Safer Communities in Scotland: Page 10

3.27 A clear sense of the costs of crimes, accidents and anti-social behaviour can persuade partners to invest in prevention ('spend to save'). Analysing costs on a smaller scale (eg focussing on measuring the costs of vandalism to housing departments, hospitals, or schools) can be more useful than giving broad cost estimates across large geographic areas. Although cost data can be hard to obtain for an initial audit, it can give a baseline and an understanding of the potential savings which could be gained from prevention.

3.28 The Scottish Office commissioned research into the value for money effectiveness of a range of management measures to assist housing associations faced with resource allocation decisions in tackling anti-social behaviour. The researchers drew a distinction between operational costs and social or community costs.

3.29 Operational costs are experienced by the service provider. These include direct costs (such as the cost of a housing officer investigating a complaint) and indirect costs (such as losses of rental income from empty properties and increased demand for transfers because of anti-social behaviour). Community costs are the broader impacts of community safety problems on the community [see Box 3.9].

3.30 In most cases, it may be impractical to carry out a costs exercise in the initial audit. However, further work on costs could be carried out in the first or second year of a strategy.

Box 3.9 Costs of crime

1 Costs of neighbour nuisance

Direct costs to landlord

time spent dealing with neighbour complaints by housing officers, area managers, senior officers, caretakers
costs of implementing initiatives and associated on-going costs
legal costs for advice, interdicts, court action
costs of repairs for vandalism and graffiti
time of homeless and allocation staff in dealing with requests for transfer

Indirect costs

loss of rental income from empty properties
void security and repairs
reduction in desirability of property (reduced market value/reduction in demand)
opportunity costs: diversion of staff time from other work
increase in staff stress related illness from work

Community costs

costs to disputant and other residents
costs to other departments/agencies including police, social work, environmental health, courts
decrease in social cohesion and loss of informal social control

Source:
The Feasibility of Assessing the Cost-Effectiveness of Measures to Deal with Anti-Social Neighbour Behaviour - J. Bannister and S. Scott for The Scottish Office (unpublished)

2 Property risk management in schools

A study of school property-related risk by the Accounts Commission for Scotland to assist and encourage councils to develop effective risk-management arrangements showed:

school property crime and prevention cost education authorities £18m year, about 20% of school property maintenance budgets
police respond to about 30,000 intruder alarm calls in schools every year, but about 90% of them turn out to be false or faulty. The cost to Scottish police forces is about £1m a year
vandalism is often repeatedly targeted at the same school. In four former education authorities, 20% of schools accounted for 70% of all losses
schools are the principal targets for malicious fire-raising, with 9 out of 10 school fires being started deliberately. In the former Strathclyde Region's properties, about 95% of all fires occurred in schools
the non-financial costs of crime can often outweigh the financial costs. Vandalism can damage the morale and ethos of the school, disrupt class work and impair the learning environment

The Accounts Commission issued a number of recommendations, including:

adopting an organisational commitment to risk management
developing effective information systems and identifying specific risk areas
designing out crime in schools, improving control over access to schools and installing physical measures to protect schools from crime

3 City of Dundee

The City of Dundee Community Safety Partnership carried out a comprehensive review of the costs of crime-related damage (vandalism and housebreaking) to council property. The review required some technical amendments to the council's billing system, with new recording codes so that non-insured losses could also be included on the system. The system was also adapted so that information could be produced to show costs per police beat area.

The review also examined the costs of fires, the cost of boarding property and estimates of the cost to the council of absence from work due to exposure to violence.

The information provided by the review is used as an aid to targeting resources on those areas with the highest costs of crime.