29 March 2011
The public sector’s target culture has made it unresponsive to areas plagued by crime and antisocial behaviour, the government’s safer communities champion has said.
Baroness Newlove was made a Conservative peer after she became a community campaigner following the 2007 murder of her husband Garry by a group of youths outside their Warrington home.
Her report for the Home Office, published today, draws on her experiences of six months spent meeting community activists in Folkestone, Hackney, Havering, Merthyr Tydfil, Southampton, Stockport and Wakefield
Her recommendations included allowing communities to keep the proceeds of official sales of the assets of drug dealers convicted in their area, pooling public agencies’ local budgets and earmarking 1% of police resources to be spent in line with community wishes.
She said: ‘I think we’ve become so dependent on professional agencies to sort out problems that we’ve simply stopped seeing the safety and cleanliness of our community as something we’re responsible for or even have any influence over.
‘Government has made the problem worse by tying up agencies in stifling bureaucracy and targets.’
Public bodies had become distanced by this from those they served because there were ‘fixated on statistics, performance tables, pilots and initiatives’, Newlove argued.
She said the ‘Big Society’ already existed in the shape of innumerable voluntary organisations but a telephone helpline was needed to advise the public on how to ‘overcome cautious agencies standing in their way’.
Her other ideas include letting communities set their own local speed limits, publishing action taken against offenders on crime maps and giving community activists council tax rebates.
