by Angela Eagle
The problem of homelessness – an acute symptom of the underlying disjunction in our housing market – is illustrative of the overall patterns of the past twenty years. Labour targeted homelessness as a policy priority. Under Labour, statutory homelessness acceptances by local authorities reached their peak in 2003, having increased since 1997 before being relentlessly driven down to historic lows by the end of the Brown government. Since then, the independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact report that ‘around 58,000 households were accepted by councils as entitled to be housed in 2015/16. This number has been rising since 2009/10, and is up by a third since 2010/11.’ But when it comes to temporary accommodation, the figures are not as positive. By the end of the Brown government, virtually no progress had been made on the numbers of people in temporary housing. That is because, while the Blair government had made the statutory accommodation available to more people, they were languishing for long periods in temporary housing until appropriate accommodation was sought. These waiting times were a reflection of the scarcity of homes. It is to Britain’s credit that we do so much to ensure those that are homeless are provided with accommodation. But it is shameful that the broken housing market keeps people in inappropriate accommodation for so long, including an estimated 120,000 children.
ENVIRONMENT AND POLLUTION
The second component of squalor is our environment and pollution; something that affects everyone, whether rich or poor. There are two very distinct elements to this: first, climate change on a global level; and second, the quality of our environment in Britain.
On the dangers of global climate change, neither author has any time for climate change deniers, who reject the bulk of evidence indicating its existence, cherry-pick data to support their own agenda and make strange assertions that, since we can’t control non-anthropogenic (non-human-induced) climate change, we shouldn’t deal with our own mess. It is a matter of pride that Britain has been one of the world’s leading nations when it comes to dealing with climate change. As recently as 2015, the UK ranked behind only Denmark in the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), published by Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network. But, despite David Cameron’s affection for huskies and promise to have the greenest government ever, our relative performance has declined over recent years. Ed Miliband, the last Labour Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, was instrumental in securing the Copenhagen Agreement and was deeply involved in negotiations around the world. David Cameron, though, took only three years to abandon climate change as a major UK priority and tell his people to ‘cut the green crap’. In 2016, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was disbanded and rolled into a new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). And, as of 2017, Britain had slipped to fifth place in the Germanwatch and Climate Action Network tables. Their analysis of our performance is worth reading:
With a very high performance especially in the GHG emissions category, e.g. with the third highest rated emissions reduction target, the United Kingdom holds the 5th rank in the CCPI. From national experts, the UK receives only low ratings for current policies, both domestically and regarding its performance in international climate diplomacy. National experts warn, like some other European countries, the UK’s relatively high score stems from a lag effect: with the exception of a bold promise to phase out coal power, for which the UK deserves credit, policy from 5–10 years ago is responsible for low carbon investment and the UK’s falling emissions. Experts agree that future carbon reductions are at real risk: the government has failed to deliver a policy framework for renewables from 2017 onwards, and as a consequence the UK’s Treasury expects renewables investment to fall by 96 per cent by 2020. The continuation of several other important policies, including the carbon floor price and zero carbon homes, also seems to be at risk. Without significant change in policy in the next years, experts would expect the UK to drop in the [tables].
This intensely depressing assessment of our recent performance is directly down to Conservative priorities. Moving DECC into BEIS is one of those things politicians do when they want to send a message. As Ed Miliband noted at the time, departments set priorities and shape outcomes. In de-prioritising climate change and making it subservient to the needs of business, the government were almost certainly listening to the climate change-denying tendency in their own ranks. But they couldn’t have been more wrong-headed. The direct effects of climate change will damage global businesses. Even the City of London isn’t immune. Climate-related disasters like droughts and hurricanes, for example, are hitting insurers and reinsurers, for example Lloyds of London. The United Nations found that between 2005 and 2015, there were 335 weather-related disasters each year across the globe, almost twice the number from 1985 to 1994. Insurers are also worried about the cost. The real-terms cost of natural disasters was about $30 billion annually in the 1980s. It’s now $182 billion a year – six times more even when accounting for inflation. Globally interconnected supply chains are also much more sensitive to disruptions in the vast array of locations they and their suppliers, distributors and customers operate in.
Beyond that, green energy is a huge emerging new growth sector globally. Britain should be trying to lead this industry to enhance our future prosperity. There is a global race on renewables. Al Gore, the former US Vice President and climate change campaigner, recently noted in an interview on The Bernie Sanders Show that the fastest growing job in the US, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, is windmill technician. Germany announced in 2011 that it would phase out nuclear and prioritise renewables. Some critics said renewables couldn’t possibly replace the megawatts produced by nuclear power plants. How wrong they were. On one day in May 2016, over 85 per cent of electricity produced in Germany was from wind and solar, so much that it caused a downward spike in the overall cost of energy. In the second quarter of 2017, 30 per cent of all energy produced in Britain was from renewables. In September 2017, a landmark occurred in Britain that critics of renewables had claimed wouldn’t happen for years: the price of offshore wind went below that of nuclear, and by quite some margin. And yet, of the companies that operate in the renewables sector, Britain has only four of the top 200 according to Clean200, which produces annual analyses on the market. China has sixty-eight, the US has thirty-four, Japan has twenty and Germany has nine, including the top company, Siemens. Once more, the lack of a coherent industrial strategy has meant that the UK is missing out on the myriad opportunities available to lead in this new sector.
The politics of climate change and renewable energy are quite clear. In the government’s published polling on climate change, available from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s website, in the latest tracker, 71 per cent of people say they are very or somewhat concerned about climate change. Seventy-nine per cent of people support the greater usage of renewables, with only 4 per cent opposed. Six in ten people said they would support a large-scale renewable development in their area. The opposition comes from vested interests like major oil and gas companies.
On the domestic front, our most pressing environmental challenge today is air pollution – in particular, levels of nitrous oxides, which the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee declared a ‘public health emergency’ in 2016. The government’s own scientists have found that ‘air pollution has negative impacts on human health and the environment. Long-term exposure to particulate matter contributes to the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer.’ A lot of the reporting on air pollution has been either hysterical or hysterically ill-informed. The truth is that air pollution has dropped markedly over the past few decades but there has been a particular recent and acute problem with nitrous oxides and particulates from diesel cars. In the UK today, about half of cars run on diesel. Sadiq Khan has taken the lead as Mayor of London on providing real facts on air pollution, acknowledging the improvements over recent years but putting plans into place to deal with nitrous o
xides hotspots. It’s a good example of serious, evidence-based and effective policy-making. His plan will reduce exposure to nitrous oxides by 96 per cent by 2020. The last Labour government made huge progress on our general environment: on water, our beaches, leading internationally on climate change. This was achieved with the assistance of EU directives and regulations, which Britain helped to formulate and pass. That progress appears to be in reverse now in several key areas, despite all those fine words from David Cameron and the presence of the purportedly green Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.
CRIME
The final component of squalor that concerned William Beveridge in the midst of the Second World War and the Commission on Social Justice in the 1990s was crime. In both periods, there was an acute sense of crisis, linked to a moral panic over young people. In the war, hundreds of thousands of young people had been evacuated away from their parents. Many of those young people would never see their conscripted fathers again. Hundreds of thousands more remained in towns without much supervision. There was a predictable rise in hooliganism, gang violence and petty crime. In 1997, crime had just reached all-time peak levels in the UK-wide crime survey. On both occasions, the incoming Labour government responded to soaring crime levels by being both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.
The Attlee government introduced the Children Act 1948, creating a comprehensive, locally administered childcare service, and the Criminal Justice Act 1948, which set up youth facilities that sought to retrain delinquent children through corrective training and, where necessary, a period of preventive detention. Attlee’s government also outlawed whipping, hard labour and many of the excesses of the old penal regime.
The Blair government came into office with huge ambitions to revolutionise the approach to crime, which had soared in Britain, reaching its peak in 1995. A government statement of the time explained: ‘In 1991, 5.3 million crimes (excluding criminal damage under £20) were recorded by the police. This compares with 4.4 million crimes in 1990 and 1.6 million in 1970. There has been an upward trend in recorded crime rates since the 1950s.’ In the context of what can only be described as a crime wave, Tony Blair wrote in the New Statesman:
Our approach is rooted in our belief that society needs to act to advance the interests of individuals. For crime, ultimately, is a problem that arises from our disintegration as a community, with standards of conduct necessary to sustain a community. It can only be resolved by acting as a community, based on a new bargain between individual and society. Rights and responsibilities must be set out for each in a way relevant for a modern world.
He was speaking in contrast to the rhetoric of the Thatcherites who claimed that there was no society – that it was individuals who were responsible for crime and nothing whatsoever to do with the broader social context.
On this, Tony Blair was right, and crime dropped at a precipitous and quite extraordinary rate in Britain over the following years. There were the usual Conservative commentators that claimed it was all statistical manipulation, but even the Tories have to acknowledge the extraordinary effect of Labour’s policies. Nick Hurd, the Policing Minister, acknowledged in September 2017 that crime in Britain was down 69 per cent since its 1995 peak (but only because he was trying to spin the largest increase in recorded crime in a decade on his watch). His deception is easily revealed.
Criminology has allowed us to learn a lot about crime in recent decades, particularly the conditions under which people commit crimes and how to stop them from doing so in the first place. Mechanisms like surveillance help to dissuade potential offenders from crossing that line since, if they think they’re going to get caught, they’re much less likely to offend. Furthermore, our social mores have changed. Evidence suggests that in recent decades we in Britain, as well as many other countries in the West, have become less tolerant of violence. Bullying in schools has become less and less acceptable, especially since the scrapping of the odious Section 28; corporal punishment at home is not countenanced; and we have become less permissive of abusive, especially discriminatory, language.
We better understand criminogenicity – what makes people start committing crime – too. Studies have shown that delinquent behaviour tends to start at around twelve to fourteen years of age and tail off around twenty-one to twenty-four years. This period correlates with a natural liminal stage in a young person’s development, when peers replace parents as key influencers until romantic partners take over. Around 56 per cent of offenders do so for the first time under the age of eighteen. A further 21 per cent first offend between eighteen and twenty-four – the transition to adulthood. After that, there is a natural decline in first-time offending.
Cutting youth crime and youth first-time offending is critical to an effective law and order strategy. The bulk of crime and first-time offenders can be dealt with by devoting attention and resources to dissuading young people and young adults from delinquency.
The focus by government and criminal justice lobbyists on how recidivism varies by how individuals are treated when they are already in the criminal justice system – whether they are sentenced to community punishments or the secure estate – is only part of the story. Recidivism is best explained by the fact that persistent reoffenders have personalities that are psychosocial in nature. Put simply, this means that the most prolific offenders start early and have long criminal careers.
From these statistics, a clear message emerges: we must deal with offending behaviour early and preferably before delinquency sets in. There is an economic message here too. The monetary value of crime in the UK was calculated at £60 billion in England and Wales in 1999. A US study shows that the cost of a high-risk youth to society is $2 million over the period they spend offending. So, early intervention is not just a good idea to stop young people becoming future offenders, it is economically wise. It’s a good investment.
Criminals who persistently reoffend have identifiable characteristics that would allow us to identify families and individuals with high criminogenic risk. We have evidence that some programmes are effective in reducing offending and in many cases the financial benefits outweigh their financial cost. Demonstrably effective intervention programmes include general parent education, parent management training, pre-school intellectual enrichment programmes, child-skills training, teacher training, anti-bullying programmes and multisystemic therapy (MST).
It is worth noting that half of all offences are committed by unconvicted males. However, while it would be justifiable to target intervention programmes on high-risk persons who are likely to get convicted, it would also be desirable to implement those programmes that focus on the whole community, including those like SureStart, as well as measures designed to reduce childhood poverty.
The two major institutional innovations in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 – the Youth Justice Board and the Youth Offending Teams they co-ordinated – were at the heart of New Labour’s youth offending policies.
Youth Offending Teams – multi-agency partnerships of childcare, healthcare and policing specialists embedded in local authorities – dealt with young offenders from arrest, through court, managing their punishment in the community or the secure estate, all the way to reintegration. Labour later added prevention work to their remit and resourced them with expertise on gang behaviour, restorative justice and more. We also gave them considerable latitude for innovation and sharing of ideas.
Labour’s policies helped to arrest the unrestrained growth in crime that had occurred under the Conservatives and radically reduced youth crime. Labour judged, correctly, that the right way to cut youth offending and the number of young people in prison was to stop them turning to crime in the first place. Prevention professionals, armed with an understanding of the criminogenic factors outlined earlier, identified high-risk families and intervened to help young people before they crossed into offending.
We also improved schools, created schemes like SureStart and the Educationa
l Maintenance Allowance (EMA), and raised 1 million children out of poverty, all of which worked to reduce offending.
This, as we know from the economics of offending, had considerable benefit to the state, particularly expense in the criminal justice system, policing and eventually in net economic benefit for young people that go on to lead productive lives that are not mired in criminality.
It is worth noting here that this wasn’t much talked about outside of specialist circles. The Conservatives, utterly baffled at Labour’s success, just pretended it wasn’t happening. And many prominent ‘prison reformers’ expended huge amounts of chutzpah having a go at Labour for its ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric, forgetting the other half of the equation and the remarkable success it was having.
The effects of Labour’s policies continued to be felt until the Tories started dismantling them. The Youth Offending Teams had their resources cut drastically, as did local government, leading to the closure of SureStart centres and children’s facilities. EMA was also withdrawn. It was profoundly short-sighted and, alongside the cuts to police numbers, this led in 2017 to the biggest increase in crime for a decade – 10 per cent in recorded crime and 18 per cent in recorded violent crime. All of this will have an effect that will endure. It will harm communities, divide people and mean thousands of people who could have been saved from a life of crime will continue down a chaotic pathway. Worst of all, it will mean thousands of fellow citizens will suffer the harm and indignity of becoming a victim of crime. In short, we will all pay for the narrow-minded false economies of austerity policies.