From crime to health, Britain can’t see beyond acute needs for public services
Failures at the Metropolitan Police; the slow-motion collapse of the NHS; strikes across industries. Our public services are geared towards acute need, over stopping that acute need in the first place, writes Rosie Beacon.
Earlier this week it made prime time news that the food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, had resigned due to government inaction on obesity. Reducing obesity – famously an enormous strain on our health service – is primarily a preventative action. While this is no doubt an essential ambition, one’s mind does wander to where the equivalent of Henry Dimbleby is for so many other over stretched public services.
Post pandemic and post austerity, public services tend to be geared towards acute need, over stopping that acute need occurring in the first instance. There is no truer example of this than crime. Indeed the myopic focus on getting more bobbies on the beat has arguably entrenched a reactive approach.
But unfortunately the harsh reality is often that by the time the police or the criminal justice system get involved, a whole range of opportunities to intervene over five, ten, fifteen years could have been missed.
I do accept that it’s instinctively less appealing for a politician to tell a constituent on the doorstep about experimental strategies to reduce crime in ten years when they may have legitimate and tangible concerns in the now. But the notion that political short termism, among other things, could so consistently get in the way of public service outcomes is an indictment on our once world leading, visionary welfare state.
With this said, there’s different ways in which crime can be prevented, and it does not always involve the public sector. A little known but remarkable fact is that some crimes, such as domestic burglary, have fallen significantly across all industrialised nations over the last twenty years, despite these nations having very different approaches to policing and criminal justice. In England and Wales, it fell by 81 per cent. There is a similar story with the fall in car crime – which fell by 79.5 per cent between 1995 and 2019.
The reason for this is not extravagant policing and crime policy, but improved home security. Burglary was essentially designed out of the system. Replicating this preventative zeal with the private sector now would look something more like designing out fraud – the single largest category of crime in England and Wales – from online platforms.
But look to the increase in serious violence among young people, and the deficiencies of the public sector in prevention become glaringly obvious. It is a well established criminological finding that a person’s background influences criminal risk. These vulnerability factors can include growing up in care, exposure to domestic abuse, absent parents, low attainment in school, absence from formal education, and many more. Given the complexity of this vulnerability, it is not merely a matter of ‘designing out’ but piecing together various moving parts.
With this in mind, the headwinds for the next few years look somewhat concerning. Astonishingly, the number of section 47 enquiries – investigations carried out to assess if there is risk of significant harm to a child – have grown by 184 per cent since 2008, according to the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Just over 40 per cent of free school meal eligible secondary pupils were absent during the 2021/22 autumn term, according to research from LSE. Typically around 15 per cent of secondary pupils were registered as persistently missing from the classroom during the pre-pandemic years.
But the fact that I am quoting statistics that would traditionally fall into the remit of the Department for Education is actually part of the problem. If so much of crime prevention rests on early years intervention for example, the costs end up falling to one department while another one accrues the benefits. Nobody explicitly has responsibility for crime prevention.
And this rather inelegant disconnect between services translates on the ground too. Resource is so often spent on managing the queue and referring individuals from social care to one police force to another police force to youth offending back to social care. This demonstrates just how many missed opportunities there often are for at least one public service to make a successful intervention.
The problems of prevention should act as a necessary reminder that public services are all essentially working towards the same goals of human welfare, and better prevention should be a logical by-product of such unity. There needs to be a fundamental re-orientation of our public service provision: so much of the political focus is on ensuring the police are able to respond, but more of the focus should be on ensuring they don’t need to respond at all.