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During this inquiry we wished to examine the nature and effectiveness of crime reduction policies over the four years since our predecessor Committee reported on the merits of justice reinvestment as a means of cutting crime. Since 2010, crime has been falling, but we found that the extent to which this can, in practice, be attributed to the success of national or local crime reduction policies is unclear. Re-offending rates which had been falling have stabilised over this period but remain relatively high, and it concerns us that last year there has been a fall in the proportion of local areas achieving a decrease in reoffending. We call on the Government to seek to recognise more explicitly where reoffending has fallen and seek to understand why. The prison population has remained high but its once inexorable growth seems to have calmed.
All parts of the criminal justice system have had to cope with significant spending cuts, yet it appears to us that the Government has shied away from using the need to make significant cuts to re-evaluate how and where money is spent. This is in contrast to the approach that we saw in Texas (and over half of US states) where they concluded that any real effort to contain spending on corrections must have as its centrepiece a plan to limit the growth of, and ultimately reduce, the prison population. The Government's method of reform remains focused largely on the activity of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, which can overemphasise the significance in attempting to reduce crime of measures taken entirely within the criminal justice system. Some cross-Government initiatives have been developed, such as the Troubled Families programme, to deal with sources of crime. We welcome these yet note that the resources attached to very early intervention schemes, like Family Nurse Partnerships, are tiny in relation to the prison budget and the staggeringly high costs of crime to society. For example, we were told that it is estimated that annually violent crime, 44% of which is alcohol related, costs almost £30 billion, crime perpetrated by people who had conduct problems in childhood costs about £60 billion, and drug-related crime costs almost £14 billion.
There have been significant changes to the local partnership landscape for crime reduction since 2010, including the introduction of police and crime commissioners and the transfer of public health responsibilities to local authorities, reflecting the ongoing broader shift of power in this field from Whitehall to local communities. While this has resulted in an assortment of local accountability structures, our evidence highlights the clear benefits of collective ownership, pooled funding and joint priorities that have been facilitated by this approach, although there remains a considerable way to go before health can be considered a fully integral part of the crime reduction picture. In particular, we consider that addressing the funding of mental health services, the inadequacy of which costs the police, courts, probation, and prisons and victims of crime greatly, should be an urgent priority. Alcohol treatment similarly remains a Cinderella service.
In our view, two major elements are missing from local partnership approaches to crime reduction: courts and prisons. We believe that a prison system which effectively rehabilitates a smaller number of offenders, while other offenders are rehabilitated through robust community sentences, has the potential to bring about a bigger reduction in crime. Additionally, seeing courts as purely instrumental institutions involved solely in processing and resolving cases, misses an opportunity for encouraging greater innovation, for example through the adoption of problem-solving approaches, which we saw in operation in Texas and in Stockport, and we believe has the potential to make broader systemic savings.
The radical and controversial changes that have been made to the probation system with the intention of providing for supervision of short-sentenced prisoners will be commissioned centrally and must be carefully managed to ensure that local crime reduction activity continues to build in strength as the resources for all concerned are further diminished.
What remains lacking also is still, as our predecessor observed, a rigorous assessment of where taxpayers' money can most effectively be spent in cutting crime, and a government-wide approach which recognises more explicitly that the criminal justice system is only one limited part of the system through which taxpayers' money is spent to keep people safe from crime. We do not have the right structures in place to provide a collective memory of research evidence, its relative weight, and its implications for policy-making, including the capacity to make decisions about the best direction of resources, and we call on the Government to create an independent and authoritative body to facilitate this. In addition, the Treasury should seriously question whether taxpayers' money is used in ways most likely to reduce future crime and victimisation, and develop a longer-term strategy for the use of resources in this manner.
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