Burglary
Assessing the impact of the Reducing Burglary Initiative in southern England and Wales Assessing the impact of the Reducing Burglary Initiative in southern England and Wales
This Home Office report summarises findings about the impact of The Reducing Burglary Initiative projects covered in southern England and Wales. It considers what worked in reducing domestic burglary, and explains factors of its success. Twenty-one Strategic Development Projects (SDPs) were evaluated across southern England and Wales, although the number of projects was reduced to 20, when 2 projects combined.
Title: Assessing the impact of the Reducing Burglary Initiative in southern England and Wales
Author: Research Development and Statistics
Series: Home Office On-line report 42/04
Date published: July 2004
Number of pages: 27
Summary
Projects tended to be more successful if the underlying theory of interventions was clearly thought through so that they complemented rather than contradicted each other. An example of this was a drug-referral programme set up under the project 1 - 5 SDP.
'Packages' of interventions were most effective when designed to be relevant to the local area in terms of the:
local community
local offending
project management experience.
Combinations of short-and long-term interventions were found to have a more sustainable impact on offending.
Areas were expected to meet 2 criteria of eligibility before they could apply for a £60,000 Home Office grant. Projects had to:
focus on areas covering between 3,000 and 5,000 households
have a burglary rate of at least twice the national average (54 per 1,000 households)
Of the 20 projects evaluated by the Southern Consortium, 11 matched the household total requirement and a further 3 were within 750 of this target.
Six projects had a burglary rate below the standard of twice the national average.
Southern Consortium Strategic Development Projects | ||
Strategic Development Projects (SDP) | No. of households (1991 census unless otherwise stated) | Burglary rate per 1,000 households |
Target number of households = 3,000 to 5,000 | ||
Project 1 - 14 | 3,560 | 52 |
Project 1 - 17 | 3557 | 89 |
Project 1 - 1 | 4126 | 54 |
Project 1 - 11 | 4182 | 58 |
Project 1 - 6 | 4909 | 63 |
Project 1 - 16 | 3113 | 43 |
Project 1 - 9 | 3076 | 147 |
Project 1 - 19 | 3483 | 68 |
Project 1 - 7 | 3216 | 83 |
Project 1 - 15 | 4117 | 52 |
Project 1 - 12 | 3453 | 65 |
Projects near to the target number of households | ||
Project 1 - 13 | 11267 | 53 |
Project 1 - 20 | 5254 | 69 |
Project 1 - 14 | 2760 (1999 council figures) | 63 |
Other projects | ||
Project 1 - 18 | 1564 | - |
Project 1 - 2 | 6258 | 88 |
Project 1 - 4 | 56436 | 24 |
Project 1 - 3 | Virtual community | n/a |
Project 1 - 5 | 93841 | 42 |
Project 1 - 8 | 193 | 113 |
Conclusions
This report considered what worked in reducing domestic burglary and analysed the success of the sites across southern England and Wales.
Both theory and implementation need to be relevant to local community, policing and offending characteristics.
Combinations of short-and long-term interventions were found to have a more sustainable impact.
Of the 20 Southern Consortium SDPs, half had a possible impact on domestic burglary during the evaluation period.
Many projects overran and possibly impacted on local burglary figures after the evaluation was completed.
Of the 10 projects that had a probable impact during the evaluation period,
5 projects contained interventions that were implemented on a wide enough scale to have had an impact across the whole target area.
the remaining 5 projects limited impact to specific streets or households targeted by an individual intervention.
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Last update: Monday, July 28, 2008