The strategic thinking of Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman, a package of prevention programs based on models from the US and northern Europe, and proposals for a UK assessment body of the caliber of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado combine in a major experiment announced today by the UK city of Nottingham.

A prosperous Midlands university city once at the heart of the English mining and hosiery industries, Nottingham has periodically been notorious for signs of social breakdown – in the 1980s for neighborhood riots, more recently for the spread of drugs-related gun crime.

A key figure in the announcement that the city is to become Britain’s first “early intervention” city with the launch of an array of measures “to stop its poorest children from drifting into crime” is MP Graham Allen, whose North Nottingham constituency straddles the worst of the city’s housing estates.

“About 38,000 children under 18 in Nottingham live in families on benefits or low incomes,” Mr Allen says. "My constituency sends the fewest number of kids to university than anywhere else in the UK. It also has the highest number of teenage pregnancies.

"For 30 years we have had a policy of late intervention which has clearly failed. We have had remedial measures such as expensive drug rehabilitation programs and ineffective young offenders' institutions, when actually a fraction of the taxpayers' money that is needed to fund these services could have helped youngsters avoid becoming involved in drugs and crime in the first place.”

Nottingham is one of 20 pilot areas in the government's Family Intervention Programme, which aims to stop bad behavior spiraling into offending.

Chairman of the Local Strategic Partnership, One Nottingham, the MP has gone further than most UK politicians in recent years by making the case for re-balancing public expenditure on social care in favor of the long game of early intervention.

He told the UK House of Common last week: “When we transform a local pilot into a public service, we must also make the transition from local finance to public spending. Remarkably little has been done to address this issue. It requires a cultural shift to take place through the medium of the comprehensive spending review.

“Public expenditure should be rebalanced to favor early intervention to tackle the causes of problems, and consequently to reduce the need to spend ever larger amounts of public money on containing the symptoms.”

A key element in the Nottingham package is a $1.39m pilot of the Nurse-Family Partnership. The $19.9million Nottingham initiative also acknowledges the value of Triple P, The Incredible Years, Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America and Sweden's Mother Care Pregnancy Centers.

"By implementing the services that we have set out in a comprehensive manner, I believe we can become the first city in the country to break that cycle and show other cities that have to deal with similar problems how it can be done." Mr Allen said

In 2007/08, One Nottingham received $27.8m of funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government. This year the board is receiving another $21.9m and in 2009/10 it will receive $23.8m.

In a video message to support the launch, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to say: "Intervening early before problems develop is vital to helping all children reach their full potential, giving them every opportunity to achieve the best for themselves and then go on and reproduce that for their own families."

Many Prevention Action stories of recent months cover the territory of the Nottingham initiative. See for example: Skills beget skills: Nobel Laureate updates view on early intervention for more on James Heckman and Proving that answers don’t come out of the blue for more about the Centre for the Study and Prevention of Violence.