The London borough of Redbridge is relatively leafy and prosperous. But it also faces enormous challenges, with crime topping the list. It is home to great affluence cheek by jowl with significant deprivation. Too many people, especially young people, live lives they are desperate but unable to change and generations of its residents have been lost to criminality.
In the spring of 2021, the leader of Redbridge Council, Cllr Jas Athwal, invited me to chair a local independent Commission tasked with addressing the issue of crime. The Community Crime Commission was part of the response to the largest public consultation ever undertaken in Redbridge, which had highlighted residents’ concerns about what they felt was a crisis of rising crime. The essential idea behind the Commission was simple: gather a group of committed local people, put the experience of highly trained professionals at their service, and then let them develop a series of recommendations for action, informed by the evidence they had heard, but rooted in their experience of living with these issues every day.
It’s worth taking a moment to recognise how bold and rare this was. A safer approach would have been to gather the experts in a room and let them come up with solutions to the residents’ priorities: women and girls’ safety on the streets, domestic abuse, drugs and street crime, anti-social behaviour and burglary. But the real experts in the issues which affect local people are local people themselves. The council risked the Commission revealing some unpalatable truths about how services perform; but It was clear that the usual ‘sticking plaster’ solutions weren’t going to do the job.
We know that it’s not possible to arrest our way out of crime, and in the current funding climate simply throwing more resources at the problems isn’t possible either. The prize the Commission offered was a chance to reveal new approaches, rooted in the experience of local people, based around services which already existed, and with the potential to engage residents with an approach that really spoke to them.
We gathered 16 Commissioners, all with strong links to Redbridge, all passionate about creating change.
In a series of evidence gathering sessions over the summer, we heard from more than 40 witnesses from organisations including the Metropolitan Police, the local education and health systems, specialists in the fields of youth work, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol services and communications and culture change, as well as local people with experience of gang violence, street harassment and community action against anti-social behaviour. Our sessions, which were closed to the public to let witnesses speak candidly, were remarkable for the vividness of the testimony we heard, the lack of defensiveness about where things were going wrong, and the passion on display from all sides to make things better.
As the Commission investigated a range of issues, we came across several common themes, which I suspect may be replicated in local authorities elsewhere: poor communication between agencies and the public; services working in isolation from each other; a system that does things to people rather than working with them; agencies being aware of young people at risk but not intervening early enough to prevent criminality. We described these issues as our ‘golden threads’: a set of simple principles which could help to untangle the most pressing problems we face. The golden threads weren’t just a way we found to talk about crime in Redbridge, we believed that they were a fundamental part of tackling it. They have shaped all the recommendations we are making to Redbridge Council and its partner agencies in our final report, which will be published later this year.
We now want leaders of our public services to be brave again, listen to us and deliver change. Undoubtedly there will be difficulties: we know that funding is a problem. But we also know that the costs of doing nothing dwarf the cost of acting now. Investing to solve today’s problems will insure us against them becoming worse tomorrow. To state the obvious, we simply cannot carry on in the old ways, the consequences would be catastrophic for another generation.
Just before the first session of the Commission, I said that Redbridge could be at the start of something the rest of the country might want to know about. It was an off the cuff remark, but as we have gone through the process of gathering evidence and shaping our report, I am becoming convinced that it’s true. Redbridge has trusted its residents to understand when they are shown how their services are currently performing, and to be part of a conversation of equals about what needs to be done. This is more than a piece of public engagement. It’s an attempt to re-shape the relationship between electors and elected. We should all watch the next steps with interest.
Javed Kahn is chair of the Redbridge Community Crime Commission
