Crime, Disorder and the Third Sector

This contribution to Viewpoint is about government policy on crime and disorder. Firstly, it highlights problems with current policy on community safety - especially the definition of and approach to “anti-social behaviour” - outlining what this means for voluntary sector funding. Secondly, it discusses proposed changes to the probation service and their effects both on the service itself and on the voluntary and community sector. This part looks especially at the issue of opening up a wide range of service activities for tenders by private business.

Community safety and conflict resolution

One of the New Labour Government’s central preoccupations has been with crime, disorder and the public’s perception of safety in the community. It has created the new field of ‘Community Safety’[1], establishing standards of collaborative partnership between local authorities, the police and the criminal justice system which go further than anything previously achieved. In ‘inventing’ the notion of anti-social behaviour and creating a new industry to tackle it, government has also created a very wide policy receptacle into which public fears and panics have been funnelled. The development of a broadly focused response to crime and disorder is a considerable achievement, but as with other areas of this Government’s social policy, a tendency to overdo expectation and regulation has badly spoiled things.

Anti-social behaviour

30 years ago Stan Cohen’s famous study ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ showed how press and public reaction to Mods and Rockers was disproportionate. Any chance of a measured response to levels of public disorder - relatively mild by historical standards - was lost in the process. Much the same has happened recently with anti-social behaviour, but this time much of the sound and fury has been led by central government. The main unit involved, now called in worryingly Orwellian language the Respect Task Force, has consistently promoted enforceable legal options over measures concentrating on prevention and conflict resolution. (Its recent transfer to the Children’s Ministry, however, may possibly signal a shift towards prevention at last: the new Minister, Ed Balls, was quoted in the Guardian (28th July 2007) as supporting such a shift, as against the longstanding preoccupation with ASBOs).

Crumbs for the voluntary sector

Very substantial funding has gone to local authorities and the police for work on anti-social behaviour, and new posts and departments have been created at national level. Very little of this funding, proportionately, has found its way to the voluntary sector. This seems largely to do with the strong policy emphasis on enforcement and control, and the lack of priority for prevention and community work. An especially sad example has been the failure to invest consistently in community mediation.

The community mediation movement began to take off about 15 years ago, using internationally recognised techniques to tackle neighbour dispute and community conflict. As is often the case in Britain, development was piecemeal, and funding for local schemes generally small-scale and short-term. A national organisation, Mediation UK, was set up to represent the newly emerging field. This worked hard, with some central government funding, to secure consistent standards of practice – including a Community Legal Service Quality Mark towards which local schemes were expected to progress.

A great deal has been achieved by community mediation, and much of the work done goes way beyond neighbour dispute into tackling major community conflict. The Southwark mediation scheme, for example, involves training young people to mediate in settings which may include gang disputes and threats of serious violence. Elsewhere mediation has resulted in successful settlement of a wide range of anti-social behaviour problems, with an overall rate of successful outcome at 70% or more. Why is it therefore that today most mediation schemes are struggling for survival, and last year Mediation U.K went out of business?

Three familiar reasons

• We won’t fund consistently until there is ‘proof’ that it works
  There are one or two earlier pieces of research about the effectiveness of mediation, and many local evaluative studies, but as with many ‘new’ interventions much of the evidence is near the ground and no money is made available nationally to provide more substantial research. Only expensive number based research is seen as valid, and the lack of this is used as a justification for not funding. When it suits, though, the Government is happy to spend substantial sums of money on initiatives or changes for which there is little or no evidence of effectiveness: the operation of ASBOs has been a clear example of this from within the same anti-social behaviour field.
• We’ll fund referrals from our workers rather than public access
  Much of the funding for mediation is channelled through housing agencies or local authority departments such as environmental health. Commonly referrals can then be made through these agencies. Frequently a pattern of under-referral results, because housing and environmental health workers hang on to the case rather than let it go, or just can’t be bothered. The mediation scheme is faced with a tough choice - either spend much of your time chasing workers for referrals, or run the risk of under-use which leads to the judgement that you are not needed, whatever your success with the cases you do get. Those schemes which have the funding to provide an open door voluntary public service, on the other hand, find the service is taken seriously by those needing help with high levels of self-referral and very positive results in a wide range of cases.
• We can do this ourselves, or at least find someone cheaper
  Of course it is helpful for housing, health and community safety staff to take a problem-solving approach to conflict, but this is not the same as an independent confidential service which is only concerned with the parties involved. Of course those are exactly the qualities, which of necessity may make mediation unpopular with referring agencies which complain of loss of control, lack of feedback, and so on. And, of course there always is someone cheaper. I am aware of at least one community mediation scheme which has folded because its main local authority funder decided with limited notice to buy the services of a small private partnership. This may have been cheaper but provided no local training, no volunteering opportunities for local people and no public access. In this context talking about Compacts and Full Cost Recovery just provokes a very hollow laugh.

Change Up?

Government has spent large sums over the past two years on supposedly helping the voluntary and community sector become ‘fit for purpose’ through improving organisation and infra-structure. Apart from its ludicrously broad definition of the sector, several things have become clear already from this initiative. First there has been strikingly little visible ‘product’ for the money. Secondly it is surely obvious that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is really unhelpful for small or community based organisations. The example of community mediation indicates just how difficult it is to sustain an independent and accessible service in the new culture of dependency on contract and commissioning. This is incredibly short sighted when other government priorities about the fear of crime, inter-generational tension, and community cohesion all need to make best use of tested and internationally acknowledged methods of dealing with conflict, dispute and prejudice.

Criminal Justice- the emergence of NOMS and the future of probation.

Patrick, now Lord, Carter first recommended the establishment of a National Offender Management Service (NOMS) in his December 2003 report, Managing offenders -reducing crime: a new approach. This advocated bringing together the national probation service (itself only centralised less than five years before) and the prison service. The new structure would have a single national offender manager responsible for overall strategy, and regional offender managers who would ensure service delivery and purchasing of necessary services.
Some of Carter’s propositions made sense; poor integration of the two national services had always made coherent rehabilitation work difficult. The Government’s very rapid response was to propose implementation of his plan, with a much greater emphasis on the newly minted notion of ‘contestability’. In the serious pitched battles of the three previous attempts to get the NOMS Bill through Parliament most of the opposition has been to this concept.

What does contestability mean?

Essentially contestability involves putting public service work out to tender on the basis that either a statutory or private organisation might become the provider. Earlier discussions about this process, as applied to probation work, suggested that contestability would apply only to certain aspects which were described as ‘interventions’: group programmes, the delivery of community service, educational provision and so on. In fact the Government soon made it clear that it saw contestability as applying across the board, to include the core probation service activity of ‘offender management ‘ as well: that is to say, central ‘arm of the law’ justice activities such as court reports, enforcement of orders, recall to prison in licence cases, and so on. This would be made easier to achieve by requiring probation areas to divide their organisations into intervention and offender management arms, and by seeking the abolition of Probation Boards, with new ‘independent’ Probation Trusts to take their place.

The key arguments against contestability

Opposition has come from a wide range of sources, managing to unite the opposition parties in Parliament with a combined resistance from the Probation Boards Association, the Probation Union, and NAPO. Three of the central areas of criticism are as follows:

• It’s wrong to privatise justice
  Since probation officers are agents of the state and have defined powers over the freedom of offenders in the community, they should be public servants employed by a publicly accountable statutory service. What holds for the police should hold for probation, and the troubled experience of privatised prisons shows that however tight regulatory mechanisms might be, the severing of direct statutory responsibility from public provision is deeply flawed.
• Perverse incentives and the issue of profit
  Courts depend on impartial advice in court reports, and there could develop a conflict of interest over recommendations for custody as against community penalties, stemming from the interest of the private provider. This is a significant issue in thinking about a jurisdiction which imprisons more per head of the population than anywhere else in Western Europe.
• This is a doctrinaire response, which overcomplicates the issues and blights performance.
  The Government’s determination to retain contestability as a key part of the NOMS Bill has been immovable to date, despite the broad base of opposition and the evidence that despite all the uncertainty the probation service in its present form has been achieving impressive improvements in performance. Figures for staff turnover, however, indicate the real costs of the probation service having become a political football.
• There is no doubt that the Government has invested substantially in the probation service, but a high proportion of the funding has gone into creating the new centralised structures and, with NOMS, a whole new regional infrastructure with commissioning responsibilities. There is a great deal of confusion about budgets and strategy. While it may have been right in the long term to create a new Justice Ministry, taking these responsibilities away from the Home Office, the short term effect is likely to be further confusion and uncertainty.

Implications for the voluntary sector

For a number of years, the probation service has funded voluntary and community sector agencies for specific areas of its work - notably education, employment, housing and drugs work. Probation areas are now required by Regional Offender Managers to use a specified proportion of funding in this way. As constituent members of Drug and Alcohol Action Teams, and also Crime and Disorder Partnerships, probation managers also have a wider indirect say in wider commissioning. Probation Boards have developed some consistent practice on commissioning, and at least this form of contracting and funding has local connection to commend it.

There is, though, real concern about the future role of the Regional Offender Manager and regional purchasing, especially among smaller voluntary and community organisations. Apart from the obvious issue of whether a regional approach will achieve good local commissioning, many smaller organisations are very concerned about whether they have the capacity to work at regional level, especially if they are expected to re-organise themselves for what may well be quite short- term funding.

For some of the largest and best known of the voluntary and community agencies working in criminal justice, the increasingly tightly controlled central government funding for research and service delivery has resulted in dependence, political caution and risk aversion. For such agencies the future is likely to be heavily dependent on bidding against Group 4, a Probation Trust, or even the Local Authority for contracts to deliver statutory services in a highly prescribed format.

This is not true of all voluntary and community based agencies, and those like the Howard League and the Prison Reform Trust have tended to their credit to be wary of public funding and aware of the need to safeguard independence.

Conclusion

A healthy, independent and community based voluntary sector which can experiment, break new ground and dare to challenge received wisdom has always been an important feature of work in community safety and criminal justice. In recent years dependence on public funding has been associated with tighter controls and commissioning processes, which have already seriously affected both the nature of work undertaken and the capacity of organisations to take risks. Creativity, flair and independence, characteristics traditionally associated with the voluntary sector, will be much harder to secure in these new market places.

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