"I've worked a lifetime in children's personal social services," he says.
"I was in the job so long I was starting to see the second generation of children coming along. I was working with families where they had really entrenched problems. It was so obvious that if we had been able to offer something to those families at a much earlier stage we could have prevented and broken that cycle."
Ashford, whose passion for prevention borders on the evangelical, unsurprisingly got the job at the board - a position he describes as "the best job I've ever had" - and set about converting the rest of the world.
"When I first started we had a youth crime prevention strategy and no money to deliver it," he recalls. "I can remember visiting youth offending teams, and four years ago many didn't see it as their responsibility to be involved with young people on the cusp of offending."
He says there are now very few teams who would not consider working with young people at risk of offending to be part of their statutory duty.
Ashford also had to convince the wider world of children's services and government policymakers that prevention was worthwhile. "Part of my role has been about delivering messages, and it has now been widely accepted that youth crime prevention is important," he says.
Ashford and his team gathered evidence by evaluating different types of prevention work, proving not only that it worked, but also that it is cost effective. His success resulted in a £45m budget for preventive work, secured earlier this year from the Treasury.
This money has now been allocated to teams across England and Wales, based on a formula constructed to give funding according to local need.
Each team now has to choose from a menu of different types of prevention that it feels will be effective, before going back to the board for approval.
The serious investment will come in from April next year.
The board's success in getting funding has given youth offending teams a lead role in crime prevention for the next two years, up until the next Home Office spending review, expected in 2007. What happens after this has been thrown into doubt by the reform of young people's services set out in Every Child Matters and the Youth Matters green paper.
"Youth Matters clearly says it recognises the value of what we have been doing in terms of the programmes we've delivered," says Ashford. "As a result it says, at least for the period of the spending review, we want to see the Youth Justice Board, and youth offending teams, carry on delivering these programmes."
After that he says the question of who will run crime prevention is still up for debate: "We've said we want to explore the possibility of how we can further integrate and improve co-ordination between youth offending teams, children's services and criminal justice services. That has to happen. On the question of what that means in terms of the structure, there hasn't been a decision yet."
As you would expect from such a devout follower of the philosophy of prevention, for Ashford the important thing is not who does it, but how.
"In the end, I don't care who delivers," he says. "I want to be sure that whoever is responsible is able to, and will, make a greater impact on the young people, and their victims and communities, that we are all so concerned about."
FYI
- Youth offending teams run a range of prevention programmes across England and Wales
- Youth inclusion and support panels are aimed at preventing offending among eight- to 12-year-olds
- Youth inclusion programmes are more targeted initiatives, aimed at the 50 most "at risk" 13- to 17-year-olds in an area
- Youth offending teams are also involved in parenting programmes, Safer Schools Partnerships and support for young people with antisocial behaviour orders.
