Call for cross-government crime reduction body
Joe Lepper
Thursday, September 12, 2013
The government is being urged to create a cross-department crime reduction board to better co-ordinate criminal justice policy across Whitehall.
The proposal, put forward by the Local Government Association (LGA) to the Commons Justice Select Committee’s inquiry into crime reduction, would include Department of Health and Department for Education ministers working alongside the Ministry of Justice on youth justice matters.
Joanna Spicer, vice-chair of the LGA’s safer and stronger communities board, told MPs that the move was needed due to the links between crime, mental health and school problems such as truancy.
She said: “There is a need for joined-up thinking on crime prevention and the opportunity to ensure that all the initiatives, for example by the Department for Education around school truancy and in the Department of Health around mental health, link up and work together.”
She added the move would lead to the development of more cross-government programmes such as the Troubled Families initiative, where multi-agency support is used to tackle a range of problems affecting families with complex needs.
Top-level co-ordination is especially important as reorganisation of health services have made it difficult for councils and the NHS to work together, said Spicer.
“We’ve had to recognise considerable change in the NHS over the last year, including the move to clinical commissioning, which has made it difficult to keep the same people at the same table. That reorganisation has set back progress,” she added.
Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said better co-ordination of crime reduction policy was necessary as “lasting solutions to crime” are usually “outside the criminal justice system”.
He added: “If it takes a cross-departmental board in Whitehall to help break down silos and enable this to happen, we would welcome such a move.”
Also speaking at the committee inquiry was Dr Alison Frater, head of public health and offender health at NHS England, who called for more support to gather data across education, health and probation services to identify indicators of possible future criminal behaviour among young people, such as a parent or sibling being prosecuted.
She said: “Understanding these predictors of crime and really getting into that information is something we need to get on top of and we need a lot of technical support to do that.”
