The Crime Survey for England and Wales (widely regarded as the best measure) tells us that crime has fallen.

But reality is not as clear cut. Proportionally, crime has shifted online, whilst physical crime has become more complex, more serious and more impactful on victims. Therefore, whilst your likelihood of becoming a victim is reducing, the impact of a crime should you be a victim might be increasing.

However, in purely numerical terms, crime has fallen, and it is this unsophisticated argument that is often used to demonstrate that whatever the Government of the day has done is working – be it the focus on targets and the introduction of PCSOs and neighbourhood policing, or the focus on local governance through the introduction of PCCs and wider police reform, on so on.

Many of us experience cognitive dissonance with these statistics because they do not tally with our own personal experience of crime. This results in us simply not believing them. How can crime be falling if we do not feel safer? How can crime be falling is all we hear about is how overstretched and under pressure the police are? How can crime be falling if all the newspapers have front page stories us telling how bad things are? How can crime be falling when there was a burglary down the road just weeks ago?

The nature of policing, and other emergency services, is that they focus the majority of activity on response tasks. Their leaders think about offering the best possible service to the public and do this by enhancing response capability – analysing deployment locations and coverage, shift patterns and geographic and temporal demand profiles.

What we should do is acknowledge that any time we see a blue light vehicle in full flight; something has gone wrong somewhere. But we don’t. We don’t spend anything like enough time thinking about how we could have stopped those emergency situations arising in the first place.

The Early Intervention Foundation is running a <a href="http://www.eif.org YOURURL.com.uk/our-call-to-government” target=”_blank”>campaign for the new Government to make a commitment to make better use of early intervention principles in policymaking and to support early intervention as a key Budget priority by creating an Early Intervention Investment Fund.

I strongly support the need for a meaningful focus on prevention.

In austere times, we need to get outside the box, and instead of aligning whole rafts of activity to picking up the pieces once things have gone wrong we need to push our activity upstream and get ahead of problems before they can develop.

The challenge is therefore for all of us to rethink our short-term, target driven mentality, and worry less about what the weekly and monthly reports show, but be secure and confident to take strategic decisions that will affect the experience of the public five, ten and more years down the line.

Policing can learn from our blue light colleagues here. Whilst some, including me, argue that policing has yet to engage with this agenda as fully as others due to the pressures placed on the service in recent years, the fact remains that it is overdue.

Fire and rescue services do fire prevention well. Local public health bodies do health prevention well. But crime prevention is not locally ‘owned’ by a single agency. Certainly local authorities – through community safety partnerships and youth offending services, and certainly community rehabilitation companies, PCCs and the police all play key roles, but there is no joined up approach. We all talk about crime prevention, but truly is not one of our shared core activities. This is a mistake.

We should be advocating fully joined up programmes across the public sector to build a better picture about those who offend, their interaction with other partners, the interventions used, and the results of those interventions. We need to show those (predominately) young men who truly believe that there is no other avenue for them than to follow their father, older brother or friends into a life of crime that there is another way. We need to not only make our communities a hostile environment for criminality but we must show those people at the edge of offending that there are legitimate ways of supporting non-offending lifestyles.

However, we do live in the real world, and whilst very few would argue against the benefits of funding early intervention activities, it is often difficult to find money for ‘new’ programmes especially within policing where budgets are incredibly tight.

I therefore welcome the call for the creation of an Early Intervention Fund “drawn from inefficient public spending and private sector capital such as social investment”, but would include one addition. The new Government must prioritise early intervention and prevention work, but equally, so should local agencies.

Some time ago I developed the concept of a local Early Intervention Fund, created by utilising unallocated money at the end of a financial year. I recognised that as local budget holders we all struggled to shift money to early intervention activity, but even so, that we all tended to find underspend at the end of the year. The concept was therefore for every local agency around the table to put some of this underspend into a single early intervention programme – one that all local partners recognised as having an impact on public services as a whole.

Partners need not get into conversations about who puts in how much, and what the potential benefits are that accrue to each agency, but simply to agree that this is local money and that is will be used for the benefits of the local community. My view at the time, and to this day, is that such an initiative would bring the kind of results that we all spend our professional lives trying to deliver.

We often talk about demand reduction in terms of turning off or slowing down the tap. An evidenced and effective early intervention programme will not only reduce demand in the longer term but can help us improve the short-term by managing whatever cuts the next Government propose for policing. Given further cuts are coming irrespective of who is in No 10, do we have any choice other than to turn off the tap?