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Description

At present, we have rather limited information on the costs and benefits of crime reduction interventions, which hampers evidence-based decisions on what to do about crime problems. A cost-benefit tool has thus been developed to provide a straightforward but comprehensive format for assembling the information relating to the costs and benefits of a programme or intervention.

About the tools

The cost-benefit tools developed for this project consists of two parts. Part 1 uses traditional costing techniques such as those employed in the HM Treasury The Green Book (2003). This allows all input-relevant cost and benefit data to be entered into the tool to calculate total expenditure on one or more interventions/programmes (across all years of the intervention), and/or to compare the average annual expenditure before and after the introduction of the intervention.

Part 2 uses a combination of traditional methods for calculating the costs of an intervention and other techniques that allow cost estimates to be made in the absence of reliable accounting data. In Part 2, the average annual costs of an earlier or similar intervention can be compared to those of a new intervention.

Developers