Policing is essential for economic growth. By reducing crime and limiting its wider harms, policing can minimise the social and economic costs of crime and help establish the necessary conditions for spending, investment and prosperity.

The Office of the Police Chief Scientific Adviser (OPCSA) commissioned two reports that examine the relationship between policing and economic growth. Both reports show how the costs of crime fall on individuals, businesses and the public sector, impacting public safety, community stability, economic confidence, house prices, and poverty, among other factors, and leading to a range of economic outcomes which in turn impact negatively on economic growth.

The reports illustrate how spending on policing is not just an investment in improving public safety but also in stimulating economic growth. By reducing crime, policing reduces the negative effects crime has on the economy, which in turn boosts economic performance. Policing is shown in the reports to enable investment, contribute to GDP, improve individual welfare, and reduce public spending on repairing the damages caused by crime. The economic returns that policing can generate are shown in these reports to be considerably higher than current levels of spending on policing and are only maintainable through continued investment in policing’s efforts to reduce crime and increase public safety.

• The first report, produced by academic researchers at the Universities of Birmingham, Sheffield and City University of London, uses a sophisticated hedonic house price model to estimate the economic value of crime reduction from which it can calculate the impact of a 10% change in policing funding on economic growth. The approach allows the report’s authors to estimate the economic value of policing by examining the impact of local crime on local property values, controlling for other factors such as the quality of local schools or the availability of public transport.   

• The second report, produced by Crest Advisory in partnership with RSM UK Consulting, combines an evidence review with a logic model that conceptualises the links between policing activities and economic growth. The logic model provides a graphical representation of how policing activities lead to crime and societal outcomes, which in turn generate economic outcomes and impacts, and is also a transparent and replicable framework for users to apply in different circumstances.