So the Lord Chief Justice – the aptly-surnamed Sir Igor Judge – feels that the UK has passed too many anti-crime bills into law. It’s a comment that echoes a similar complaint from Lord Judge’s immediate predecessor, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who moaned only last February that sentencing criminals was becoming much harder due to Labour’s “ceaseless torrent of new legislation”. A torrent which, in his eyes at least, is “extremely hard to justify”.
In short, the overriding belief among legal eagles is that there’s too much legislation framed in too many words which, in turn, is creating far too many crimes.
The best beliefs are based in fact, and Lord Judge – the leading criminal officer in England and Wales and head of the judiciary – supports that bold assertion by citing six major Acts containing more than 1,000 separate sections and 68 additional schedules which went on to the Statute Book in 2003 alone.
First up, there’s the 2003 Extradition Act. That’s the legislation currently being used to send computer hacker Gary McKinnon across the Pond for trial by US television even though his crimes were committed in Britain.
While Lord Judge doesn’t criticise the content of this law (which opponents feel has been heavily weighted in favour of fulfilling the ambitions of US authorities to put British citizens on trial in America), he believes it to be “unnecessary”.
The Lord Chief Justice also mentions four other Acts from 2003: the Crime (International Co-operation) Act, the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, the Courts Act and the Sexual Offences Act.
Not forgetting the ‘jewel in the crown’ that is the Criminal Justice Act, with its 339 sections, 38 schedules and a grand total of 1,169 paragraphs. That’s legislation gone mad.
Criminal legislation: less is more
The latter analysis excludes schedule 37, which sets out no less than 20 pages of statutory repeals. It doesn’t end there, either. No less than 21 Commencement and Transitional Savings Orders have been made under this Act, the first in 2003 and the last in 2008.
“This year,” stated Sir Igor Judge, “the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Commencement No8 and Transitional and Savings Provisions) (Amendment) Order of 2009/616 was made, amending the eighth Commencement Order. Each of these provisions produced different starting days for different statutory provisions, all for a single Act.” There’s only one word for that. Ridiculous.
It’s pretty obvious that major constitutional changes are now being made without senior judges having been consulted.
Indeed, constitutional changes by the Government from 2003 onwards, which removed the Lord Chancellor from responsibilities as head of the judiciary, were instigated – according to Lord Judge – “without so much as the courtesy of a letter or even a telephone call” to the Lord Chief Justice.
Even the hugely contraversial decision two years ago to divide the Home Office and create what we now recognise as the Ministry of Justice was announced to the world by a Government minister in an article published by one of the well-known Sunday newspapers.
In all, Labour has created over 3,500 new acts of criminality since it wrested power from the Conservatives in 1997, more than 1,200 of them through full-scale primary Parliamentary legislation.
No less than 1,036 new offences have been realised which can result in jail terms. That’s the equivalent of a new offence being introduced every four days. Like I said before, it’s ridiculous, but one supposes it keeps a few people in legal admin offices from the dole queue.
The Lord Chief Justice delivered what can only be described as his unprecedented broadsides against Labour’s legislative record on 14 July when speaking at the Lord Mayor of London’s annual dinner for judges. Tellingly, he did so with Jack Straw, the justice secretary and Lord Chancellor, right by his side.
Barrage of pointless and damaging laws
An absolutely perfect scenario for my money because this Government has – poorly, one might add – attempted to conceal its failure to govern by introducing a barrage of pointless and all-too-often damaging legislation.
The sheer volume of new laws renders little or no time for the Civil Service to draw them up with any kind of real detail, nor for Parliament to scrutinise them properly.
Take the Human Rights Act, for example. Introduced by Straw himself, who insisted that when the Act became law in 2000 it would have virtually no significant impact. I wouldn’t say that, exactly.
The Human Rights Act has done nothing if not revolutionise the law in Britain. Many commentators feel it has actively transferred huge powers to a new generation of heavily politicised judges who constantly thwart the will of Parliament in key areas (including the restraint of terrorists, privacy, freedom of expression and the treatment of migrants).
Then there’s the whole area of anti-social behaviour. Since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 came into being, the Courts have been allowed to hand out ASBOs at will.
However, only 7,000 have ever been issued. In truth, in some parts of the country they’re treated with such disdain that each order has been breached on an average of three occasions. Deterrent? Don’t make me laugh.
In 2000, as I was occupying the Editor’s Chair on Security Management Today for the first time, Labour passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which was designed to limit the ability of the State to spy on its people.
Instead, this law has had the opposite effect, creating a new bureaucracy to allow State snooping by a total of 800 different organisations. All local councils are included in that bunch.
Never have we had it so bad
Arguably, the area where we’ve suffered most from bad legislation brought hastily into being – most likely because of Labour’s insatiable desire to tell us how good its policies are at every possible turn – is that of counter-terrorism law.
In 2006, you may recall, ministers overruled House of Lords objections to a new offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’. They also outlawed the ‘possession of extremist material’, attempting to make it a crime merely to think about criminal acts.
Thus far, the Courts have thrown out any attempts to convict using this law. Can’t think why, can you?
In the meantime, terrorists freely walk our streets each and every day of the week, scouting for a suitable iconic venue or area to blow up and knowing full well that they’re protected by the Human Rights Act if they’re caught when out on reconnaissance. It’s enough to make you sick to the stomach.
Sir Igor Judges’ protest is probably the strongest indication yet of deepening unhappiness among lawyers and judges at Labour’s continuing flood of legislation and regulation.
“In a rough and ready calculation,” he said at the dinner, “it seems to me that if every line of recent criminal justice legislation had been guaranteed by a payment to the Bank of England of GB pound 10,000 per line, the credit crisis would have been funded.” It’s a sobering thought.
Lord Judge is also critical of the Prime Minister’s hurried attempts to clean up Parliament by way of the Parliamentary Standards Bill which, he believes, will elevate the power of the judiciary over that of politicians and throw the constitution into confusion.
That Bill allows for the establishment of an independent regulator to supervise MPs in the wake of the scandal over their expenses, but Lord Judge said he is of the firm opinion that the regulator’s decisions would be open to challenge in the Courts.
The opposite side of the legal coin
Caught in the headlights for the umpteenth time, Jack Straw countered by stating that judges are wholly wrong to complain about too much law being in place.
“People find it easy to complain in general terms about the volume of criminal legislation, but when they are asked which of the new offences should be repealed they struggle to find an answer,” said Straw at the Lord Mayor’s event.
An extremely worrying development of late is that “incompetent” prosecution lawyers are seemingly allowing criminals to escape proper punishment.
A damning report produced by lawyers working for the independent Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate has found that more than one third of prosecuting lawyers proved incompetent during trials, while a quarter of all prosecutors were deemed to be ‘lacklustre’.
The report claims that trial prosecutors are guilty of “inappropriate acceptance of pleas of guilty to lesser offences, or pleas that reduce the gravity of the offence.” They also fail to spot gaps in evidence. It’s yet another matter for us all to worry about.
Ultimately, it’s long overdue that this Government stopped using knee-jerk legislation as some kind of thinly veiled proxy for real and concerted action.
Brown and Co need to begin a process of stripping the Statute Book of some of the more ridiculous laws that have been concocted.
Too many laws… and they’re not working
So much for all of those laws, anyway. Not if the just-released British Crime Survey is anything to go by, because in parts it makes for horrifying reading. To these eyes, it looks very much as though a recession crime wave has set in, with a dramatic increase in theft, burglaries and fraud.
Petty theft is up by a massive 25%, shoplifting by 10% (which must be a huge concern for High Street traders) and drug-related offences by 6%. The number of burglaries has risen by 1% to 284,000 recorded incidents (the first increase in six years).
The British Crime Survey also reveals a staggering 313% increase in fraud by company directors (more of which anon, courtesy of the KPMG Fraud Barometer).
Overall, fraud and forgery is up 5%, with frauds perpetrated by executives soaring from 198 cases to a massive 818.
Fraudulent credit card transactions are also up 4% to 2.8 million. Indeed, the cost of card fraud in Britain appears to be spiralling out of control, forcing banks and credit card companies alike to develop a new generation of high-tech cards with constantly changing passwords.
Card fraud cost the UK a massive GB pound 610 million last year – up by 43% in just two years – with more than three quarters of all offences now involving internet, telephone or mail order shopping where Chip and PIN technology offers no protection. Does it offer any protection anyway? That’s the $64,000 question.
Based on interviews with 40,000 householders, the British Crime Survey shows that the proportion of cardholders who are victims of fraudulent activities has risen from 3.7% to 6.4% in the past three years.
Card Not Present fraud accounts for 77% of all incidents – that’s a total of almost 2.2 million episodes last year – and losses rose by 13% to a staggering GB pound 328 million.
Card companies beginning to experiment
Card issuers are now experimenting with high-tech plastic cards featuring a built-in miniature keypad and tiny display screen.
When shopping online, a customer has to enter their four-digit PIN into the card which then flashes up an eight-digit number.
This is valid only for one transaction. The customer enters the number on the web site to prove they are the rightful owner of the card.
Losses from counterfeit cards have risen by almost one fifth to GB pound 170 million, while card identity theft shot up by close on 40% to GB pound 47.4 million.
The only category where fraud declined last year was in the use of lost or stolen cards in shops. Here, losses have fallen from GB pound 68 million to GB pound 54 million post the Chip and PIN boom.
The UK Cards Association trade body knows that the figures cited are “not very good” – which is something of an understatement – but there’s an insistence that the statistics ought to be viewed in the context of a huge rise in online shopping.
Between 2001 and 2008, Card Not Present fraud soared by 243%, but over the same period the total value of online shopping in the UK leapt from an estimated GB pound 6.6 billion to a whopping GB pound 41.2 billion.
What’s being done about it? Both Visa and MasterCard have introduced a password protection system for online shopping.
However, at present only a quarter of Britain’s estimated 145 million credit or debit cards are covered by the schemes, while at the same time a good many online retailers aren’t yet registered.
Some more of the headline statistics
The British Crime Survey suggests that murder cases have dropped by 17% to a 20-year low, with 135 fewer killings last year. As a whole, the Government informs us, attempted murders were also down by 7%.
However, attempted murders using a knife (more of which anon) are up 11% and, although violent crime is down by the stated 6%, instances of the rape of women have risen by 5%.
There has been a 1% rise in the risk of any one of us becoming the victim of crime. Frighteningly, almost a quarter of the population – 23% – could be targeted by criminals at some point.
“We are not complacent,” asserted Home Secretary Alan Johnson when quizzed earlier this week. You could have fooled me, Al.
“As in previous years, we see changing patterns of crime and we know that during economic downturns certain crimes face upward pressure, which is why we’ve already taken action to tackle them head-on,” he said.
Johnson is adamant the rise in burglaries will be met with “tough, targeted policing”.
Will that mean more Boys in Blue on the beat, then? That’s what we need. Johnson must be made to listen to the views of police officers up and down the country.
Their bureaucracy and paperwork must be cut so that they can get back onto the streets and into our communities where they belong and can be most effective.
Still, it’s good to know that murders in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level for 20 years. The number of killings tailed off by 17% to 648 in the year to the end of March.
Attempted murders also fell according to the annual crime figures for 2008-2009 which, overall, show that the level of crime remains “broadly stable” (whatever that means).
Police-recorded crime has fallen by 5% to 4.7 million offences, with violence against the person involving an injury diminishing by 7% to 421,000.
Incidents where no injury occurred fell by 5% to 480,000. All good to know, but hardly grounds for allowing us all to sleep safely at night.
Businesses count the cost of rising criminality
Worryingly, the latest British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) survey suggests that crime is now costing businesses GB pound 12.6 billion every year – one fifth more than it did four years ago.
The increase, of course, coincides with the introduction of controversial on-the-spot fines for offences such as shoplifting, criminal damage and graffiti.
The BCC believes the annual cost of the crimes equates to one-sixth of that for all offences committed in the UK. Businesses are hitting back, suggesting that the Home Office “just doesn’t care” about their plight.
There is also an accusatory dig at the police for what businesses perceive to be “fundamental flaws” in the way crimes are handled.
Business leaders are fuming that the British Crime Survey does not even gather statistics on crimes committed against their operations.
The BCC’s survey of 3,900 businesses found almost two-thirds had been victims of crime in the past year. One-in-five has been hit by vandalism and graffiti, with a similar proportion burgled.
Come on Mr Johnson. Put what’s left of your money where your mouth is and do something about it.
The Culture of the Blade continues apace
You could have knocked me down with a feather when I discovered that “a high profile Government drive” to reduce knife crime on our streets has instead been met with an increase in the number of fatal stabbings occurring in our worst-affected inner city enclaves.
Last July, amid much of the usual bluster and self-congratulation, (then) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith presided over the triumphal launch of the Tackling Knives Action Programme.
The initiative was launched in ten police force areas, namely London, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, Nottinghamshire, South Wales, Thames Valley, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and the Capital of Kitsch that is Essex.
With the Government having spent no less than GB pound 12 million of tax payers’ hard-earned money on the scheme, it now emerges that the number of people over the age of 20 subsequently murdered in these areas over the past nine months rose to 103.
This Government of the Day failing to curtail knife killings yet again? Surely not? Of course, the Home Office is as bullish as ever. There are “beneficial results”, apparently, with a reported 16.6% fall in knife-related violence among the under-20s. Murders haven’t been reduced, though, and that’s the key point.
As is the fashion these days, the usual police chiefs have been quick to stand by Labour, warning us all that changing attitudes towards knife crime is like “turning the proverbial oil tanker, and could take generations”.
Does that mean we’re going to give up, then, and let all the metal-wielding yobs carve up whomever they choose at will?
Not at the moment, it seems. The Tackling Knives Action Programme is to be expanded in the short term, with another GB pound 5 million chunk of funding being spread between 16 force areas.
There’ll be a focus on attempting to reduce cases of serious violence among the 13-24-year-old age range.
Will it make a difference, though? If we’re honest with ourselves the answer has to be: “Probably not”.
Are we not surrendering to the thugs?
Programme leader Keith Bristow waxes lyrical about the “public angst” over knife crime being “understandable”. Too right it is, but to talk about having to eradicate this form of crime over generations is little short of a surrender. A passing the buck exercise, presumably designed to make doubly sure the mud no longer sticks.
The figures are bad mainly because of our apparently spineless judiciary, although given what I said at the top of this discourse they do deserve some sympathy.
That said, in the last year only one person has received the maximum possible sentence when put before a Court on a charge of knife-related crime. What kind of message does that send out?
Not surprisingly, Government ministers are being accused of burying their collective heads in the sand on this issue, and of ‘massaging’ the figures.
Official police figures record 38,082 serious violent or sexual knife offences over the past 12 months, equating to 104 every day.
Those assaults include more than 16,700 robberies, 369 rapes and other sexual assaults, 252 killings and 1,549 threats to kill, all of them involving knives or other sharp objects of some kind.
That figure compares with 25,013 offences recorded in 2007-2008. Doing the sums, this renders an apparent increase of more than 50%.
However, because the Home Office definition of what qualifies as a serious offence was – some would say conveniently – changed this year, it’s now almost impossible to determine the genuine scale of the problem, and whether or not matters are actually worsening.
Gerrymandering of the worst kind
Massaging the figures on knife crime twice in two years – for that is what it looks like to many of us – is but an insult to the families of those who have been tragically murdered in knife attacks, and who are now campaigning vigorously for real action to eliminate knives from our streets.
Despite a fall in robberies last year, to 16,701, the proportion involving knives actually increased by one percentage point.
Respected criminologist Dr Marian Fitzgerald has stated: “I believe serious violence is continuing on its upward trend, but this year they [the Government] have deliberately presented the figures so you cannot tell. The statistics on knife crime give no evidence at all that Government initiatives are making any real difference.”
According to the Home Office, changes to the definition of what constitutes a serious offence were made to provide a more detailed view of knife crimes.
This year’s overall knife figures, we are told, cannot be compared like-for-like with last year’s. They include whole new categories like ABH, you see, which were not accounted for in 2007-2008. How convenient is that?
For crime types which can be compared, like knife robberies and knife homicides, the Home Office cheerfully tells us overall totals are down, and that provisional hospital admissions data published only last month showed the number of teenagers being stabbed is falling.
The national papers don’t see it that way, and neither do I. Something tells me there’s more spin there than even Graham Swann could muster.
This Government’s motto is simple: “If you can’t beat the issue, fudge it.” Time for this lot to move over, methinks, and let someone else have a – decidedly more determined – go at eradicating the Culture of the Blade.
Record number of reported frauds
Appalling news this week also comes in the results of KPMG Forensic’s latest fraud report. Over 160 cases of serious fraud with charges in excess of GB pound 100,000 were put in front of UK Courts in the first half of 2009.
That’s the highest number of reported cases in any given six-month period spanning the 21-year history of the company’s much-lauded Fraud Barometer.
Those cases combined render a value of nigh on GB pound 640 million. If replicated between now and Christmas, that would also lead to the highest value of reported fraud in the Barometer’s history (a figure that currently stands at GB pound 1.2 billion, as recorded in 1995).
Professional gangs have been the most active perpetrators of fraud, it seems, with 70 cases worth a tidy GB pound 450 million. The main victims? Investors, who suffered to the tune of GB pound 320 million. Much of this stemmed from a GB pound 200 million investment fraud case involving the attempted fraudulent sale of The Ritz Hotel in London.
Company managers were also active perpetrators, being responsible for GB pound 150 million worth of fraud against their own employers in 32 separate cases.
The Government apparently suffered GB pound 150 million of fraud, mostly in the form of tax and duty evasion and fraudulent benefit claims. One wonders why KPMG Forensic doesn’t mention MPs’ expenses in the same breath?
Not surprisingly, the prime victim has been the financial sector. Over a quarter of all cases were planned against financial institutions, with a combined value of GB pound 111 million. Staggering sums of money, aren’t they?
Property has also been at the heart of much fraud. In addition to The Ritz Hotel, a substantial buy-to-let fraud in the North East conned as many as 2,000 investors to the tune of GB pound 80 million. The investments were put behind properties that, more often than not, turned out to be derelict shells. For Spain read Newcastle.
Mortgage fraud has also continued its gradual but steady rise, either perpetrated by individual customers or organised gangs of professional villains.
According to KPMG, there were 18 cases from January through to June, with a combined value of GB pound 24 million. That needs to be set against 25 cases worth GB pound 36 million in the whole of 2008. Who would bet against the continuing rise of mortgage frauds as the recession plays out?
Bad, yes, but worse is still to come
Some of the stories surrounding managerial fraud are beautiful in their simplicity. KPMG tells of the managing director of a Hartlepool-based food product company who siphoned some GB pound 2.5 million from company accounts across a 12-year period.
How about the charity finance manager in Manchester who paid herself nearly GB pound 500,000 over the course of a decade by creating fictitious invoices and processing bogus payments? Choice.
The Star Prize, though, goes to a construction company secretary on Merseyside who claimed she had cancer so that she could take compassionate leave from work – during which time she treated herself to plastic surgery and holidays with a soupcon of the GB pound 600,000 stolen from the company (and a previous employer) by paying wages into her own account. Delicious, isn’t it?
The figures quoted by KPMG are bad, but worse is yet to come. It will be several years before the full impact of the recession feeds through into the fraud statistics.
Hard times mean that more and more people are driven towards fraud due to personal pressures, while more and more investors are willing to believe in cooked-up investment schemes not worth the paper they’re drafted on.
Security and business continuity professionals must guard against becoming desensitised to the seriousness of commercial fraud.
Even the smaller cases can cause extreme stress and suffering for those on the receiving end. Not to mention the creation of major reputational and financial difficulties for companies as a whole.
Put simply, security must always begin at home for every organisation, irrespective of its size or that part of the security business sector within which it operates.
Taking in the Newsnight experience
I don’t often watch Newsnight. Surprising, really, given that I’m a big fan of Jeremy Paxman’s journalistic abilities.
I do so admire the way ‘Paxo’ legitimately savages some of our parasitic politicians on screen with the same vigour that Richard Littlejohn brilliantly tears them to shreds in print. No matter. By half-past ten at night I’ve usually seen all the news I want to see, Thank You very much.
This week, however, it was a different story – at least on Monday night, anyway. At around 8.00 pm, Paul Mackie – the compliance director at CameraWatch – sent me a text tipping me the wink that Newsnight (this time around fronted by the rather dour Kirsty Walk) would be featuring CCTV. As it turned out, I missed the live broadcast and subsequently tuned into iPlayer on Tuesday morning.
The ten-minute report – left until the last ten minutes of the programme, by the way – was presented by Michael Buchanan – but not before Walk had introduced him through a fake CCTV ‘fuzz’ complete with background PTZ noises as if she herself were being caught on camera.
“Is CCTV any use at all?” pondered Walk. Now there’s a question that’s never been asked. Whatever happened to cutting-edge journalism on the BBC? What on Earth was I about to watch?
Not holding out much hope, I gave Buchanan the benefit of the doubt. He kicked off by telling us viewers that there’s now one public space surveillance camera for every 14 residents in the UK.
He did so from a vantage point high in the Shetland Islands where, apparently, there are “more birds than bodies” these days. “Here, Puffin watching is rapidly being overtaken by people watching”. One wondered at that point if Buchanan were touting for a job on The Sun’s Subs Desk.
100-plus cameras now cover the Shetlands and, during Buchanan’s report, another 14 were hastily being installed at the cool cost to the Council of GB pound 200,000, mainly in direct response to police and public pressure to control drunken rampages after hours.
So it’s true, then. There are now cameras everywhere. Come on Martin, tell us something we didn’t already know.
Debunking an old myth?
In the London Borough of Wandsworth, there are no less than 1,113 cameras, to be precise. More than are owned and operated by Dublin City Council and the Lord Overseers in Johannesburg, Boston and Sydney combined.
Don’t forget that Wandsworth contains the two streets that provided the famous “4.2 million cameras in the UK” statistic we’ve come to know and doubt (or loathe, depending on your liking or distaste for Big Brother).
Interestingly, Simon Harris of IMS Research was next up for interview. Simon writes regularly for SMT Online, and sends us plenty of market research reports.
Based on sales, the factoring-in of replacement rates, a review of the marketplace and tracing the CCTV industry back to the 70s, he suggests that there’s an installed base of 3.2 million cameras in the UK. An interesting conclusion.
Let’s not get bogged down in figures, though. The meat and drink of Buchanan’s quest to answer Walk’s question centred on an interview with detective chief inspector Mick Neville, he of the Metropolitan Police Service and never one to pull any punches when a discussion on CCTV is energised.
“There are lots of elements that make CCTV work,” opined Neville. “All of those elements, like proper training, need to be in place at the same time. In my experience, there are too many police forces that don’t manage CCTV properly.
“We have enough cameras now of good quality. Let’s not become mired in the detail, talking about HD and megapixel. Instead, let’s use whatever development money there is to train people in the correct deployment and use of CCTV.”
Convictions falling over in Court
For me, that sums the situation up to a tee. Not so long ago, I gave a speech at the aforementioned CameraWatch’s most recent Forum, held at Canary Wharf. I didn’t pull any punches.
We all know that (the majority of) CCTV systems are superb, and yet convictions are falling over in Court on a continual and tiresome basis. Isn’t it about time we did something to halt this parlous situation?
Representing the Association of Chief Police Officers, Graeme Gerrard brought Buchanan’s report to a close by alluding to “countless cases where CCTV has been critical”.
Indeed, Buchanan himself gilded the lily by reference to the tragic case of James Bulger. “If you can put a value on that then I can tell you how effective CCTV really is,” urged Gerrard.
This question is going to keep on rearing it’s ugly – but necessary – head time and time again. One day, Joe Public will wake up, smell the coffee and demand a definitive answer.
Although Mr Darling has led us all to believe that the public purse has an elasticated waist, it does not. Continually throwing money at more and more surveillance installations isn’t the answer. Rather, we need to manage what cameras we already have, and manage them properly.
Not just for the sake of the insurers, either, but to make certain – with the assistance of a decent judiciary – that the criminals who sully our streets are locked away for good.
What to do in the downturn?
Only yesterday, an extremely interesting e-mail flashed up in my Inbox. “Mandelson urged to stimulate innovation rather than bail out dying industries” was the subject line.
“Mandelson does something useful for once” is the headline most of us wish to see, but there’s more chance of Kevin Pietersen playing in another Ashes battle this summer than that ever happening.
The former headline is the central finding of what’s described as a “hard-hitting report” courtesy of Professor Robert Blackburn, who resides in an academic tower at Kingston University in that establishment’s Faculty of Business and Law.
A report commissioned by Mandelson’s own Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, in fact, in a bid to help firms of all shapes and sizes deal with the economic trauma wrought by Gordon Brown and his cronies in the banking world. Rich, isn’t it? In more ways than one.
A team led by Blackburn has analysed academic studies, news articles and business publications talking about the credit crunch, and consulted a specially-convened Think Tank comprising nine of the UK’s most eminent business gurus – among them Professor Richard Whittington of Oxford’s Said Business School and Professor Charles Baden-Fuller, who works for the City University’s Cass Business School.
Blackburn’s team tells us that the recession is “unique and unpredictable”. Unique it most certainly is. Unprecedented, even, but unpredictable? I’m afraid that’s a ludicrous suggestion.
Brown and Co knew this was coming a long time ago, but chose to ignore the financial juggernaut hurtling towards them until it was far, far too late to construct any kind of meaningful blockade.
There’s no doubt, as Blackburn states in his report ‘Business Strategies and Performance During Difficult Economic Times’, that a new economic order is bubbling under the surface.
The recession is overturning and, in some cases, revolutionising current business models to create threats and realise opportunities. Certainly, if you speak to most security company owners then ‘Business As Usual’ hasn’t been any kind of option of late.
Woe betide the corporate anorexics
For its part, the Think Tank recommends that “firms must innovate and explore new ideas, as well as cut costs” if they are to have any chance of surviving and then growing during this recession.
There’s certainly a sound logic in suggesting that companies focused only on cutting costs – nicely dubbed “the corporate anorexics” – might survive the recession in spite of forcing people to work harder as opposed to more efficiently, but then fail in an upturn simply because they have insufficient resources.
Come on Mandelson. Do something. Assist businesses in the security sector and elsewhere by offering financial inducements for innovative projects based on altruistic and new ideas and ways of working.
Finance – or what’s left of it – must be regarded as having some form of leverage, or at least ought to generate a burst of new thinking and activities rather than being chucked down the drain as a subsidy for supporting “the way it has always been done”.
Once they’ve finished claiming for all those Corby trouser presses and moat cleaning episodes, it wouldn’t take much effort for ministers to actively promote examples of companies that have grown stronger in previous recessions – there are many of them in the security sector – and celebrate the importance of entrepreneurs. Again, there are plenty of that ilk in our world.
Why can we not set aside monies for an Innovation Laboratory where security companies might experiment on ideas outside of their conventional business long before they’re enticed along the road of bundled services by the lure of extra revenue, but wherein security becomes a bit-part player enveloped in a swathe of facilities management fog?
What we do urgently need is a reform of the Bankruptcy Laws. At present, these simply exist to encourage some businesses to wind up of their own volition such that they might avoid the ever-increasing costs of bankruptcy proceedings in Court.
Professor Blackburn’s report – which he co-authored with Kingston University colleagues Professor David Smallbone and Dr John Kitching, as well as Sarah Dickson from the University of Bath – concludes: “The key to successful Government intervention does not lie in persisting with business models that were appropriate in the past, or which are currently under threat.
“Instead, successful intervention lies in breaking the frame and reinventing not just the organisation, but also the broader socio-economic political system within which business organisations operate.”
Now that’s what I call commercial reality.
Until next time.
