Out of the box

Nick Ross is best known for his TV work, but he's also passionate about social policy. He talks to Jonathan Myerson about crime, road safety and choice in public services
Nick Ross

Picture the scene: it's the 1950s, the three Ross children - Nick is the one in the middle - are gathered on their parents' bed for Sunday morning storytime. Will it be Goldilocks or perhaps something from Enid Blyton? No, as always, it is another true life story derived from his parents' lives as Liberal councillors in Sutton, Surrey. Councillors' casework stories: unexpected beginnings, gruesome middles and hardly ever a happy ending. A bit like Crimewatch, Ross's crime reconstruction TV show, then.

Those bedtime stories may also explain why, when his life must be busy enough with TV and radio appearances, and the spin-off conference work ("I turn down more than I accept"), he is serious enough about social affairs to find the time to sit on several commissions and working parties, from the NHS Plan taskforce on health inequalities to the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee.

On the morning of our interview, he was supposed to be visiting a marmoset with electrodes in its brain, as a member of the Nuffield Council bioethics working party on research involving animal experimentation. It didn't happen. Which means we can meet in a cafe in Notting Hill, west London, to talk about his latest "good work", as a commissioner on the independent policy commission on public services, which has just reported - on choice, the public policy topic of the moment - to the National Consumer Council.

So what was it like, his first day on that particular commission, when everyone else in the room is a professor or a sir or has an impressive collection of letters after their name? "Some never watch the television or listen to radio so don't know me," he says. "And then some rather expect that I am going to be able to introduce some magical insight as to how to manipulate public opinion."

And presumably most people think he is just Mr Crime. He is passionate about tackling crime - but not in a glitzy TV-ish way. "I was making a series called Out of Court, which was more about keeping people out of jail rather than putting them in, and Crimewatch just came along as a job," he says.

"I wasn't even interested in crime for the first four, five years of the programme, not remotely. But then I started to see there were solutions lying around that people weren't picking up. And even now I'm not interested in the sort of stuff that crime correspondents are interested in - blue lights and all that."

It is when you start to probe deeper about those "ignored solutions" that Ross starts to get fired up, and his normally modulated tones pick up an edge. It is poorly targeted effort that infuriates him. "I find it truly astonishing how unintellectual we are about crime as a problem," he says. "It takes three things to make a crime. First, you need to be predisposed to break the rules; second, you need temptation; and third, you need opportunity. All the effort currently goes into the first factor. But there is so little effort targeted at the other two factors. That's all just left to individuals. If we put a tenth of the thought and energy into the other two things that we do into the first one we'd have a huge effect."

Ross helped to set up the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, named after his former Crimewatch co-presenter, who was shot dead in 1999. The institute focuses on designing out crime, rather than on who commits it, and its remit reflects his "how" rather than "why" view of crime. Ross coined the term "crime science", its analytical approach posited in contemptuous opposition to what the institute website calls the populist "battle between good and evil" concept of crime.

He blames his fellow journalists for this shallow crime narrative. "Journalism's a grubby, competitive business," he says. "It's easier to write inaccurately with a flourish than dull, honest stuff. Look at these health scares, such as MMR [the mumps, measles and rubella triple vaccine] and mobile phone masts. The air is full of radio waves already! People understand so little."

Ross almost became an academic, before being lured into journalism, and he retains a professorial reverence for evidence-based policy. Exercised by shocking statistics on fire prevention - "If we spent a tenth of the billions we're now spending on the railways in order to save, what, six lives a year, we could save 300 deaths annually from domestic fires" - he's now running a competition to design an affordable sprinkler system. "You only ever see them in offices because they're very expensive and need special plumbing. I want them to be affordable, running off normal pipework and part of building regulations within 10 years."

For someone who has effectively been given a platform to expound any theory, any manifesto he chooses - both in the media and in his committee work - he remains almost obsessively tied to the minutiae and makes few grand pronouncements. But isn't he tempted to? He says: "I made a programme about road traffic accidents, The Biggest Epidemic of Our Times. It moved from BBC2 to BBC1, it was repeated endlessly, and didn't change a thing." And then he shrugs and thinks again. "Except it did later get me access to the minister (the Conservative, Peter Bottomley) and we started to do things. Because all it took was a bit of white paint." He grabs my pen and starts to draw me a diagram of a particular T-junction at the brow of a hill. "Huge numbers of accidents, right here, and no one could understand why. All we did was put chevron lines here ... and here .... and a right-turn box there ... and suddenly, no more accidents. That's all it takes."

Maybe that is why he has not ended up in politics. Despite being the child of local politicians, despite marching on the barricades during the civil rights movement in Belfast (he was studying psychology at Queen's University) alongside Bernadette McAliskey, former MP for Mid-Ulster, he has veered away from overt politics since going into TV. "My wife and kids don't even know how I vote," he says. "Not that it stopped Alastair Campbell [the former No 10 press chief] saying I was a Tory when I disagreed with a government policy."

It is this apolitical stance that crucially underpins his credentials as Mr Everyman when they are picking sides for these panels of the great and the good. But he is not just Mr Telly Face - he knows his stuff. I ask him about the problems of implementing the recommendations of this new National Consumer Council report, about how to convince consumers that they really are the paymasters and make them exercise their right to choose. His reply goes off into a detailed analysis of the relative successes and failures of left and right over the past 30 years and how choice has become axiomatic, and how public services must be democratised. He clearly thinks way beyond the teleprompter.

Yet when I invite him to imagine himself as prime minister for the day, he is unwilling to name his top three new laws. Either he will not be drawn or he just does not think on a large canvas. He is the sort of guy, it seems, who will take the world as it is, and then seek out and support the changes that can be squeezed in.

He is scornful of glib soundbites. "The problem with crime is everyone thinks they're an expert - as I did before I got involved. In fact, I was much more certain before Crimewatch than I am now. Everyone thinks they have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done. So if you're a senior police officer listening to all this tosh, some of it from local councillors, I'm very sympathetic to them shrugging it off."

And so we're back to the small incremental changes: "Comstat [a computer analysis approach to tackling crime] is a terrible name, but it enables new detection methods, new geographic information systems, designing out crime with tiny adjustments, such as changing licensing rules or bus timetables. You need lots of links in a chain to make a crime, and you only have to cut the weakest one."

Then he thinks again, and says with a smile: "Of course, the toughest one is to persuade the kid not to have a lot of testosterone." He doesn't yet have a redesign solution for that one.

The CV

Age 56

Status Married, three sons

Lives Notting Hill, west London

Education Wallington County grammar school, Surrey; degree in psychology, Queen's University, Belfast.

Career 1972-75: reporter and presenter, The World Tonight and World at One, BBC; 1975-86: various consumer and current affairs programmes; 1986-97: presenter, Call Nick Ross, BBC Radio Four; 1984-present: presenter, Crimewatch UK, BBC; 1997: named Broadcaster of the Year.

Public life His many appointments include chairman of Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science; president, HealthWatch; director, Health Quality Service; board member, Royal College of Physicians Committee on Ethical Issues in Medicine.

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