and you would expect the Children's Trust Board to be deciding how that significant sum of money would be spent. There is also, of course, the money, in the form of a grant, which is given to the local authority themselves, and the last figure I had was £500 million going to local authorities in 2007/2008. I believe it is that part of the budget that may be under pressure but within this spending period (and obviously it is difficult to talk from 2011 onwards for reasons we all know) there is no reduction in that amount of money that is going to local authorities, and they are the best people to determine how to spend that.
Q419 Tom Brake: Do you think part of the problem in terms of youth services is what Louise Casey highlighted to us where she said that, in her view, youth services are one of the least reformed areas of public service and that they tend not to provide services at a time when they are needed, such as during the summer holidays?
Mr Coaker: That is why we have very much targeted, with respect to dealing with youth violence, for example, Friday and Saturday night activities and we are running what we call "The Open Campaign", which is trying to ensure that facilities and services are available at times when they are most needed, and, as I say, Fridays and Saturdays would be an obvious example, school holidays would be another. We are working to address some of the constraints that there have been on the provision of youth facilities and youth services at times when it would be most appropriate for them to be available.
Q420 Tom Brake: Clearly you are saying the Government are taking action. Presumably local authorities are taking action in that respect. Are there any other areas of youth services where perhaps Louise Casey is right and there is need for reform?
Mr Coaker: There is always need for change and to look at how things are being delivered. The co-ordination of all of this, I think, is one area, but it is not just the youth service on its own, it is the police, it is health, it is schools, housing. It is all of the different agencies. The point I was making earlier on - the fact that the Children and Young People's Plan will bring all of that together to give it the co-ordination that it needs - I think, was an area that was in need of reform and that is what is going to happen from April onwards.
Q421 Chairman: What was clear from the meeting that we had with User Voice is the importance of schools, not just teachers but other figures who are able to turn them away from crime, and we heard from Professor Laycock this morning that bullying is a particular problem that eventually leads to crime outside the school setting. Could we send you the details of these groups and see whether, in your very busy diaries, you could find some time to meet with them, because I think we all agree the system is the system, but we need to find imaginative and radical approaches to try and deal with this problem?
Mr Coaker: I am very happy to do that, Mr Vaz. In my professional life as well as my political life I have always believed that the voice of pupils, of students, or young offenders is absolutely crucial in determining the best way forward with respect to all of this. As I say, bullying is a problem we all recognise. The Committee will also know from its other deliberations, that is why we are looking at ensuring how we record incidents of bullying in schools so that we get a better idea of exactly what is happening.
Chairman: Indeed. Ms Eagle, Mr Coaker, thank you very much indeed. We are most grateful to you for coming.
Memorandum submitted by Safer Sutton Partnership Service (SPPS)
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Lord Tope MBE, a Member of the House of Lords; Mr Warren Shadbolt, Head, Safer Sutton Partnership; Mr Andy Sellins, Acting Chief Executive, and Mr Adam Hall, Development Manager, Cricket for Change, gave evidence.
Q422 Chairman: I would like to welcome Lord Tope, Mr Sellins, Mr Hall and Mr Shadbolt. Apologies for keeping you waiting, but I hope by having all witnesses together we can make some time up. Perhaps I could start with Mr Shadbolt, the structure of the Safer Sutton Partnership, why is that different from other partnerships in different parts of the country? What is so special about what you are doing there? What are your outcomes? Have you shown that there has been a reduction in crime?
Mr Shadbolt: The structure is distinct because the Community Safety Police Partnership and the Drugs and Alcohol Action Team all come under a single line manager, the Head of Safer Sutton Partnership. That allows a holistic look at everything, through from some of the causal factors all the way through to the prevention and problem solving. It is less concerned with detection, which still resides with the operational side of the police. It allows us to concentrate on community problems and directing resources to them. In terms of the results, over the five years since the partnership started operating in that way we have seen criminal damage offences drop by 36%; violence against the person by nearly 23%; theft of motor vehicles by 29%; total crime down by over 11%; and similar large reductions in fear of crime but specifically higher numbers around vandalism and antisocial behaviour.
Q423 Chairman: Lord Tope, you must have seen other partnerships in different parts of the country. Is this different?
Lord Tope: It is different. Very briefly, a bit of history: the close working partnership between the council and the police goes back certainly to the early 1990s, long before CDRPs were formally instituted, so it is a very mature partnership. It survives changes of personnel, different chief executives and different borough commanders. They are working together, first of all, under a single managed unit. Originally I was asked whether we would like to co-locate and I said, "Let's go a step further and single manage." I was on the Police Authority in those days and persuaded the Commissioner that this might be a good idea. Uniquely, I think, the Met agreed to an open recruitment. The Head of the Safer Sutton Partnership, who would manage police officers and council staff, was recruited openly rather than just within the Met. It is well known that the shortlist we interviewed was one local government officer (not from Sutton), one civil servant and one police officer. On merit, the police officer got it. But that is what made it unique. It is a working partnership not just at senior level, where people are nice to each other, but right down through to the problem-solving meetings, now fortnightly, I think, at operational level.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q424 Mrs Cryer: Mr Shadbolt, could you explain to the Committee how the Intelligence through Neighbourhood Security Interviews process works. How has it improved your crime prevention approach?
Mr Shadbolt: Intelligence through
Neighbourhood Security Interviews is a methodology devised by Professor Martin
Innes of
Q425 Gwyn Prosser: At our last meeting, the Police Minister told us that the cuts in funding for the partnerships will not have any major impact. You might have heard earlier on this morning that Maria Eagle, the Justice Minster, sought to downplay the 50% cut in funding and said that the partnerships are becoming much more efficient and there will not be any significant change. I guess you would have a different view of that.
Mr Shadbolt: Certainly the 50% cut in the capital element of Safer and Stronger Communities Funds represents £26,000 for Sutton, and that will now be a gap that will occur on our Life Centre project which I submitted a note to you about. That is of local concern. It is certainly true as a small suburban borough that, although we have small pockets of extreme deprivation, on average we are a pretty 'normal' borough, so we tend to be overlooked for other specialist funding streams, so any of the more generalist funding streams, particularly for revenue and particularly for things like the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund, are vital in launching projects where we can put resources to neighbourhood problems. All of these apparently minor funding streams are crucial for smaller boroughs with lower revenue.
Q426 Gwyn Prosser: Will you still deliver on the partnership?
Mr Shadbolt: Yes, certainly. The reality of the cut in the capital budget means that it creates a gap in the Council's capital programme which will have to be met, presumably, from contingency.
Q427 Chairman: Do you lament the passage of the community, the old days when people used to look out of their windows through their net curtains, where they would know everybody in the street and therefore they could ring the police through Neighbourhood Watch? Did that exist or is it just the thought of it existing?
Lord Tope: Probably not, Chairman, but I have reached the age when I remember those days fondly even if they did not exist. To try to give you a slightly more serious answer: yes, community has changed from the memories some of us might have of the 1950s and 1960s, and whether accurate or not, in a way, does not matter. I think there is now a greater loss of community. One of the things that we are trying to recreate, and I am sure all local authorities are, is that greater sense of community, and we are working in a different way. I hope this will be one of the achievements of the Life Centre that we have spoken about.
Q428 Bob Russell: Lord Tope, in the current economic climate, how can a council justify spending money on something like the Sutton Life Centre?
Lord Tope: First of all, half the funding is coming from the My Place scheme, the DCSF scheme. I think it is an even more important investment in the future. One of the concerns I have, with the cuts that we all know are coming, is that it will press us more and more to short-termism. That has been one of the shortcomings.
Q429 Bob Russell: It is not a statutory responsibility for you to do this, is it?
Lord Tope: Some of it is a statutory responsibility; some of it is the extras that I think make the difference for local authorities.
Q430 Bob Russell: Your first responsibility is to statutory duties. If you have economic pressure, how are you going to raise the additional funds for the extras, as you have described it?
Lord Tope: Let us separate this out. The capital scheme is now - apart from the £26,000 we have just heard about - funded. Hopefully the Life Centre itself, when it is fully up and operational, will pay for itself. It includes a library which brings with it its own budget; it brings youth facilities, which again bring with it an existing budget, although it may be cut. The aim is to make it self-financing with that budget support that will be there anyway for the statutory services.
Q431 Bob Russell: You are having to bring in elements of imaginative accountancy - and I do not meant that in the wrong sense.
Lord Tope: Absolutely not. Would it be helpful, Chairman, if I asked
Mr Shadbolt: There are two choices. The revenue can either be funded from existing budgets, which is not realistic, or where the Centre operates in two modes. One is as a regional training facility essentially. Those trips will be charged to schools that attend but at very low cost. At the moment the charging structure is £270 for a class of up to 30, so £9 per head. The key thing about the Centre is that it is around citizenship and life skills, so it will come back and form part of the curriculum from 2011. We are really looking not so much at the traditional physical safety but things around bullying, cyber safety, domestic violence, nutrition, health, environmental issues, so it is a real attempt to deal with some of those issues that people may say no longer form part of the curriculum, or that the youths, particularly in deprived areas, do not pick up from other routes.
Q432 David Davies: How will the provision offered by the Life Centre help young people stay away from crime? Have you involved young people in planning the services that will be on offer?
Mr Shadbolt: Yes, most certainly. There was a full feasibility done a few years ago that looked specifically at the issues for two age groups, and we focused in on Year 6, the final year of primary school, and Year 8, the second year of secondary, because there appeared to be a great difference in the needs of those two age groups. We have consulted widely and looked at where the gaps in existing service provision are. To answer the first part of your question second, how we would keep people away from crime, the hope is that, when we put groups through this process, out of that class of 30 not only will we put the victims of bullying through, but we will also put the perpetrators of bullying through. There will be ways and means of applying pressure to groups and individuals within that group to dissuade future behaviour. It really is an attempt to provide a set of corrective behaviour for those who are in danger of becoming criminals, but also to provide support to those who are already or may be the victims of domestic violence or some of those other crimes.
Tom Brake: This is both a political and a practical question.
Chairman: Mr Brake of course will declare his interest as a local MP.
Q433 Tom Brake: Yes, I should declare an interest as the MP of half of the London Borough of Sutton - although not the half which has the Life Centre in it. A political and practical question: given that resources are limited, how are you going to ensure that the most disadvantaged young people use the services provided by the Life Centre? I am thinking not only of the service you have just talked about but also the sport facilities, the climbing wall, et cetera.
Mr Shadbolt: The honest truth is that there is a great tension between revenue generation to cover the costs of running the centre in its regional training mode and the community benefits that can derive from it. We will be looking - and we have already started planning in its second mode as a local community facility - at specific schemes, feeds in from things like the YISP, the Youth Inclusion Support Panel. We are already looking at the climbing wall for those that are sight and hearing impaired, running particular programmes for those not in education, employment and training, and particularly focusing again around the northern wards, which is where the Life Centre is situated, which is our highest area of deprivation, teenage pregnancy, high unemployment. We will deliberately skew the activities in the centre towards those groups, but, as I say, recognising that we do need to generate some income from the activities of the Centre as well.
Q434 Tom Brake: Lord Tope, is this going to require some political will in terms of balancing the revenue implications against income and so on, if we are going to ensure that the most disadvantaged young people are able to access this facility?
Lord Tope: Yes, it will. One of the key questions for us will be getting the balance between the use of the Centre as a regional facility, which it very much is and where the main income stream will come from, and ensuring that it is of very real benefit to the local community, not just or particularly what we are calling the Life Zone now, the media thing, but the other community facilities, the library, the climbing wall, the sensory garden, the youth zone, and the meeting rooms and so on. Yes, we can go from one extreme - dream on! - if the council could fund it all and we could have all the emphasis there, to the other extreme, where it could be run entirely as a commercial enterprise and the local community would pay the price that everybody else pays. We have to get the balance between those two extremes and that is going to be a pretty tough political judgment.
Q435 Tom Brake: I have a more general question about crime prevention policy. One of our other witnesses has described the Government's approach as being far too centralised. Is that a point that you would echo, Mr Shadbolt?
Mr Shadbolt: Our experience in Sutton, irrespective of policy, is that the more we talk to communities and the more we learn about their problems, the better we can direct limited resources to those issues. That appears to pay dividends not only in terms of issues requiring reassurance but also it feeds through into the more serious categories of crime. Certainly we would advocate more localism and more determination locally of how those resources are deployed.
Q436 Tom Brake: Is there any way in which currently central government are directing the local authority to do certain things in relation to crime prevention that you think are not appropriate or allocating and earmarking funding in a way that you think is not appropriate?
Mr Shadbolt: I do not think I could cite a case of that. I could say there is always that natural tension between prevention and detection. When economic times are hard and budgets are restricted, there can tend to be a move back towards reactive policing rather than proactive and preventative approaches. We are both keen and concerned that we do maintain that emphasis on problem solving and longer-term problem solving rather than being drawn back purely into a more responsive mode.
Q437 Chairman:
I
have seen the plans for the Life Centre and I have seen a presentation. It is an excellent concept. We would like one in
Lord Tope: We are open to offers, Chairman.
Q438 Chairman: When we went to look at the site, Mr Brake and I were driven off the site because they thought we were breaching security for being on it. When is it likely to be completed?
Lord Tope: It will be completed, I think, in August. It opens to schools in the borough in October this year.
Q439 Chairman: In terms of the costs - and I know we have dealt with this - one of the problems of course is the cost of using the Centre. Is there any possibility of a subsidy for schools?
Lord Tope: We are offering a 50% subsidy to Sutton schools (a) to encourage them, but (b) on the basis that a substantial amount of Sutton money is going into it. It is half-funded by central government, the capital costs, but half of it through local funding, so that is what we have decided to do, at least for the first year.
Q440 Chairman: People genuinely believe that, as a result of this resource, crime in Sutton will go down further amongst young people.
Mr Shadbolt: In the longer term, yes. It is a far broader approach. Because it is focusing on fair and safer and greener, the intention is in some way to promote better citizenship, so people consider their responsibilities as well as their rights in the broadest sense. It should perhaps be clear that many of the community facilities that are on offer will not be charged for. It is purely the training for groups of school children that that is in the charging.
Q441 Chairman: You are welcome to stay Mr Shadbolt. I know, Lord Tope, you have other engagements. This is probably an appropriate time if you wish to take leave of the Committee. Thank you very much for coming and giving evidence to us. We look forward to being kept informed of the progress of the Life Centre. Can we now turn to Cricket for Change. Mr Hall and Mr Sellins, you have been sitting very patiently there. Before I turn to Mr Winnick, can I ask about the importance of schools, because this is an initiative that goes beyond schools, it has been done in the community. Do you think that the education system ought to have been doing what Cricket for Change has been doing?
Mr Sellins: A lot of our work is not really appropriate for schools. We run the largest disability cricket programme in the world and the early parts of that are in special needs schools, but I think our work that has the most impact is out of school hours. We run a programme at the moment in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police called Street Chance. It is a three-year project, running ten year-round cricket projects every week in ten areas with the highest youth crime - with youth disengagement, as defined by the Metropolitan Police, who are obviously partners in it. We have found that we do get young people coming from schools, but really we pick up young people in all manner of ways: from hearing it from their friends, from just passing by and seeing what is going on. The key elements to that are that we are there all the time, that we have a positive, often male role model, who is their cricket coach but is so much more than their cricket coach.
Q442 Chairman:
We
will come on to that in a second. You have been to
Mr Sellins: We are going to
Chairman: Good answer.
Q443 Mr Winnick: Mr Hall, I see you have won a number of national prizes as a coach.
Mr Hall: Yes, I have. Last week I won the ECB young coach of the
year, which was fantastic to win. From
where I was five or six years ago, it is fantastic to pick up a national
recognition like that. I would never
have dreamed of anything like that when I was 14 or 15, where I was going and
where my life was heading, to where I am now, sitting here in front of you guys
and winning national awards and travelling to
Q444 Mr Winnick: We guys and ladies congratulate you on your excellence award.
Mr Hall: Thank you.
Q445 Mr Winnick: And for the work that both of you are doing. Has working with disadvantaged young people taught you anything in particular about the cause of re-offending, anything that you would not have known beforehand?
Mr Hall: I can tell you a little bit
about my story. I went to primary
school, obviously, and I was very academic. At primary school, I was brilliant. I then went to secondary school and when I
was 13 I just sort of went off the rails and I joined a gang and I became a
member of a gang, quite a violent gang actually. I grew up in Walthamstow, which is in
Q446 Mr Winnick: And you, Mr Sellins?
Mr Sellins: I have been involved with the charity for 25 years. That is Adam's story but, luckily, we have a number of those types of stories. We have a programme at the minute that is even more targeted than Adam's story. We are taking five young offenders, straight out of HMP Ashfield, each year for the next three years and putting them through a similar process that Adam has described. Part of it is an arm around the shoulder, a part of it is saying, "Right, we've had enough of this sort of behaviour. If you do this, this will happen to you in a positive way." It is beyond the level 1/level 2 of coaching qualifications, which are quite straightforward to do; it is about having that young person out with one of our team - and Adam is one of our team - day in, day out showing them first about turning up on time, being responsible for your actions, building positive adult relationships. The type of adults we are, we talk about music and sport and girls and we go out for a drink and we do all these things, but we are very firm about how you should behave to each other and to other young people. It is about developing a sense of responsibility about yourself and about your actions. This is a revelation to a lot of the kids. One of the lads who has joined this scheme was involved in a gang shooting when he was 15 and then went straight to Ashfield. We picked him up, straight out, and I said, "What could have been different about your life when you were 15? What made you go off the rails?" He said - and it is rather a cliché - "Having a dad about would have helped, but also meeting blokes like you" - he meant the team generally. He said, "You guys, you're funny, you're cool, you love sport, you talk about sport, you play sport, but when it comes to serious stuff about the kids and how you behave and turning up on time, you guys are deadly serious about this and I really like this. I like it. I can see where it is going. You map out. You are constantly talking about what comes next." Not just in terms of the charity, but in his life, we say, in weekly/monthly feedback, "Right, you got here. To get here, this is what we need to do together." It is a long process. Comic Relief are funding us. It costs about £5,000 per year to support and train one of these young offenders. I am sure you know how much it costs to keep a young person in prison. It will take that time to turn him around, and probably more. When they come to us, they are off the rails. They are not the mainstream type of kid that understands if you invest now in exams the future looks bright. They have no idea of that link at all.
Q447 Chairman: To pursue the funding aspect, you have talked about how much it takes to keep the programme going, but where do you get your funding from?
Mr Sellins: That particular programme is for the Street Team. It is from Comic Relief. That have taken a leap of faith with us, I think, and said, "Right, we will support you." We are taking five kids this year, five next, and it is 25 grand a year.
Q448 Chairman: You get no public funds for this.
Mr Sellins: No. It is done from foundations, charities. We get a bit of Sport England funding, a bit of Big Lottery funding.
Q449 Chairman: There are lots of forms to fill in.
Mr Sellins: Lots of forms to fill in, lots of reports to write. We have about 30 different funders, all supporting different aspects of our programmes - which is good in some ways, but difficult in others.
Q450 Tom Brake: Adam, I am wondering whether from your experience it was cricket that was, in effect, the bait. You reel these young people in with cricket and then, when you have got them, the role model aspect kicks in and you start to build them up as people.
Mr Hall: Yes.
Q451 Tom Brake: Is that the way it works?
Mr Sellins: Yes. Cricket is very much the carrot that we dangle to attract the young people in. Not every young person is going to like cricket, but we are working on programmes now to engage them through football, street dance, rugby, or whatever sport they like. It is all about youth engagement.
Mr Hall: Cricket was the carrot that dangled and attracted me, and I built up a relationship with these guys over time. Cricket was what drew me in but then I got to know these guys and built up a relationship. I told them things that were happening in my life and then they directed me on to better ways, where I can go and what I can go to, to where I am now. Cricket is very much the carrot that we dangle. It is more youth engagement and almost being a youth worker.
Q452 Tom Brake: For the youth work part then, what particular support do you receive in terms of training, or are you simply relying on your own personal experience? I assume people will come to you saying, "I've got a drug problem, what can I do about it?" Or, "I'm in trouble because I owe someone some money, what advice can you give me?" and that sort of thing. What sort of training or assistance have you had with that aspect of the youth work?
Mr Hall: When I was taken onboard, if I can say that, I went through quite an intensive training programme. It happened every single week. Since then I have been sent on about 80 different courses - all different, not just cricket related: working with gangs, how to tackle obesity and loads of different courses - so that I can gain some knowledge. But the key for me is going on those courses but using that knowledge as well as my background of what I have been through and I can adapt the two and then see what situation fits best for the young person I am working with. It is about the individual that I am working with. If I am working with someone who is on an estate, going down quite a bad road, the courses I have been on have been massively helpful, but I use my background and my experience to say, "Look, this is not quite right. You should do this, do this, do this." It is an ongoing relationship. It is almost an ongoing conversation. We have been working with young people for about three years now and I am still having ongoing conversations about drugs with young people and it is very difficult to try and guide them. It is more of a relationship-building process, but the training element to it is probably just a tiny part of it. I tend to use my knowledge of what I have been through.
Q453 Tom Brake: Does it ever get too heavy and you have to refer it on to some other organisation because you know it is outside the scope of what you can deal with?
Mr Hall: Yes, there are occasions when it does get too heavy, but this is why we have partners on board like the Met.
Chairman: We will come on to that in a second.
Q454 Bob Russell: Chairman, it is a truly inspirational presentation. Thank you for that and I congratulate you, Mr Hall, on your achievement.
Mr Hall: Thank you.
Q455 Bob Russell: Mr Sellins, are there any benefits of employing young people who have previously been in trouble?
Mr Sellins: I think there are benefits to them and I think there are benefits to wider society. Starting just with them, the Street Team, for instance, or someone like Adam, they come to us without that sense of a dream, without any structure to their progression, and so, first of all, to get them to buy into that is absolutely crucial. We are hoping with the Street Chance programme to have no re-offending. We hope that the carrot that we are dangling - which is professional work, professional qualifications - is strong enough for them to see that that is a better option for them. For wider society, we all know the figures, that a small number of offenders are responsible for a large number of offences. We started this current programme with the Met Police after doing a pilot in Hackney, and the police records show that while we were doing the programme crime and antisocial behaviour did go down, but I think as soon as you withdraw they could bounce back. I do think that this type of work is about being on the ground a lot with the right people.
Q456 David Davies: I think Mr Hall has already answered my question, which is about how you target people. You do it through the police and the local authorities. What is your relationship right now and the relationship of the people you work with with the police, given the backgrounds that many of them have?
Mr Hall: Do you mean the relationship the young people have with them?
Q457 David Davies: Yes.
Mr Hall: It is an interesting
question. We are doing a programme in
Newham at the moment. We are working
with a sergeant in Newham. I am working
with a gang in Newham, trying to engage them through cricket. As someone mentioned earlier, I use cricket
as a carrot to dangle and now we are trying to build up some real strong links
with them. I have been working with them now for a year. At first a sergeant from the Metropolitan
Police came along, and they were, "Ooh, he's a policeman," and they would not
come along to the session, and I had to go back on to their estate and say,
"Look, guys, just come along. He only
wants to play some cricket, so come along."
This policeman came along and he played cricket with them and he was
chatting with them and he was engaging with them. He has not been around for two months, and
every single session, it is like, "Where is Sergeant Bob? Where is Sergeant Bob?" They have realised
that, out of the uniform, he is a human being, he is just like them, he is an
adult. That, for me, is one of the most
powerful things I have seen in ages, because they have seen this uniform, they
are very wary of this uniform, they are always getting attacked by this
uniform, but seeing him out of his uniform and he is a sergeant - which is
a high ranking for a young person to see - and he has come along and he has
played cricket with them. We went down
to
Q458 David Davies: That is an interesting answer. On a sensitive issue, and I always try to ask these questions in a careful way: you must be dealing with gangs from minority groups?
Mr Hall: Yes.
Q459 David Davies: Do you find you can interact fine with them or do you find that harder to do because of your own ethnic background?
Mr Hall: Good question. I have never seen it as a struggle. It has never really been a struggle. I think once you are working with a young person, no matter what ethnic background they have, if they are into crime they are crying out for help really. I was crying out for help. When I was 14 and 15 and on a bad road, really I was crying out for help. They are crying out for help, for anybody who is in a senior position who is there willing to help them, who is not going to be very authoritative on them and say, "You've got to do this, you've got to do this," who is there just to be an ear for them to talk to really. It has not really come across in my work where it has been a problem, no.
Chairman: Mr Clappison, I know you have a particular interest in cricket.
Q460 Mr Clappison: It is marvellous that cricket is doing this. It is a feather in the cap for cricket. How do you think we can get other sports going on the same wavelength?
Mr Sellins: I think some are. Football has done a lot and basketball. I met someone this morning who is doing it
with basketball. With cricket, apart
from the crime diversion element to the Street Chance project with the Met, the
other half of it is to try and engage with marginalised Muslim
communities. The way it works is we play
a form of cricket called Street20. It is
20 balls per side, the game is over in 20 minutes, you can play and play and
play. It is six aside. It works on basketball courts and all that
sort of stuff. Every half term and
school holiday, we have competitions, where all the teams come in from across
Chairman: Some not for long! Gwyn Prosser, your chance in the spotlight.
Q461 Gwyn Prosser: The evidence of both of you has been really impressive. The story you have told us is going to feature strongly in the Committee's report. I am convinced of that. Adam, you have told us that you were part of a criminal gang, a violent gang, and then you met up with Andy and his people. What was the reaction from your gang members when they said, "There's a big job going on on Sunday," and you said, "I'm sorry, I'm playing cricket."
Mr Hall: It is a good question. In fact, I am still friends with the majority of them now, and there are some of them that are still not going down a good route.
Q462 Gwyn Prosser: There was no pressure from the gang?
Mr Hall: No, there was not. Not at all. In fact, they were happy for me. We created our own community. We were our own young community. There were about ten to 12 of us and we had our own community. We lived by our own rules, because that was all we wanted to do, and we ran riot everywhere, but as soon as someone did something and achieved something, they were extremely happy. I am still friends with some - not all of them, because some of them are in prison now.
Q463 Gwyn Prosser: Have you had success in bringing any more of them out of the dark, if you like, and into the cricket fraternity?
Mr Hall: Yes, some have had success - not through cricket, because cricket was not a popular game for them. Some of them were taken on board by other organisations that are doing the same sort of work. I have spoken to them about what I am doing and it inspired them really. The first time I went overseas I went to Barbados, and I came back and said to them, "I've just been to Barbados" and they were really inspired by what I was doing and the sort of work I was doing and they really wanted to do it. I think it was a light bulb in their head saying, "I've been down this process, I know what is happening. I can change other young people's lives." The majority of them now are working as youth workers.
Q464 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Sellins, we have talked about cricket, football, baseball, et cetera. Are we talking about boys and men all the time or not?
Mr Sellins: The Street Chance project we have talked about is 95% boys. The 5% is quite high, considering it is not a programme targeted at girls. We were talking on the way about targeting girls and it is a different approach. We have something starting in May where we are not so heavily focusing on a sport but we are making it an activity programme. We are making the time and the space theirs, because girls and young women can easily get squeezed out or have to come in to the boys' agenda. We are finding time at our centre to start with in May, and then we are picking other centres that we are working with around London where we give them their time, with female role models supported by male role models, letting them set the agenda to some extent, and not making it a pure sport thing, which appeals particularly to boys. The pure sport is attractive to boys.
Q465 Mrs Cryer: The Chairman has already asked you about funding but I want to delve a bit more deeply into that. Has it become easier or more difficult of late to get funding? How do you see the future? Do you feel quite comfortable that in future you are going to have a continuous stream of funding to do what you are doing now, or do you think there are going to be difficulties? Finally, I am tempted to ask, how did you get on with the New York Police Department?
Mr Sellins: Funding, funnily enough, we are finding easier rather than harder, but I think it is partly because our reputation is strong and we research what we do very heavily, so we produce the type of evidence that researchers find which backs up our anecdotal case study type evidence. Funding is okay. I should never say that, should I?
Q466 Chairman: No.
Mr Sellins: That is terrible. Scrub that.
Q467 Chairman: I am afraid you are on live television.
Mr Sellins: Okay. The scale of what we are doing is relatively small, so to scale this up would be expensive and then larger funding would need to come in.
Q468 Chairman: What is your total budget for the year?
Mr Sellins: About half a million.
Q469 Chairman: And you employ how many people?
Mr Sellins: Twelve.
Q470 Chairman: And that pays for all the programmes.
Mr Sellins: Yes.
Q471 Chairman: Every single thing is included in that figure?
Mr Sellins: Yes. And our cricket centre in Sutton.
Q472 Mrs Cryer: For the future, are you quite confident?
Mr Sellins: We are very confident. We are
a London-based organisation. We work in
Q473 Chairman:
If
you go to
Mr Sellins: Fine.
Q474 Tom Brake: To pursue that point a little bit further, I wonder whether there is any way that you can build into your programme something that guarantees that funding will continue? If you are dependent on things like Comic Relief, in two years' time they could choose to put their money somewhere else. Are there any arrangements you have? The obvious thing would be to talk to the police or the Prison Service. I think £30,000 is what it costs to send someone to prison. You are spending £5,000 on dealing with these most prolific offenders. Having a relationship where that money would come to you in exchange for the work you are doing would provide continuity. What more can you do to try to cement in the finances, so that you do not run out of funds?
Mr Sellins: There are several things
there. We went to
Q475 Chairman: You go to another group first and then you get in contact with the prison.
Mr Sellins: Yes.
Q476 Chairman: You do not deal with them directly?
Mr Sellins: We work with the Second Chance project just in Ashfield Prison. They prepare the young people to come to us: they interview them, they introduce them to us. We go to Ashfield on a regular basis to talk to young people and see if they are ready for this type of training programme.
Q477 Chairman: Why not Feltham? Why Ashfield?
Mr Sellins: Feltham we have been put off
a bit because it has quite a lot of remand prisoners in. We need to have the young people under the
tutelage, as it were, of Second Chance project, and then, for an extended
period, build a relationship. The lesson
we have learned throughout this is that it takes time. It is a lot of good adult time that needs to
be poured into these young people. The
Prison Service is being dealt with and the Met Police, yes. Similarly, if we are going to scale up around
the
Q478 Chairman: Do you get resentful of the fact that you see a very well-funded criminal justice system, with billions of pounds at the disposal of men in suits, but you have to struggle filling in lots and lots of forms to do something that they ought to be doing?
Mr Sellins: Not really. I am really, really excited about this Street Team idea, which, as I say, formalised the process that Adam has gone through, because I am convinced that, at the end of these three years, we are going to have these 15 young people and this nice report, and these young kids are going to be working with us and they are going to have careers and we will be proud of them. Hopefully the lessons learned from that we are going to share with everybody else to do it, because that is what we are about. No, the joy is turning round these young people. It is amazing. You know, I am so proud of this guy. There are things he has not told you that are amazing - sitting in front of the NYPD and the USA Cricket Association last week and just telling it as it is. I got a letter back saying, "He is so impressive. We thought he was going to be a 40 to 50 year old." The way he dealt with them was so impressive on emails and telephones. He has done really well. Academically he did not achieve anything, but he has got this intelligence about how you make things happen for yourself once he had bought into the dream of what it is he is trying to do.
Chairman: Mr Sellins and Mr Hall, thank you very much for giving evidence. Mr Shadbolt, thank you.