The Health Impact Assessment of the Home Office Reducing Burglary Initiative

1.1 There is an increasing body of literature, which considers not only the
negative health impacts of crime on individuals and communities, but also the nature
and context of fear of crime. This element, which is not easily explained by either
experience or risk of crime, has only recently been further explored. The health
impacts of property crimes such as theft and burglary are, however, the least well
documented of all crime types. Researchers have even less frequently examined the
preventive and protective effects on health of crime prevention; this is probably the
first study approaching this subject directly for the area of domestic burglary.
1.2 Emerging Health Impact Assessment (HIA) methods offer mechanisms for
identifying and exploring the potential links between health and non-health policies,
programmes or projects (Lock, 2000). The current rapid HIA study has applied an
‘off-the-shelf’ method for HIA, the Merseyside Guidelines (Scott-Samuel et al., 1998)
to the Home Office’s national Reducing Burglary Initiative (RBI), both prospectively
and retrospectively in selected local case study projects