Partners in crime

This housing association officer from the north of England is describing his organisation's failure to work with the police to fight crime, and his words will be familiar to many housing workers.

Recent legislation has changed the housing sector from the eyes and ears of the local force to an active partner in the fight against crime (see "The law", page 26). Housing providers work with the police, social services and other agencies on antisocial behaviour from noisy teenagers to crack houses. Statutory strategic groups such as crime and disorder reduction partnerships operate at borough level. Neighbourhood partnerships work on one-off concerns such as graffiti and taskforces on specific estates target individuals with acceptable behaviour contracts or antisocial behaviour orders.

Multi-agency working can bring great results – one unit in Barnsley has even used it against a suspected paedophile (see "A success story", page 27). But the shift to joint working has led to a number of challenges: from reconciling cultures to deciding who should foot the bill.

Orders from above
The Home Office has allocated £6m to crime and disorder reduction partnerships this financial year, money that backs up a commitment to joint working made in last month's Antisocial Behaviour Act . The fund will rise to £11m a year next April.

The prime minister has staked his government's reputation on the fight against crime and social landlords have little choice but to be part of it: at the launch of a new strategy for addressing antisocial behaviour last month, the home secretary made it clear that housing officers who failed to carry out their new duties should face tough sanctions. "If they don't do the job, chief officers should get rid of them," he said.

The Local Government Association, National Housing Federation and Association of Chief Police Officers have set an example by working together to publish Antisocial Behaviour: Together We Can Beat It, a guidance document on partnership working. But on the front line, many find it hard to accept that they are taking over what was traditionally regarded as police work. When it comes to low-level crime, says Hyde Housing operations director Paul Bridge, "the reality is that the first point of contact for residents is housing association officers".

The government's multi-agency agenda dissuades many housing professionals from complaining publicly, but visit any large inner-city estate and you are likely to hear stories of police relying on housing officers to clean up no-go neighbourhoods.

"As landlords develop their capacity to tackle antisocial behaviour, tenants become more confident that problems will be addressed," says Judy Nixon, senior housing policy lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. "There's likely to be a corresponding increase in recorded complaint levels." Nixon's research for the Social Landlords' Crime and Nuisance Group in July showed that complaints about nuisance to registered social landlords rose from 15 to 46 complaints per 1000 homes between 1997 and 2003.

Deciding who will pay for this work can be a problem. In the absence of any Home Office guidance, the two sectors are left to haggle over who funds ASBOs and antisocial behaviour contracts, says Stuart Douglass, community safety adviser at the Local Government Association: "There are a whole range of agencies involved in community safety but you need local agreement on who's going to pay or take legal action. It's down to local negotiation."

Newcastle-based Cheviot Housing Association has a £15,000 security budget – barely enough to cover CCTV and noise monitoring equipment. This leaves little change to pay for antisocial behaviour orders, which can cost up to £5000 each, or for dealing with abandoned cars, which can cost up to £2000 each to remove.

"The issue of who's going to foot the bill is going to get bigger now that associations are being encouraged to take out ASBOs," says Paul Nilsen, Cheviot's tenancy enforcement manager. "At what stage will it be decided, and by which agency, who will meet the cost?"

Not on my watch
As with most crime-fighting duos, partners in multi-agency schemes don't always see eye-to-eye. Tensions arise between short-term solutions and long-term official targets. The landlord might want an anti-graffiti project, but the police might prefer to focus on burglary targets.

Paul Brannan is manager of a successful neighbourhood safety unit in Barnsley. But even he is aware of the culture clash: "The police sector is an organisation based on hierarchy, with a top-down approach," he says. "The preconception is that they're suspicious of non-police people. In housing, working conditions are slightly more relaxed and it's more a bottom-up mentality, where managers rely on hearing from the frontline."

This cultural gulf is one possible reason for a major strain in the partnership: the fact that many RSLs are finding it hard to get involved in their local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. They can join, but only with the agreement of the partnership board. In September, the Social Landlords' Crime and Nuisance Group surveyed 230 of its members and found that three in 10 had been cold-shouldered by their local partnerships. Landlords with properties scattered across a number of partnership areas may also have problems working with the different partnerships, says the Local Government Association's Douglass.

Information sharing is the norm in successful teams such as Barnsley's but can be difficult in others. Police might fail to pass on reports of domestic violence, for example, or housing providers might not inform police of evictions.

Southwark council launched an information-sharing protocol four years ago. A service level agreement between the police borough intelligence unit and the council's antisocial behaviour unit specifies timescales and formats for information exchange – standard information request forms or weekly meetings. It's a tough job, though. "The biggest challenge now," says Guy Valentine-Neale, Southwark's divisional housing manager, "is not 'can we?' but 'how to' provide the capacity to exchange and manage the increasing volume of data which is being exchanged."

Even when information is swapped by frontline staff, it is not always shared higher up the organisations. Getting funding agreed when the two agencies are more concerned with internal management issues, for example, can take months. The irony is that when senior managers finally take decisions, they can hinder efforts on the ground.

Hyde Housing's Bridge says good police officers often get moved onto other duties that are considered more important. "The local network – which is what community safety's about – is affected. It's about building up relationships, you can't do that if someone moves on every six months."

This was one of the problems that scuppered a crime project at the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust's New Earswick neighbourhood in York. In 2000, the trust paid £25,000 a year to buy in 24 hours a week of extra policing. But in two years, three officers had the post. Crime dropped by 5% in the first year, but almost doubled in the second as more residents began reporting low-level incidents. Dissatisfaction with policing rose from 30% to 40%. The project was eventually scrapped.

Meet your new partner
Successful joint working is a matter of negotiation and understanding one another's cultures. Tim Winter, national organiser of the Social Landlords' Crime and Nuisance Group, says: "The conflict is not between housing and police, it's between people who are trained to represent the interests of the individual and those who represent the community."

The various agencies need to agree their roles, formally. "Often, housing don't know why police won't arrest and police won't understand why housing doesn't evict," says Sergeant Paul Dunn, the Metropolitan Police's antisocial behaviour adviser. "But this is naivety on both sides. Where the partnership works well is where housing has an enforcement role and the police support through evidence gathering."

However, it is also fair to say that the parade of legislative changes in the past five years have barely given councils and RSLs time to prove they can crack the problems of joint working. "It's an area where there's been an almost unprecedented intervention and a plethora of guidance and measures," warns Nixon. "We need time for this to bed in. It's been quite hard for landlords to keep up, let alone move forward."

Because the future of low-level crime fighting rests on partnership in both practical and political terms, neither sector has any choice but to rise to the challenges. Even the Northern housing association and police force that were fighting over abandoned cars have buried the hatchet – after frontline staff realised they had to sort out the situation because tenants were frustrated at getting passed from pillar to post. Now the landlord and the local force have a joint protocol on the issue, and both can use a state-of-the-art computer system to check on boundary areas, so either can tell at a glance who owns the land that a car's been dumped on.

After all, while housing officers and their police counterparts are embroiled in debates over decision-making or budgets, the public – the true judges of success in community safety – just want results. As the Met's Dunn puts it: "The public tell us it doesn't matter if it's an ABC or an ASBO and they don't care who takes the lead, as long as someone tackles it."