Our newspapers and news programmes have been filled with articles about knife crime, drugs, drunken yobs, gang violence, hate crime and fraud, as well as environmental crimes in our neighbourhoods, all seemingly taking place without proper enforcement or redress.
In response, local councils are encouraged to use CCTV and other surveillance to tackle anti-social behaviour and reduce crime. And a recent Home Office initiative is going to give local councils additional powers to access e-mail and Internet records to cover criminal activities, including public health, threats to public safety.
I do wonder where this will take us, given the fact councils have been criticised for ‘snooping’, when they have used surveillance to catch people committing serious fraud, such as housing benefit.
Unfortunately, a large number of housing benefit fraud cases going to court are not awarding costs to the council, and the money is not being recovered. This means there is little or no incentive for local councils to catch fraudsters, since it costs money to take them to court only to find that they are given ‘unpaid work’ sentences – formerly community service – instead of a hefty fines and the requirement to repay the benefit. While I appreciate the value of unpaid work, this again costs the public sector more in organising and managing it.
Another initiative under attack from the media is the use of residents to report crimes.
In a survey carried out by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, one in six councils said they had signed up teams of environment volunteers who were encouraged to photograph or video neighbours guilty of littering, those not recycling rubbish, vandalism, graffiti, dog fouling, fly-tipping and abandoned vehicles.
Yet, if used in the right way, there are clear benefits in getting the community involved.
In Tandridge, we have offered a reward for information leading to a successful prosecution for almost 10 years. This incentive, plus the recruitment of a waste enforcement officer – who is almost a fly-tipping detective – has helped us secure more successful fly-tipping prosecutions.
So, if surveillance used to catch people committing crimes and the use of environment volunteers is considered snooping, I wonder what the public will make of the new powers to examine and access people’s e-mails and Internet records.
I fear it may mean even less public support for local councils and other agencies, and we know we can’t afford for that to happen, if we take Ipsos MORI’s and the LGA’s Reputation campaign’s statistics into account.
Stephen Weigel is chief executive of Tandridge DC
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