Crime Reduction Measures: Spending Impact (Hansard, 18 July 2000)

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton

In the course of the Spending Review, the Government have had close regard to the relative costs and effectiveness of a range of measures for reducing or preventing crime. A wide range of solutions is needed satisfactorily to tackle crime reduction, and in practice many of these are interdependent. For example, re-offending is reduced not solely as a result of imprisonment but also requires that offenders are apprehended through effective policing and that prisoners complete programmes designed to prevent re-offending.

Different measures also have varying impacts over time and between locations, and according to the group of offenders targeted. The Government's evidence-led approach to crime reduction is based on establishing a full understanding of these inter-linkages and not on a simple correlation between spending and crime for individual measures in isolation.

With these qualifications, our central estimates on the available evidence suggest that the impact of spending on individual measures in isolation are as follows:

£1 million invested in building and running more prisons would result in approximately 180 recorded offences being prevented annually; and
£1 million invested in running drug treatment programmes within prison would result in approximately 500 recorded offences being prevented annually.

However, these estimates are uncertain and subject to error margins. Research is currently being undertaken by the Home Office to improve them and to expand their coverage as new evidence becomes available.

The impact of recruiting more police officers, installing closed circuit television systems, and early interventions with children at risk, is highly dependent upon the circumstances and on the mix of approaches and tactics chosen. They cannot therefore be meaningfully reduced to a single impact per-spend measure.