House of Commons Justice Committee Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? First Report of Session 2014–15 Report, together with formal minutes and oral evidence Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 10 June 2014 HC 307 [Incorporating HC 94-i to 94-ix of Session 2013-14] Published on 26 June 2014 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £0.00 Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? 1 The Justice Committee The Justice Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the Ministry of Justice and its associated public bodies (including the work of staff provided for the administrative work of courts and tribunals, but excluding consideration of individual cases and appointments, and excluding the work of the Scotland and Wales Offices and of the Advocate General for Scotland); and administration and expenditure of the Attorney General’s Office, the Treasury Solicitor’s Department, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office (but excluding individual cases and appointments and advice given within government by Law Officers). All publications of the Committee (including press notices and further details can be found on the Committees webpages at www.parliament.uk/justicecttee. Current membership Rt Hon Sir Alan Beith (Liberal Democrat, Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Chair) Steve Brine (Conservative, Winchester) Rehman Chishti (Conservative, Gillingham and Rainham) Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch) Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, Islington North) John Cryer (Labour, Leyton and Wanstead) Nick de Bois (Conservative, Enfield North) Gareth Johnson (Conservative, Dartford) Rt Hon Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru, Dwyfor Meirionnydd) Andy McDonald (Labour, Middlesbrough) John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington) Yasmin Qureshi (Labour, Bolton South East) The following Members were also members of the Committee during the Parliament: Mr Robert Buckland (Conservative, South Swindon); Christopher Evans (Labour/Co-operative, Islwyn); Mrs Helen Grant (Conservative, Maidstone and The Weald); Ben Gummer (Conservative, Ipswich); Mrs Siân C James (Labour, Swansea East); Jessica Lee (Conservative, Erewash); Seema Malhotra (Labour/Co-operative, Feltham and Heston) Robert Neill (Conservative, Bromley and Chislehurst); Claire Perry (Conservative, Devizes); Mrs Linda Riordan (Labour/Co-operative, Halifax), Anna Soubry (Conservative, Broxtowe); Graham Stringer (Labour, Blackley and Broughton); Elizabeth Truss (Conservative, South West Norfolk), Karl Turner (Labour, Kingston upon Hull East), and Mike Weatherley (Conservative, Hove). 2 Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? Contents Report Page Summary 5 1 Introduction 7 Background to the Committee’s inquiry 7 Our inquiry 7 The Committee’s Interim Report 8 Other relevant Justice Committee reports 9 The role of the probation service 9 Youth justice 9 Women offenders: after the Corston report 10 Departmental savings 10 2 Trends in crime and re-offending 12 Trends in recorded crime since 2010 12 Trends in recorded re-offending since 2010 13 The relationship between rates of crime and re-offending and crime reduction policies 14 3 Developments in crime reduction since 2010 17 The Government’s strategic priorities for the reduction of crime 17 Governance arrangements to support crime reduction 17 The National Criminal Justice Board 17 Elected Police and Crime Commissioners 18 Other developments 19 The Gov ernment’s approach to reducing the costs of the criminal justice system 19 Changes in the prison population 20 Crime reduction initiatives 22 Efforts to implement payment by results 22 Early intervention 23 Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme 23 The Troubled Families programme 23 Family Nurse Partnerships 24 Efforts to improve the evidence-base 24 4 The coherence of crime reduction policies 26 Crime as a cross-departmental issue 26 The breadth and depth of cross-Government activity 28 Early intervention 29 Governance at national level 31 Governance at local level 32 The role of police and crime commissioners 32 Integration between public health and crime agendas 33 Tensions between national and local priorities 34 The impact of Transforming Rehabilitation reforms 35 Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? 3 Progress on key crime reduction initiatives 38 Restorative justice 38 Access to mental health treatment 38 Access to drug and alcohol misuse treatment 40 Courts and prisons: missing links? 42 The role of courts in crime reduction 42 The role of prisons in crime reduction 43 The impact of spending reductions on local partnerships 44 Prison safety and rehabilitative effectiveness 44 Innovation in courts: a casualty of the cuts? 46 The evidence-base for crime reduction policy-making 49 The relationship between research and policy-making 49 Washington State Institute for Public Policy 51 The potential of technology in targeting crime reduction activity 52 5 Revisiting a justice reinvestment approach? 54 Developments in the implementation of justice reinvestment approaches in the US 54 Texas case study 55 Developments in the implementation of justice reinvestment approaches in England and Wales 56 Greater Manchester Justice Reinvestment case study 58 Transforming Rehabilitation and justice reinvestment 58 Freeing resources to invest in crime prevention 59 The nature of the financial incentive 61 Future devolution of custodial resources to local communities? 62 A note on political rhetoric 65 Conclusions and recommendations 67 Published written evidence 78 Formal Minutes 75 Witnesses 76 List of printed written evidence Error! Bookmark not defined. List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament 79 Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? 5 Summary 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 6 Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? and resolving cases, misses an opportunity for encouraging