The recent riots represented a huge challenge to the rule of law. But government also faces another, equally big challenge: identifying why and how the riots happened, and ensuring that they don’t recur. Mark Rowe reports

Last month’s riots threw down a number of challenges for the civil service. Departments have had to simultaneously respond to the immediate demands presented by social unrest – such as processing court reports on offenders, and filtering funds to local authorities to recompense retailers and re-house residents – and plan a longer-term response to the underlying issues and mistakes that led to the disturbances.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) is leading on the post-riots Whitehall response, acting as a conduit for all other departments. “It makes sense to have a single body that everyone can contact – the departments, local councils and businesses,” says a DCLG spokesman. “This ensures we’re not all saying and doing different things and that businesses and communities get what they want.”

The hub is the department’s Fire and Resilience Directorate, which has previously dealt with major flooding. The directorate has chaired several cross-departmental meetings, collaborating with officials from the Treasury and the Home Office. HMRC has also been involved, with DCLG ensuring that businesses affected by the riots are given extended deadlines for filing tax returns. A £10m recovery scheme has helped councils meet the immediate costs of security and cleaning, and a £20m high street support scheme is giving grants to local firms affected by the riots.

In addition, a ‘public disorder and recovery team’ has been established, reporting directly to communities secretary Eric Pickles. This temporary team – the plan is to disband it after three months – has nine staff, including two deputy directors, and will monitor the process of recovery and consider further support for affected areas. DCLG has also launched a consultation on whether and how to allow landlords to evict tenants convicted of criminal offences during the rioting.

DCLG believes it has drawn on its experience with previous emergencies and that its overall response has been strong. “Every emergency is different, and so requires a tailored response,” says the spokesman. “The feedback from local councils and businesses is that the system has worked pretty well. Soon after the height of the riots, money was getting to local councils to ensure people didn’t end up homeless”.

Various departments are being tasked with specific actions, and Pickles wants to address property issues such as the high number of derelict buildings in Tottenham. But the picture of activity across Whitehall is a patchy one, with some departments reluctant to talk about their response to the riots. The Ministry of Justice declined to supply any information, and wouldn’t comment on whether the National Offender Management Service – which is responsible for commissioning and delivering adult offender management services – has the capacity to keep up with demands for pre-sentencing reports on convicted rioters. The Home Office also declined to provide details of its operations in the wake of the riots, with a spokesman saying it is “not prepared to give a running commentary”. However, the department confirmed that it’s holding cross-departmental meetings with the police on how they and social networking hosts might work together to prevent people from using new media to plot violence. The department has also been tasked with drawing up a change in the law to enable police officers to force the removal of face coverings.

The Labour leader Ed Miliband has called for a public inquiry, and David Cameron has not definitively ruled out a major inquiry along the lines of the Scarman Report into the 1981 riots. But the prime minister has first asked the home affairs select committee to report back with its own findings, and created an independent ‘communities and victims panel’ to hear from people in the affected areas and investigate the riots’ causes. These moves suggest that the government is leaning towards a series of small, relatively quick investigations into the riots, rather than a lengthy flagship inquiry designed to produce worked-up policy ideas a year or more down the line.

The panel is to be chaired by outgoing Jobcentre Plus boss Darra Singh – a man with long experience in local government (see interview) – and will report back in November. Singh has been asked to consider why violence broke out in certain areas but not elsewhere; to identify what motivated the participants; and to investigate the response of the police and other public services in dealing with the riots. Speaking to CSW, he insisted he was approaching the task with an open mind. “We’re keen to resist pre-determining what local communities feel,” he said. “What we will find is that the causes will not be the same in all areas.” Singh intends to liaise with existing local panels that have already been set up in places such as Haringey and Hackney.

The PM’s approach was welcomed by former home secretary Michael Howard – now Lord Howard – who told CSW that a full public inquiry would be “expensive and time consuming”. And while we await the long-term policy changes likely to follow the home affairs committee and Singh reports, Howard believes, it makes sense to pursue short-term policy ideas such as that of evicting those convicted of rioting. “I see no inconsistency in doing both,” he says. “There are people who feel excluded, who are not as well off as we would like them to be, and we owe it to them to give them as many opportunities to escape deprivation as we can. But rioting is a different matter, and the people involved need to be dealt with.”

David Blunkett, who has served both as home secretary and as work and pensions secretary, argues that a national volunteer programme should be part of Whitehall’s package of answers. “There are lessons that we already have to hand in advance of the communities and victims panel,” he said. “The vast majority of those involved were under-25s; those taking part showed a severe disregard for people, property and communities; and the rioting largely occurred in areas of urban deprivation. It’s now time to address the broader question of how we change values and attitudes fundamentally, so that mutuality comes high on the public agenda.”

Others, though, are sceptical that either a public inquiry or the communities and victims panel will be capable of unlocking the underlying causes of the riots. Professor Gus John advised the Labour government on race and social policy, and closely examined the 1981 riots in Manchester’s Moss Side. He says of Singh’s inquiry: “It isn’t helpful to conflate the business of looking at community issues and the concerns of victims. Victims are likely to focus on dealing with criminality – curfews and the like – rather than the underlying reasons.”
However, John believes that a public inquiry simply doesn’t have the right capabilities to get to the bottom of the riots. “The usual kind of formal structure, with a grandee chairing a committee, won’t work,” he says. Instead, the government should recruit people “with the credibility and competences required to engage with these communities”, creating a set of “people’s inquiries” supported by “a back-up system where they have access to people in government ministries, so that the contribution that the public sector can make can be brought into the picture.”

Such a format would present a challenge both to politicians and to civil servants, says John, but it’s the only way to develop a detailed knowledge of why the riots happened. “Civil servants may be privy to particular problems, but there is no understanding of the dynamics within these communities,” he says. “Opportunities need to be created for young people to have a voice. That doesn’t mean sending civil servants out to wander around Tottenham, but it does mean that they need to engage meaningfully with the people who do community work in these areas.”

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Written by Mark Rowe, CSW