Police and Crime Commissioners

Graham Allen Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

It is nice to be under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Dorries. I begin this debate on police commissioners’ role in early intervention by congratulating all the police and crime commissioners elected last month. They have an historic role, and they bring a long-overdue democratic element to policing that will strengthen both policing and democracy over time. I hope that by the next police commissioner elections, they will be an even more important and legitimate part of our society, particularly if those elections are held at a sensible time of year with properly resourced freepost election addresses and without the low-level point-scoring that characterised this year’s campaign.

Central to that mission is the clarity and relevance of the vision for police commissioners, and that is what I will address today. My first specific ask for the Minister is to accept my invitation to deliver the keynote address at a House of Commons conference of all police and crime commissioners, discussing how they can help stop crime through early intervention. The conference follows on from the highly successful early intervention and crime conference opened by the Home Secretary last March.

We need our police commissioners to hammer home the two key principles of modern policing: partnership and prevention. Those two principles come together in early intervention. The police have long since realised that they cannot tackle crime on their own. They need effective partnership, and police commissioners are the perfect people to deliver that. One of the smarter breed of top cops, John Carnochan, former head of homicide in Glasgow, says that 1,000 extra police officers would be great, but 1,000 extra health visitors would be clever. He knows that working with health, education, the third sector and other partners to stop crime before it happens—rather than just picking up the pieces afterwards —is the future of policing.

The new police commissioners could be the midwives of a cultural change in policing from late intervention to early and pre-emptive intervention. The police will always have the task of reacting to crime, but sustained crime prevention and reduction requires a strategy that unites the police with all the other agencies, whether public, private, third sector or business, that can help tackle the behaviours and lifestyles that breed antisocial behaviour and crime.

Talk to any experienced police officer, from the local bobby to the chief constable, and they will tell you the same stories about the families that cause trouble and the newborn baby destined to carry on the tradition who will come their way in 12, 14 or 16 years’ time. Many of us—teachers, health workers, councillors and MPs—have the same experience. We all know that if we were not so busy firefighting, the best time to sort out the problem would be in the first few years of life. That has been common sense for many centuries, but it is now confirmed by a robust scientific evidence base.

Bessel van der Kolk, writing in the US Psychiatric Annals, said that according to his research, people with childhood histories of trauma, abuse and neglect make up almost the entire criminal population. More than one third of the 100,000 most hardened criminals in the UK were in care as children, and half have no school qualifications at all. The Centre for Mental Health tells me that six out of 10 child offenders have speech and communication problems. Tim Bull of the Brook Trust reinforces that tackling the trauma of sexual abuse would greatly affect offending behaviour later in life. I also agree strongly with Chief Superintendent Irene Curtis, president-elect of the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales, who said:

“I see the new role of police and crime commissioners as an opportunity for someone to have an overview of the increasing demands in relation to community safety in its widest sense that face all public sector organisations at a local level and to look for innovative and creative, sustainable solutions.”

If children acquire a bedrock of basic social and emotional skills in the first three years of life, they have a better chance of being successful in the rest of life, achieving at school, in further education and in work, developing good physical and mental health, making good lifestyle choices and, above all, forming relationships that lead to becoming great parents or carers for the next generation. For all those reasons, police commissioners and police officers know that early intervention programmes giving a good start in the first few years of life are the best possible method of preventing future criminal behaviour.

That was the central message of the two reports on early intervention that I wrote for Her Majesty’s Government last year, and it is why I then wrote to all police and crime commissioner candidates challenging them to adopt early intervention policies as the unique selling point in their relationship with the police. Instead of treading on operational toes or seeking populism and publicity, police commissioners could use their skills, their independence and their role to bring a strategic and long-term view to reducing crime, which would be welcomed by police officers, victims and taxpayers.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the positive response that this debate has generated already. The Revolving Doors Agency reminded me that a quarter of young offenders are themselves fathers, perpetuating an intergenerational cycle that must be broken. Andrew Balchin, the communities director in Wakefield, referred to “bobbies and babies” initiatives in which police community support officers help parents keep children from offending. Councillor Maxi Martin of Merton said that “partnership, partnership, partnership” is everything. Guy Mason reminded me of Save the Children’s families and schools together programme, which is supported by Morrisons. Jean Gross talked about the social and emotional aspects of learning, or SEAL, programme used in every primary class in Nottingham between ages five and 11. Marion Bennathan of the Nurture Group Network highlighted the link between absenteeism at school and crime. Effective information sharing between partners was mentioned by Neal Kieran, principal community protection officer in St Albans.

Many other practical points have been made. The Local Government Association and the Children’s Society have taken an interest in this debate, because they see that police commissioners can play a role in getting to the source of crime rather than waiting until 15, 16 or 20 years later to pick up the pieces expensively. That demonstrates to me that massive expertise is available if Government can encourage police commissioners to use it.

Many police commissioners to whom I have spoken are well aware of this agenda. They range across the parties and include Staffordshire’s Matthew Ellis, Nottinghamshire’s Paddy Tipping, Nick Alston of Essex and Winston Roddick of North Wales, to name but a few. Police commissioners are perfectly positioned to explore the role of policy making based on evidence of what works, as well as social finance and payment by results in reducing crime.

We pioneered that approach with the police and other partners in developing Nottingham as the first early intervention city. Enlightened, forward-thinking police officers became the driving force of the new partnership. Alan Given, Shaun Beebe, Peter Moyes and many others were at the forefront of the movement. At one point, local police were prepared to signal their commitment to stopping crime before it started by financially supporting local health visitors. We then brought the family nurse partnership programme to Nottingham, giving more than 100 teen mums and their babies a dedicated health visitor and the social and emotional skills to make a bright future for themselves. It cost the same amount of money as banging up three 16-year-olds in a secure unit for a year, two of whom, incidentally will go on to reoffend. That sort of investment in cutting the supply of dysfunction and criminality is a no-brainer. I ask the police commissioners to join the rest of us in explaining this to the Treasury as the biggest deficit reduction program it could dream of. Billions of pounds that we currently spend on late intervention could be saved by small investments early in life, to prevent people from going wrong.

The police commissioners should follow the words of Sir Robert Peel, who wisely put preventing crime first in the list when creating the Metropolitan police, even ahead of catching offenders. This is going further than police commissioners lobbying to ensure that those on the edges of the justice system or at risk of offending receive support, which they should, from mental health, social care, drug and alcohol and employment services, important as those things are. This deeper step is about pre-emption: stopping crime before it starts. With the right early intervention policies, we can forestall many of the mental and social problems that are factors in generating antisocial behaviour and crime later in life. Cut off the supply. Tackle the causes, not just the symptoms. Yes, swat mosquitoes, but drain the swamp, too.

Early intervention can break the cycle of dysfunction that makes some families nurseries for offending. It can do this much more cheaply and reliably than intervening later and can generate lasting savings for local budgets, and lasting gains in the quality of life for local neighbourhoods.

Police commissioners using early intervention to attack the causes of crime at the source will also unlock, with tiny investments, a huge new stream of money. We are already seeing payback from investment in social and emotional programmes; those involving young offenders are massively reducing costly reoffending. Such programmes —for example, at Peterborough and Doncaster prisons— are also the pioneers of social finance and innovative bond issues.

I was recently in New York, where the deputy mayor made an innovative agreement with Goldman Sachs and a provider of social and emotional development. This reduced recidivism in 16 to 18-year-olds, generated a profit for Goldman and may ultimately result in a money-saving wing or prison closure.

Police commissioners should, in their oversight of policing budgets, work with institutions like the Early Intervention Foundation and others to insist that every police service has, as standard, such long-sighted invest-to-save programmes. That will create an income stream that the police will be pleased to receive year after year, as the savings accumulate.

Doing this locally is difficult. Sharing the costs and the benefits is the key to such innovative investment. If a health visitor can help prevent the expensive costs of policing and criminal justice further down the line, police commissioners should start working with local health services to plan for the spending and saving from prevention and early intervention. Local authorities, which are now taking on new responsibilities for public health, need to join these new collective financial arrangements, to invest a little bit now and redistribute transparently the funds that are generated by stopping crime early. Building effective partnerships with education and health will enable joint spending to take place early on, followed by redistribution of the big savings to all partners later.

My second ask of the Minister is that he encourages examples of early intervention and promotes it by recruiting just 10 of our willing police commissioners and linking them with those who have the expertise to provide evidence-based programmes, the monetisation of outcomes and the sometimes complicated contractual partnership arrangements—let us try to get some standardisation into the programmes to save a lot of money—to help us make such arrangements an everyday feature of policing by the end of the first term of the first police commissioners.

This is not hopeful speculation; this is happening now. Early intervention has proven results. I mentioned attaching health visitors to teenage mothers, as is done in Nottingham. We draw on a 30-year evidence base from the family nurse partnership and see reduced crime, better job prospects and educational achievement. We introduced the family intervention project, which has seen 100% of its clients complying with community sentences while engaged on the programme. These are not just the noisy neighbours; they are the most difficult families in our city. There has been a 56% improvement in children’s attendance at school. There have been big gains. Police commissioners could also link with the new troubled families initiative and make self-financing and, indeed, profit-making deals that could reduce crime as well as harvest dividends for reinvestment in policing.

Again, if the Minister and the Home Office wish to take this further, those of us involved in early intervention would be happy to help with the nuts and bolts.

In a typically British way, this important extension of democracy has had a difficult birth. However, police commissioners should put that behind them. They now have it within their power not only to give voice to ordinary people, but to make a strategic, lasting contribution to making our society a safer and happier place. If they use their position creatively to become champions of early intervention and argue for effective crime-reduction programmes that make us safer and generate a return to the taxpayer, they will demonstrate to all those who did not vote last week that there is a clear reason to do so next time.