One of the unsung successes of public investment in recent years is family intervention projects or FIPs. Bringing together local services including policing, schools, health, housing and children’s services, FIPs work with thousands of the most chaotic and challenging families to help end cycles of anti-social behaviour, drug and alcohol misuse, behavioural problems and poverty.
As I have seen on visits around the country, this is a tough love, no-nonsense approach which confronts and challenges the parents and children they work with to change their behaviour. Before a meeting of the Cabinet in Nottingham last year, I met one father who had been abusing drugs to the detriment not only of himself but his whole family, with his children getting into trouble at school. The FIP made him face up to his problem, giving him the help and support he needed to get off drugs and get his family back together. His kids stopped truanting and got back into school.
The average FIP costs up to £15,000 per family, but the costs to society of a family with severe problems is around £250,000-£350,000. From a social policy as well as an economic point of view, it’s a no-brainer.
Yet it’s just these sorts of services – which do require investment in the short term, but save the taxpayer and society as a whole a much bigger cost in the long run – which police officers fear will be the first victims of cuts to local services.
It’s no wonder they’re worried when Home Office minister Nick Herbert says policing should only be about tackling crime. But all the senior police officers I’ve met in my constituency, and over the past month doing this new job, recognise they cannot effectively deal with crime and anti-social behaviour if they view their role as being simply about “catching and convicting criminals”.
They know they also have a wider responsibility to work with other services to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour in the first place. The coalition doesn’t seem to understand this. And for all David Cameron’s rhetoric about a “Big Society”, the reality of the Government’s policies lookd set to weaken not strengthen our society – because it’s not just prevention and early intervention which is facing deep and immediate cuts, but local policing, too.
The Comprehensive Spending Review announced that Government funding for the police will be cut by 20 per cent – way beyond what most experts believe can be achieved through things like better procurement and reorganisation. To make matters worse, the Home Secretary has also signed up to a deal that means the biggest cuts will hit in the first two years and, most worryingly, with the biggest cut of 8 per cent in the year of the Olympics. Front-loading the cuts in this way will make it impossible to protect the frontline through long-term efficiencies.
Put into such a difficult position by the Government, police forces are preparing for significantly reduced budgets from next April by freezing recruitment, getting approval to use a legal loophole that allows officers with more than 30 years of service to be forcibly retired and planning to make police community support officers redundant. That’s the context in which the policing minister last week praised the work of volunteers in one town who are helping to keep a local police station open. They deserve praise – as do thousands of special constables. But people rightly fear this is the vision for cut-price public services and policing on the cheap that the coalition has in store.
It increasingly seems that David Cameron’s big idea of a “Big Society” is little more than a cover for deep and ideological cuts to local services. While the Prime Minister talks about the importance of the voluntary sector, he’s cutting the funding which allows the third sector to survive. And while he says he’s devolving power – to local government and local communities – when this is done at the same time as councils are having their budgets cuts by a massive 27 per cent, it’s a one-sided deal. It’s not power he’s devolving, but blame.
So this is the coalition’s big idea: shrink the state, make the security of local communities increasingly reliant on the goodwill of volunteers, expect charities to fill the gap and provide public services for free, cut the very services which prevent crime and anti-social behaviour and devolve the blame just in time for when it all goes wrong.
That’s why I say David Cameron’s “Big society” is a big con. It’s a sure-fire route to a weaker society and it’s time we exposed it.
Ed Balls is Shadow Home Secretary and Labour & Co-op MP for Morley and Outwood
