Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Crime reduction is an enduring issue in public policy and management and has risen to the top of many nations’ policy agendas. Criminal activity is detrimental to economic prosperity, a significant drain on the public purse and harms the quality of life of both victims and perpetrators of crime. During the past twenty years, there has been a significant shift in policy approaches to reducing crime, moving away from the traditional law enforcement approach towards programs that emphasise the preventative value of community safety and social inclusion. Many of these programs involve the transfer of significant economic and political resources to local stakeholders as a way of enabling them to deal with the wider risk factors associated with criminal behaviour, such as social exclusion and youth unemployment. Nevertheless, despite the growing importance of neighbourhood renewal programs within the criminal justice field, there is still comparatively little empirical evidence as regards their effectiveness. To address this important gap in the public policy literature, we estimate the impact of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) program, a key part of the UK’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, on crime rates in local areas across England between 2000 and 2007. Because the NRF was made available only to those areas classified as the most deprived in England, we are able to apply quasi-experimental methods to approximate the causal effect of the program on domestic burglary and vehicle crime rates. Using a regression discontinuity design, our analysis reveals a substantial decrease in both domestic burglary and vehicle crime rates in those areas which were eligible to participate in the NRF program. These results are robust to several alternative model specifications.