Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Swansea Night-Time Economy Co-ordinator

Title: Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Swansea Night-Time Economy Co-ordinator 

Funder(s): Home Office – tackling violent crime programme 

Start Date: April 2009 

End Date: March 2010 

Research Team

Adam Edwards, Cardiff University
Clair Wilkins, WISERD Cardiff 

Description

The project examines the role of a new kind of institutional actor in crime and disorder reduction, the ‘night-time economy co-ordinator’ (NTEC), appointed in Swansea and funded out of the Home Office Tackling Violent Crime Programme. The NTEC has been appointed specifically to inform and co-ordinate responses to alcohol-related violence at night in the city centre and bay areas of Swansea on the presumption that responsibility for tackling this violence cuts across a number of public authorities (police, local authority service directorates, health authority etc.) and that remediation of the problem cannot be achieved by these authorities acting alone; their various responses to the problem of violence therefore need to be ‘co-ordinated’. The evaluation examines the challenges of co-ordination encountered by the NTEC, of countering the ‘silo mentality’ of established public bureaucracies and facilitating joint operations. It also provides an impact assessment of co-ordinated measures to reduce alcohol-related violence against the person. This impact assessment entails the development of a database recording the frequency, location and timing of incidents of violence against the person, which will be used, in turn, to inform a ‘problem-solving’ approach to crime reduction in which responses are premised on quantitative and qualitative evidence of crime problems and their interpretation by local practitioners and the social scientists involved in the evaluation.

Decisions on publication of findings from this research reside with the Safer Swansea Partnership.