20140430_HC
Source: UK Parliament
Date: 30/04/2014
Event: Ken Pease: "if you Google crime then climate change does not come up"
Attribution: UK Parliament
People:
- Professor Ken Pease: Professor of Crime Science, University College London
- Joan Walley: Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Chair of Environmental Audit Committee
[Environmental Audit Committee: Oral evidence: Sustainability in the Home Office.]
Joan Walley: It is a great pleasure to welcome both of you, Professor Pease and Ms Goddard, to the Environmental Audit Select Committee this afternoon. As you are probably aware, the work that we do, as well as our inquiries, is looking at and tracking what different departments of government are doing. For reasons that are not altogether clear, we have chosen to perhaps zoom in a little bit on the Home Office. We wanted you to come along and share some of your thoughts as a preliminary, if you like, as a starter, before we interview officials from the Home Office. With that in mind, we have a fairly full agenda this afternoon of the subsequent panel to yours, so this is just a very brief taster of what is to come.
I wonder if, Professor Pease, I could start with you. I know that you have been looking at crime prevention and carbon impacts of crime. I just wonder if you could share with us the benefits of the conclusions that your work has reached and how that could be applied to Home Office thinking on sustainability issues and, I suppose, link that to the prevention of crime and, in a way, what the conclusions of your research have to say to those considering sustainability in the Home Office.
Ken Pease: Right. I have been a Green Party member for 30 years and a forensic psychologist criminologist for about the same time. In about 2005 I realised that the two things did not have any kind of nexus. If you Google climate change, then crime does not tend to come up, and if you Google crime then climate change does not come up. I thought it would be nice just to change the vocabulary of crime costs so as to include carbon costs and wrote a pretty basic and crude - because I am not an economist - costing of crime in the hope that people will take up the battle as Helen Skudder, who is here today, has taken it up.
The key point is not what the precise numbers are. I think the numbers will always be massive understatements because of the way in which people’s lifestyles are changed by crime; for example, people leaving home or people transporting their kids around when public transport is deemed to be too unsafe, and so on. The costs are bound to be only a fraction of the actual costs, both present and anticipated costs.
The first point is at least to have the notion of crime and the notion of carbon costs in the same lens, as it were, in the same framework. That is the first thing to say. Once that has been done, then all kinds of things become possible. There is no point in carbon costing unless you can do something about the thing that costs. My crime science background says there are huge amounts of change that you can make quite simply that will reduce crime risks; for example, in housing design, in street layout. Chair, you have been long interested in the effect of lighting on crime, I know, and that is another aspect of the whole thing. If you can make substantial changes in crime, as you can, then you will produce a commensurate reduction in costs.
The big problem and the reason why looking at it department by department is problematic is that the Home Office does not generate crime. It is elsewhere that generates the crime. For example, if I may ride a hobby horse particularly, DCLG, if the housing standards review is acted upon, will be generating burglary over the lifetime of the new homes that are about to be designed. Of course, the private sector generates crime by the way in which it designs products and services.
If I may take 30 seconds of your time to say how I got into crime reduction in the first place, I used to be a proper forensic psychologist doing tests and whatever. I was at Wetherby borstal in the mid-1980s and two items on the six o’clock news were next to each other on my way back across the M62. The two items were, first, that new detention centres were being opened at New Hall and Send and the second item was that the Ford Motor Company had made record profits. I nearly left the motorway because of the link between those two things. At that stage, the most popular car for car thieves was the Ford Cortina and the Ford Cortina could be opened one chance in two by any Ford Cortina key if it was not absolutely brand new. The notion was that the costs were being visited by Ford on the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice—same thing then—with the consequence of having to open the New Hall and Send facilities.
Now, there is a whole plethora, and I beg your pardon, I will not take any more of your time saying it. There is a massive possibility of reducing crime by simply changing the circumstances in which crime occurs: building design, layout design, vehicle design, place design, lighting, lighting variations. It seems to me that the fact of lighting has been established but the way in which it can be abused to manipulate people across a space has not been.
Joan Walley: Okay. If there was one thing that you would say the Home Office could have regard to arising out of the conclusions that you have reached, given that some of that implementation would not be down to the Home Office, it would be down to other departments, what recommendations would you say should be in the Home Office business plan?
Ken Pease: The first thing I would say is that this Committee should be looking in emphasis across departments rather than at specific departments, so the balance between individual department investigation and total government investigation should be moved towards total government. That is, if you like, for you guys.
For the Home Office, I would say that the immediate and important thing is to ensure that new homes, much needed new homes, are built to standards of security that have been shown to be effective in reducing local crime. That is totally important because the crime risks of new homes will last for their duration or have to be retrofitted and the dynamic by which people leave crime-ridden homes is well understood so that certain areas are ghettoised as people who can afford to move, move out. I know it is a bad source, but the Abbey National are doing more research to establish it and I am sure it is true. The Abbey National suggests that crime and disorder is the greatest single reason why people move out of homes and areas.
The answer to your question is: one, for the Committee, think across government because it is other government departments who are generating the risks that the Home Office has to pick up in crime terms.
Joan Walley: So government departments are the one of the causes of crime?
Ken Pease: Well, yes, and, of course, the private sector as well. I do not want to pick on the DCLG but it is important; the Department for Transport in terms of the way in which they record a DVLA vehicle crime, and the way in which ANPR vehicles are deployed and the data sets that exist in that. The scope is enormous from a variety of different government departments.
Joan Walley: Finally from me, police commissioners: do you have any message for them? Have they made a difference?
Ken Pease: Not perceptibly to me and I worry about what will happen towards the end of their five-year term, at which point the only way in which I can see their public profile being enhanced is by making life difficult for chief constables. Also, when I have visited police and crime commissioners I am impressed by the plushness of the places that they now inhabit, so I am slightly worried in cost terms as well. Nice people, very much more political than I anticipated they would be. I have not seen them take up any cudgels that I particularly would like them to yet.
Joan Walley: Okay. I will just ask my fellow Committee members if there are any questions they wish to direct to you very briefly before we move on to Ms Goddard. No? In that case I will turn to Caroline Spelman...