Local service investment needed to prevent crime

Council leaders have said that there is an urgent need to invest in local services which protect and support young people, as a new report highlights rapid rise in serious and organised crime.

More than 4,500 organised crime groups operate in the UK in changing and unpredictable ways, often using violence and intimidation. A 2013 Home Office review found that the government’s strategy for tackling serious and organised crime did not deal effectively with the evolving threat, with the government prioritising pursuing crime over prevention.

The National Audit Office (NAO) says that the government recognises the seriousness of the increasing challenge and is responding, but there are still significant and avoidable shortcomings to its approach. The government does not know if its efforts are working as it does not currently assess the amount of effort involved, the impact it had and how successfully it reduced the general threat of these types of crime, instead only focusing on the number of crimes ‘disrupted’ via law enforcement statistics.

The NAO recommends that the Home Office should accelerate its work to determine how it will measure the impact of law enforcement efforts on serious and organised crime. It also needs to improve its support to tackle the underlying causes of serious and organised crime and avoid wasting resources through the duplication of capabilities, such as surveillance teams across different law enforcement bodies.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “The government faces an immense challenge in fighting this complex, evolving threat. While it has made efforts to step up its response, there is more the government could do to make its aspirations a reality. To deliver its new strategy, the government needs to better match resources to its priorities, improve its understanding of these crimes and ensure governance and funding fit with its ambitious plans.”

Simon Blackburn, chair of the Local Government Association’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board, said: “This report reinforces the need to invest in local services which protect and support young people, keeping them safe from the lure of gangs, modern slavery and county lines drug activity or from becoming involved in serious crime.

“The government is responding to the challenge, but there are still significant and avoidable shortcomings to its approach. Councils’ youth offending teams have an exceptional record of reducing youth crime and making a real difference to young people’s lives, but they are under huge pressure after seeing their government funding halved over the last decade.

“Children’s services are now starting more than 500 child protection investigations every day, but face a £3.1 billion funding gap by 2025. This is forcing councils to divert funding away from preventative services such as youth work into services to protect children who are at immediate risk of harm.

“To help stop young people being criminally exploited and drawn into serious crime, including knife crime, it is vital that government reverses years of funding cuts to local youth services, youth offending teams and councils’ public health budgets, which need to be addressed in the Spending Review.”