Gang policy on a wing and a prayer

We pray for better days." That is the bleak and rather sensational way in which the under-cover journalist calling himself 'John Heale' introduces One Blood, his book on Britain's street gangs. 

It is true that street gangs cause terrible fear and suffering, to themselves as well as to others, and it seems to be true that  there is something new about the way they are growing and drawing  ever younger children into their own fearful and blighted  existences. At any rate, the country is in the grip of an uncritical hysteria about feral youth and knife and gun crime.

However, as Heale himself says, it is extremely difficult to know with any precision what the facts really are. For one thing, the official figures are unsatisfactory: for instance, the annual British Crime Survey does not interview children under 16, only adults, and it is increasingly children who are affected by gang violence. 

Heale claims to have done many months of research among gang members in England's major cities. He is convinced that the gang problem is getting worse, but he doesn't really demonstrate it. The Prince's Trust, for example, has just published a report on youth culture which finds that only 9 per cent of young people aged 16-25 have spent time in a gang, only 2 per cent carry knives and only 3 per cent regularly use drugs.

None of this means, however, that there isn't a very alarming problem. Nobody doubts that there is in this rich country a poverty-stricken underclass of angry, alienated, unemployable and disturbed young people who feel they have been failed by everyone and everything, except each other - and they will fail each other too. The question is what, if anything, can be done.

A 'multi-agency solution' is the dreadful phrase regularly used in answer, by Heale among others, because the causes of the problems are so complex and interconnected. But all such agencies are already in place, most of them for decades - urban renewal, toddler outreach, housing renewal, family support, school schemes,  youth mentoring, crime-reduction programmes and partnerships,  probation services, social services and all the rest, including the comically named Youth Offending Teams; this multiplicity of agencies is already consuming vast sums of public time and money, with little or no results. According to independent academic research, the Sure Start programme, aimed at deprived toddlers, actually appeared to make things worse for these unlucky babies.

Since the war we have had decades of determined state interventions of every kind, but most of them have failed. The only conclusion is that complex interventions don't usually work.

Interventions that do sometimes work, as Heale also agues, are the efforts of charities, or what is now called the voluntary sector. 'Voluntary agencies' are often flexible, inventive, and more trusted by gang members and frightened people, because they don't represent the state and the police; what's more, charities often work night and day with those who need them, unlike the public servants with their office hours. 

Charities in all social fields tend to start out with their own clear agenda, not the numbing egalitarian agenda of council workers.  Yet the state is doing its best to impose its own bureaucratic inertia on the charities that might really achieve something; it overwhelms them with unnecessary paperwork, self-auditing and petty regulations, driven by the antagonism (which Heale himself reports) of the public sector apparatchiks to the freelance social entrepreneurs.

If there is one thing that could usefully - and cheaply and easily - be done about the social problems underlying gang culture, it would be to leave charities alone as far as possible. This applies across the board, of course, wherever state intrusion leads to waste, unintended consequences and yet more intrusion. Things might work a lot better if the multitude of government agencies did a lot less. That is perhaps too much to hope for, but I suppose we could pray for it. ·