House of Commons Hansard Debates for 1 Jul 1993

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of the local police force. Those are moves towards the improvement of locality, not moves towards Government centralisation. We will have to study the Sheehy proposals with great care. They are directed towards improving the management and structure of the police with fixed 10-year contracts ; by cutting out some of the bureaucracy and some ranks ; by introducing performance-related pay and more realistic pay scales. The editor of Police Review, Brian Hilliard, is reported in The Daily Telegraph today as saying that once the knee-jerk reactions subside and the implications of the report have been studied, it will be seen as an attempt to improve the service. That is what the police service needs. We have given it everything else and the police must now respond by improving their management.

I could show that it is unreasonable to criticise the Government for not having done more to reduce crime in matters apart from the police. We have massively improved crime prevention through neighbourhood watches and drug teams. We have massively improved prison building with £1 billion spent on prisons and 20 new prisons and we have also introduced private- sector management. We have massively improved the range of sentences available to courts. I could go on, but, as other hon. Members wish to speak, I want to conclude by referring to one area in respect of which the system of law and order is undoubtedly falling down. That area is the crazy situation in relation to cautioning. The hon. Member for Lewisham, East (Mrs. Prentice) referred to a different aspect of that problem. To give police the power to caution offenders, whether they are juveniles or adults, rather than to charge them must always be a rather dubious policy, because it gives ordinary police officers the power to choose who to charge and whether or not to charge. It leaves wide open the possibility of abuse of power and even corruption. I am not suggesting that there has been widespread abuse of power or corruption. However, such a possibility exists when we talk about not needing to bring people to justice because a police officer has decided not to charge someone. If we have such a system, it must be monitored very closely.

Where cautions are available, there may be frustration about the working of the criminal justice system. As was said earlier, frustration arises when the police work hard to bring someone to court and that person simply receives a pat on the head and tuppence from the poor box or, if that person is a juvenile offender, is released back to his family. That person is then back on the street once more doing his wrong-doing. The frustration about that must be immense.

Combined with cautioning, I am not convinced that that is not a bad system. Indeed, a spokesman for the Police Federation told the Select Committee on Home Affairs that frustration was felt in relation to cautioning. He said that people who should have been brought to justice are not being brought to justice.

Mr. Nigel Evans : Does my hon. and learned Friend accept that the public are also very frustrated by what he has described? I received a letter from a constituent recently who told me that his son had become involved in clearing up a crime. The perpetrator pleaded guilty instead of going to court and he received a caution. However,

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when my constituent's son was caught speeding at 40 mph instead of 30 mph, he immediately received a £40 fine. He thought that it was a great injustice that the person who pleaded guilty received a caution, while he received a fine of £40 on the spot.

Sir Ivan Lawrence : I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but the problem is more widespread than that. Offenders are cautioned, but that does not seem to happen when they drive cars. In those circumstances, they are fined. That is very irritating to law-abiding members of society.

If people think that I am exaggerating, I invite them to enter any Crown court in London and ask whether it is busy. It is quite an eye-opener, when there is such a massive level of crime, whether or not it is increasing, to go into the courts of London and find that only half the courts are sitting because cases are not being brought for trial. If hon. Members go around the chambers in the Temple and see how many barristers are sitting on their backsides doing nothing because the work has dried up, they will realise that the cautioning process has much to answer for.

Our police, unlike those in Germany and the United States, have discretion when they encounter a criminal. The can take no action, give an informal warning which is not recorded, give a formal caution, or charge an offender and begin the process of presenting him to the court. Perhaps there is justification in cautioning a juvenile, because one needs to try one more time to avert a juvenile from the criminal justice system--but an adult? An adult should know the difference between right and wrong. There are not many who offend for the first time and are unlucky enough to appear in court. Many people who appear in court for the first time have been offending for many years.

There is great worry about the policy of cautioning. If we do not punish offenders, there might be more temptation to offend again. Whereas conviction and sentence might be a deterrent, cautioning and freedom from further blame most definitely are not.

Home Office research tells us that more than half the police forces in England and Wales have no policy for the use of informal cautions. Therefore, the use of cautions is hardly standardised. If it is not standardised, it could lead to abuse.

Informal cautions are not even recorded. That almost certainly distorts statistics on the incidence of juvenile crime in particular. Our responses might be wholly inadequate because we have a completely wrong idea of the amount of crime that is going on. Crime is not even recorded because people are not being formally cautioned. There are reports that even crimes of burglary and violence are resulting in cautions to offenders and a caution is allowed to be given only when there is clear evidence of guilt ; it is a requirement of a caution that the offender must acknowledge guilt. Offenders who have are things called multiple cautions--that is, cautioning an adult or juvenile offender not once but twice, three times or four times. One of the Police Federation witnesses told us that on such occasions juveniles actually laugh at them.

If people who should be caught, charged and convicted are not charged and convicted, the whole criminal justice

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system falls into disrepute. Once the system falls into direpute and people do not respect it, there is a temptation for people to take the law into their own hands, and that is where vigilantes have been coming into the matter. If people who should be charged and convicted are not convicted, their victims, about whom hon. Members are very concerned, can make no claim for compensation for their suffering.

Mr. Colin Pickthall (Lancashire, West) : I am having difficulty in putting together the two halves of the hon. and learned Gentleman's speech. At the beginning, I understood him to say that the increase in crime was not as large as had been made out because of increased detection. The hon. and learned Gentleman now seems to be saying that the crime wave that is undetected and unprosecuted, because of the caution procedure or whatever, is much greater than we think. He cannot have it both ways.

Sir Ivan Lawrence : If the hon. Member for Lancashire, West (Mr. Pickthall) cannot put together two logical sides of an argument, that must be for him to worry about. The point that I am making is that, high as the level of crime is--nobody disputes that it is high--I dispute that it is rising at the rate at which it is portrayed. I am pointing out also that, because of the policy of cautioning, considerable problems must be addressed.

Undoubtedly, there has been a worrying growth in the use of cautions, both formal and informal. Undoubtedly, there is growing concern about the effects of cautioning. My guess is that if people outside this place knew how much cautioning was going on, they would be worried and distressed. Undoubtedly, there is a need for more research to tell us exactly what is happening. If what I think is happening is, in fact, happening, we should certainly stop multiple cautions. When serious offences such as burglary and violence have been committed, cautions should be stopped altogether.

7.34 pm

Mr. Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) : I did not expect that I would follow a Conservative Member who, at one stage, seemed to say that there was not exactly a rise in crime and that, if there was, it was really to do with the way in which the police managed their own police officers. I expected that I would follow a different set of arguments which I have heard from Government Members more frequently--that crime must be understood in relation to a crisis of values.

I place that remark in a context that is somewhat wider than that which has emerged tonight. When Conservative Members have talked about a crisis of values, they have not expressed their indignation about that crisis in terms of the Asil Nadirs of this world. They have not risen in indignation about the Ernest Saunders of this world and the way in which large-scale fraud is taking place. They have not vented their spleens on the vast tranche of the criminal classes who fiddle their tax returns or those who find ways in which to conduct illegal and illicit arms deals. Conservative Members have defined crime as being about young people.

One of the saddest aspects that I have encountered since becoming a Member is that, by and large, that is the only

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context in which young people are referred to. We hear them referred to as a problem. Rarely, if ever, is there reference to, or recognition of, young people as the best and most important assets of society. Invariably, issues to do with law and order are about young people and what we do about them as a problem.

When I listen to Government rantings on the matter, I have to ask myself how many Conservative Members who vent their spleens about young people have contact with any young people who are at the margins of youth crime, let alone those who are actively involved in it. A large part of my life has been spent working with young people who were involved, in one way or another, in crime. I began by working with children who were nicking off school--truants. As the right hon. Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson) said, in many ways their teachers were relieved that they were nicking off school because it made it easier to conduct classes for the pupils who remained.

I spent a very useful period working with youngsters for whom school was an extremely negative experience. They were not stupid kids. They were difficult and they were disruptive--they were kids who often had an awful lot of get-up-and-go about them. However, it taught me a very important lesson--that it is possible to work with that group of young people and to deflect them into far more productive channels that make the most of their talents, rather than to paint them as caricatures of difficult and disruptive people who will be a problem for society all their lives.

I was also fortunate enough to be involved in setting up the Home Office's pilot scheme in relation to non-custodial treatment of offenders. Following that, I was an active worker in delinquency prevention work. Against that strong background, I shall be fairly critical of some of the lines of thinking that have been offered to us in a succession of debates about law and order.

My first point relates to the fact that the Government's successive reruns of policy on law and order will never achieve anything. They cannot combat what they fail to comprehend. There is usually a great hue and cry from Tory Members about punishment. There is much enthusiasm about equipping the police with extra batons--presumably, to be tried out by smashing engraved watches. There is great enthusiasm also for stiffer prison sentences. But all the evidence and all the advice from people in the prison service indicate that, on youth crime, such penalties are not just singularly ineffective but counter-productive and financially wasteful. This simply is not a coherent response to the problems, even as they are perceived by the Government.

Recently, I spent some time talking with prison officers about young people in custodial institutions. I was horrified to hear about the incredible financial cost. Keeping a person in detention in a secure unit costs from about £400 to £1,700 a week. Even in the Government's own terms, the value of that punishment ought to be measured against the cost of intervention schemes, most of which involve expenditure of less than £100 per person per week. I should like to give an illustration by referring to a project in my constituency. It is called Wheelbase and caters for youngsters of precisely the type about whom many Conservative Members have been talking--those involved in burglary and car crime. Perhaps I ought to notify the Home Secretary that I intend to bring a group of young people taking part in that scheme to Westminster

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to give a presentation of the work that they are doing and to present Members of Parliament with a first-hand account of how those involved in car crime perceive the Government's approach. The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) has said that young people laugh at the courts. But they laugh at this House also. They laugh at the policies we offer, which are regarded as irrelevant and absurd.

It would be far more productive to listen to what these young people have to say about initiatives that have made a difference in their lives by deflecting them away from active involvement in car crime and burglary. When I asked one of them to describe his background, he said, "Me--I'm a 25 -a-night man." I did not understand what he was saying. I thought that he was perhaps talking about smoking. In fact, he was saying that stealing 25 cars a night had been a norm before he became involved in the Wheelbase project, whose participants build and race their own stock cars, and then go on to take up apprenticeships of the sort mentioned by the right hon. Member for Brent, North. That lad would go from one car to another as it took his fancy. He and his colleagues on the project had been through penal institutions. What had that taught them? It had taught them how to do the jobs better. What persuaded them to do less car theft was an initiative in their own locality that gave them something more constructive to do with their lives.

In my constituency there are similar initiatives to do with preventive work in relation to health and drugs abuse. The irony is that such projects are almost entirely dependent on urban programme funding and will cease to exist when that funding runs out ; thus, it is precisely the measures that are working for young people that will be discontinued. It is in that context that we have to measure the seriousness of commitment and the understanding that the Government bring to a debate about law and order.

I should like to give a few comparative figures that I was asked by the project to present in this debate. The average cost of a serious road accident in which juvenile car thieves are involved is £25,000. For every fatality, the cost is about £700,000. The cost of a project like Wheelbase is £50,000 a year. What we are talking about here is the fact that the avoidance of two road accidents a year or one death in every 14 years would make the project cost-effective, and that is before we even begin to address the cost in terms of human suffering and grief. The Government do not pay this bill out of a law and order budget or an urban programme budget. Somehow, the cost is a discrete one that we are not prepared to address, but it is still a cost we end up paying.

I do not want to minimise the problem of the growth of crime in our cities. We in Nottingham have our own difficulties arising from crimes involving serious drugs abuse and, unfortunately, guns. Before I became a Member of Parliament, I was a county councillor in Nottinghamshire. My experience throughout my time in that capacity was of putting in bids for more police officers on the beat but seeing those bids turned down or cut by the Conservative Government. On the issue of drugs, I have to set against the Government's claims of concern comments in a report issued recently by the National Union of Civil and Public Servants :

"We were astonished to hear the Government's announcement in November 1991 that it would be cutting Her Majesty's Customs and Excise previously agreed funding for

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the five-year period 1992-96, causing a reduction of 400 customs officers engaged in the war against drugs. These reductions are on top of the job losses already accepted by the Department due to changes brought about by completion of the single market." Against the background of those cuts, we must ask how serious is the commitment to an assault on the problem of drugs. If one opens the traps, one should not be surprised if the dogs go on the run. We are asking police officers to contain something after it has been let loose on the streets. The big issue is the supply of drugs. Unless the problem is tackled at that level, their distribution will continue to be a nightmare with which we cannot deal.

I should like to refer to the Government lessons that I have learnt from my work on the streets with young people involved in crime of this sort. The first is that prevention is more effective than punishment.

A recent study in the United States concluded that, in terms of mileage per buck, investment in child care for the under-fives produced more value than any other type of preventive intervention. Are the Government of this country committed to increased investment in the under-fives? Certainly not. Secondly, punishment without provision for a way back into responsible society simply creates better criminals. Thirdly, youth gangs involved in crime have a limited number of leaders.

One hon. Member has made the point that in the United Kingdom there is a limited number of seriously disruptive young people involved in crime. I accept that. It is a point that chief police officers around the country make. But if one asks what is to be done about those young people and about those on the periphery of youth gangs, the answer is that people do not have a clue because we do not have a programme.

Some countries have started to do more useful work on that issue. They have accepted the challenge of working with seriously disruptive and alienated young people and those on the periphery of youth crime. Part of that requires a commitment not only to the expansion of the youth service but to a statutory youth service provision. When I was in local government, one of the saddest realisations was that as successive cuts in government spending were made by this Goverment the areas cut most severely were the ones in which the local authority had discretion to spend. When the local authority had an obligation to spend, it had to shell out the money. When it had discretion to spend, those areas were pruned. Unfortunately, the youth service, which is potentially one of the most important ways of intervening constructively to develop the talents and skills of young people, has been massively under-resourced for more than a decade. There can be no evasion of the uncomfortable fact that one of the starting points in our response to crime must be the protection of victims. I am not suggesting that all the young people involved in crime can be dealt with in the community in the first instance. I know a number of young people with whom it is impossible to do any remedial work unless they are taken out of the community. However, they must not then be put into a children's home that is already under pressure as a result of having to deal with many children who have been traumatised in different ways. We need different models for working with those seriously disrupted and alienated young people. In terms of corrective work with the perpetrators, the right hon. Member for Brent, North was right. We need youth apprenticeship schemes and schemes that build links

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across the generations. It may be extremely difficult for those young people to develop links with their parents. From my experience, however, I have found that it is remarkably easy to develop constructive relationships between those young people and other adults in the community. One of the spin-offs from such relationships is mutual recognition and respect that develops between those groups of people.

We have made little progress on the notion of reparation schemes in Britain. I have some reservations about whether reparation should be from the perpetrator directly to the victim. In many ways, it is asking too much of the victim to be in that position. The notion of reparation to the community has more to commend it, partly because it recognises that people have an obligation to society and it gives them a way back. I cannot tell the House the number of occasions, throughout the years in which I worked on the non-custodial treatment of offenders scheme, when people who were required to work in the community after they had finished their sentences continued to do that work because they had recognition and respect for the way in which they were doing it. Building up people into that role is the biggest challenge that we face.

When I ask people in my constituency, especially pensioners, what they would do with young people in crime, the overwhelming answer is, "Give them a job." Young people without work or a place in society will repay society in their own ways. The huge challenge that we face relates not to crime but to how we value young people in society. We will not positively address that question if, for example, we continue to say to those 18 to 25 year- olds who are out of work, "We expect you to live on £4.97 a day without skirting around on the margins of crime." Half a million young people aged 18 and 24 are in precisely that position.

One in every three unemployed people is under 25 and lives on or beyond the margins of poverty, and 100,000 young people aged 16 or 17 live without a job, a training place or any benefit at all. If we ask ourselves how we would live in those circumstances, I am not sure how many of us would say that we would do so always honestly and legally without drawing on the network of opportunities that earning an illicit coin offers people. If we do not want people to live those sorts of lives, we must give them the opportunity to live better, more respectable and more legitimate ones.

I frequently have discussions with young people on my streets. From time to time, some of them were in the habit of taking my car and driving it away-- I have never been keen on that--and we have had rather heated exchanges about the virtues of it. We have also had heated discussions about racing cars up and down the street. At one time, I collared a group of them and asked, "What are you doing? These are your brothers and sisters who are wandering across the street. It could be you who kills them. You cannot go round nicking cars, marauding around the streets and leading your lives as criminals." I was stopped in my tracks when one of the lads said, "I am not a criminal--I am an entrepreneur." I was surprised mainly because I did not think that he would know the word, let alone be able to use it in the right context. I asked him to explain what he meant. He said,

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"I can deliver. Do you want a radio? I can get you a radio. I can get you a car to go with it, if you like. You look as though you could do with a new jacket. What size are you? Do you have any preference for colour? Why don't you come into town and try a few suits on? Go and have a cup of coffee and we will meet later to sort out a price. I deliver in this estate. People know that I can deliver. You say to me I have no say because I have no recognition.' I bloody well do. I will tell you what though--I will do you a deal. I will happily give up this on condition that you do one thing for me. Tell me this--can you give me a job?" The truth is that I could not get him a job. I could not offer him a legitimate way to get into a society of which he wanted to be a part.

I realised that, in many ways, that group of young people understood the message that society was giving them much better than I did. They told me that if they were voters, they would not vote for me. Their model was Mrs. Thatcher. They liked her. They thought that she was tough. She knew what the world was about--looking after No. 1. These were Thatcher's children. They frightened and saddened me because I had known all of them since they were children. All of them had a little dream. Up until the age of about 12 or 13, I could tell the House what they wanted to be. They wanted to be bus drivers ; they wanted to work in Raleigh ; they wanted to work in Players ; they wanted to be mechanics and they wanted to work in a nursery. It did now matter what it was--it was a simple dream. Somewhere beyond that age, we stripped them of that dream and the belief that society would offer them any reasonable opportunity to fulfil that aspiration.

When we are talking about reparation schemes, the biggest challenge for the House and society is whether we can address the reparation that we owe to a generation of young people from whom we have stolen their hopes. I do not condone the thefts that they perpetrate. However, when I compare them with what I hear from Conservative Members and the Government, I ask : what is the difference? The difference is that these kids are honest thieves. They are not "twoccers" in suits who have stolen access to and ownership of public resources and jobs. They live the life that the Government and society write on the wall for them and tell them is their only prospect.

Until we address the challenge not in a soft namby-pamby, wishy-washy way but by challenging those young people, redirecting their energies and making the most of their talents, we will do nothing.

Several hon. Members rose --

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Geoffrey Lofthouse) : Order. There are nine hon. Members hoping to catch my eye in the remaining time available for the debate. If hon. Members give short speeches, most may have a chance of doing so.

8 pm

Mr. Peter Fry (Wellingborough) : Further to that point, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall make an observation. We have had speeches lasting half an hour from several colleagues and interventions from people who want to speak in the debate that have taken 40 minutes out of the time available. I hope that those hon. Members will give those of us who have sat quietly and patiently the indulgence of making our speeches without interruption.

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I wish to make a point about the speech by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson), although I will not comment in detail. I was interested that the hon. Gentleman said that funding for youth services should be compulsory. He added that he found that when local authorities could make up their mind whether they wanted to spend on youth services, they tended to cut the funding. The hon. Gentleman would, I hope, make the same speech to his Labour party colleagues in local government. Most urban areas have been under Labour control for many years. I am not trying to make a party political point, but politicians of all parties, to a certain extent, must do something about it.

I shall read a few lines from a previous debate on the subject : "Crime and dishonesty pay as never before Cheating ... has become common practice and dishonesty generally has been allowed to pay Is it any wonder that Dr. Trevor Huddleston"--

a leading churchman--

"was quoted as having said I think this country's very sick indeed.' "-- [ Official Report , 4 May 1970 ; Vol. 801, c. 40-41.] That is not an extract from a speech by the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) or by any other Opposition spokesman on home affairs. It is an extract from a speech made by the Member for Wellingborough on 4 May 1970. I am delighted to say that it is the same Member for Wellingborough who addresses the House tonight. After 23 years, what is new? Crime figures seem to be much worse. Perhaps just as important, and more significant for the future, is the growing loss of confidence among the public that Parliament, the courts and the police are tackling problems in the right way. It is no wonder that some members of the public take the law into their own hands.

There is a great deal of frustration, anger and disgust and that has led some people to take the law into their own hands where they believe that the responsible authority has acted and failed. The danger now is that, despite the enormous amounts that we have spent not just on policing but on education and social work, public confidence is waning. The public are becoming impatient for action, as the letters in any hon. Member's postbag will tell him. It is no good the Lord Chief Justice, or any other judge, criticising and condemning those who take their own action. It is no good Parliament tut-tutting and talking about the rule of law. It is no good the heads of our police forces saying, "Leave it it us", when far too many of our fellow citizens see crime going unpunished and obviously paying. Those citizens are the victims.

The chairman of one public company was quoted this week as saying that £20 million had been lost in theft from the company's premises, much of it committed by those who are not yet teenagers. It is worth making the point that the crimes that disturb most people are not the major crimes that hit the headlines, although of course they do not worry about those. Most people are worried about the crimes with which they have contact, rather than major murders, bank robberies and sensations in which newspapers delight. They worry about minor burglaries of their homes, the theft of cars from outside their houses, the theft of radios and other items from their cars, the vandalism of their property, and hooliganism in general.

I suggest that hon. Members should go to any local authority housing estate. They would often find a

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horrendous list of complaints. I was told by one housing association that, in this time of housing shortages, it has houses in one city in the north of England that it cannot let because people would not accept living in that neighbourhood.

The quality of life of so many of our people is undermined by petty crime, but the loss suffered by each person who feels violated and that he or she is a victim is important. Too often these days, that loss tends, in their eyes, to be ignored. One of my constituents reported the loss of his car radio. When, many hours later, a policeman came to take details, my constituent asked why he had taken so long. The policeman replied that he had been taking details of car radio thefts all day. My constituent asked what was to happen. The policeman said that nothing would happen. He would put the theft down on his list and that would be the end of it. No wonder that constituent has little faith in the way in which the law operates. I go further. That type of crime is not only being ignored ; it is being condoned. We have heard how the youth in certain parts of our country who have no job and little or no social security are in such a desperate state that it is understandable that they should become law breakers. I have heard even a senior police officer say something along those lines. That is a tremendous insult to the law-abiding majority of people and also the law- abiding majority of our young people.

People ask themselves, "Why do I obey the law? Why should I teach my children about right and wrong when too many others benefit from crime?" Too many people are making excuses for crime. Even the Government are doing so. When they finally agreed, after representations from colleagues including myself, to provide long-term secure accommodation for juvenile joyriders, an official handout from the Home Office played down the unpleasant aspects of such confinement and stressed that conditions would not be too hard in those facilities. Most people in this country would want to know why on earth not? How many offences do that minority of 12, 13 and 14-year-olds have to commit before they are taken away and stopped from being a nuisance to the rest of society? Do they have to kill by the reckless use of a motor car before effective action is taken? It may be asked what the response of the courts, Parliament and police has been to the situation that I have been describing. I shall give some examples from the local courts. A grandfather wrote to me saying that his grandson had bought his first motor cycle, which was later stolen. He then discovered that the motor cycle had been sold to somebody else and, being percipient, was able to track down the offender and give the information to the police. He received a letter from the police, thanking him for his action and adding that the offender had been arrested. However, due to official policy, the offender had been let off with a caution. That point was made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

The House may find interesting what I would describe as two weeks in the life of a magistrates court. One of my constituents was arrested and told to attend court on 25 April. He failed to attend, and a warrant was issued. On 29 April, he was arrested for a new offence. On 30 April, he appeared before the court which promptly bailed him, although residency and reporting conditions were placed

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on that bail. On 3 May he failed to report, and on 4 May he was arrested for breach of bail conditions. The court continued the residency and reporting conditions. On 4 May, he failed to report. On 5 May, he was again arrested for breach of bail conditions. On 6 May, the court bailed him and removed the reporting conditions. Is it any wonder that on 8 May he was arrested for several new offences? My local magistrates court unfortunately has the reputation of being the softest in Northamptonshire and, with a record like that, it is not surprising. It is not a matter of pride to me or to the majority of my constituents, who strongly feel that much sterner and stiffer action is needed. It is not just a local problem ; we all know of the ludicrously light sentences that have been handed down by some of the judiciary, even for killing people. Increasingly, too many of those who are guilty of serious crimes seem to get away with a very light sentence, whereas those who commit what might be considered lesser crimes, such as motoring offences, tend to be dealt with severely.

I am full of admiration for the policeman on the beat. He is the one at the sharp end and has to deal with the public. He needs and deserves our support. The reality is, however, that they are called on to be firefighters. They are supposed to deal not with the causes of crime but only with its symptoms. I take the point that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South made in that respect.

The task of the police has become enormous because there is too much bureaucracy and the courts are too weak. The effectiveness of the police has been undermined. As a result, some senior police officers seem to have decided to say, "We cannot cope with everything, so let us cope with what we can."

In my own county, what is called a diversionary policy has been followed for a number of years. Our present chief constable--an excellent man, whom we are very sorry to lose ; however, we congratulate him on his promotion to Her Majesty's inspectorate--has recently issued a new version of that policy. It applies to juvenile offenders and is based on the premise that 10 per cent. of youngsters are responsible for 40 per cent. of juvenile crime. The aim is to target the young people who are most likely to reoffend rather than those who might be brought before the courts on one occasion only. Under this system, when a youngster is caught for his first, second or third offence, he is diverted away from the juvenile court to the juvenile liaison bureau, where he is counselled and cauution Service and, to my surprise, by the local branch of the Police Federation. I understand why the policy has been introduced, but I do not share the enthusiasm for it felt by so many estimable bodies--nor does a very large section of our local population--because 30 per cent. of such youngsters do reoffend. They may receive just a ticking off for as many as six offences. That policy is far from a deterrent ; it actually encourages youngsters to commit more crimes because they get away with it very easily.

Some juvenile magistrates have complained that they cannot understand why court sittings have been cancelled when juvenile crime is on the increase. Many individual

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policemen do not like the policy. I was sent a copy of the revised document and on it was inscribed "The Thugs Charter". It had obviously been surreptitiously sent by someone in the police headquarters in Northampton.

By talking to individual policemen, I have learned that the police do not much like the policy. The public like it even less. It seems to them and to me an admission of failure that we cannot cope with all the crime and all the potential criminals. At the same time, it is sending the wrong message to those young offenders, who are encouraged to offend again. I find it deeply depressing that the police are being forced to use such a flawed system.

What of Parliament and the Government? I welcome the announcement of my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary about removing so much of the red tape and bureaucracy that have been endured by our police forces. I am delighted that parts of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 are being reviewed in relation to past offences and income-related fines. I am grateful that offenders who reoffend on bail will receive heavier sentences. I am also pleased that we will now be able to put persistent joyriders and juvenile offenders into more permanent secure accommodation.

Opposition Members will be interested to know that there was a youngster in Wellingborough who was reckoned to have stolen at least 25 cars--that was as many as could be attributed to him. Every time he was arrested and taken to the local authority home, the police believe that he had got out, stolen another car and got home before the police car that had taken him to that home had arrived back in Wellingborough. The whole process had become a total mockery. I am grateful for everything that the Government have done, but I must say to my hon. Friends that we need to do more. I mean no insult, but the House must pay greater attention to law and order legislation as it is considered by Parliament. We would not have had some of the errors in the Criminal Justice Act 1991 if hon. Members had not left its consideration to the lawyers of the House. Any hon. Member who does half a job knows that the electorate are worried that not enough is being done and that there is a lack of confidence in law and order. The Government should consider a number of issues. The right to silence needs to be examined. We find that 15 or 16-year-olds are instructed by their lawyers to say nothing to the police, so that it becomes impossible to convict them properly. A refusal to answer a reasonable question should be allowed to raise doubts in the minds of justices and jurors.

We should examine whether the pendulum has not swung too far towards protecting the guilty rather than protecting the victims of crime. We should look again at the age of legal criminal responsibility. A few years ago, a gentleman came to me and said, "The local gipsies are sending their youngsters into our village to steal our produce. They are very clever because they are sending youngsters below the age of criminal responsibility." I asked, "Surely your village has a policeman. Why don't you report it to him?" He said, "I am the village policeman and I cannot do anything about it."

Whatever we do about the Sheehy report, may I suggest to my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary that we should be most careful not to do anything to reduce police morale. The police must not feel that they are being got at or that their job has been downgraded.

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None of the policies that we have put forward will be successful unless we harness the power and co-operation of public opinion. An area in my constituency suffered from many difficulties, but, with the encouragement of the police and the local authority, we set up a residents association and the amount of crime was vastly reduced. That kind of experiment is a positive way forward. The police cannot do it on their own ; they need the public not just to report offences but to be willing to give evidence. Both the police and the public need the support of the courts and we who are the law makers. If we respond to the challenge, we shall regain public confidence, police morale will rise and the legal system will be held in higher respect. It is an enormous challenge and I do not envy my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Home Department. But it is more than a challenge it is a duty. The happiness and quality of life of so many of our fellow citizens depends upon our success. I do not believe that we can fail them.

Several hon. Members rose --

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris) : Order. Before I call the next hon. Member, I must point out that the winding-up speeches will commence at 9.30. There are at least six hon. Members who wish to speak, so may I make a request for succinct speeches?

8.18 pm

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock) : I listened carefully to the Home Secretary's speech to discover whether I would hear anything other than the routine rubric of a new Conservative Home Secretary talking platitudes about what is wrong while ignoring the fact that he and his colleagues have been in office since 1979. He cannot possibly deceive the House nor do I think that he can deceive the people in general by trotting out the speech that has been used by perhaps half a dozen Conservative Home Secretaries two or three times every year in the Chamber and on countless occasions outside.

Conservative Home Secretaries make excuses and deliver many speeches about law and order which are full of platitudes, but they are slow to tackle the causes of crime or to bolster the sagging morale of police officers. The Conservatives must recognise that the hallmark of the Thatcher years was the creation of a selfish society, which has contributed to rising crime and the breakdown of law and order. In brief, they must be charged with contributing--albeit unintentionally--to the breakdown of society and to the increase in crime.

Conservative Members, and especially Home Secretaries, repeatedly imply criticism of the police. It is typical of this Government that they have gone through professional group after professional group, implying that they are failing society and the public but without recognising that they themselves have failed to fund properly many essential public services, including the police service. If Conservative Members think that I am making an unfair charge, I refer them to paragraph 2.2 of the White Paper that was published this week. It states :

"The main job of the police is to catch criminals. In a typical day, however, only 18 per cent. of calls to the police are about crime, and only about 40 per cent. of police officers' time is spent dealing directly with crime."

I do not accept that the most important or exclusive responsibility of a police officer is merely to fight crime ; there are the issues of public confidence, mobility and

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general order as well. When a crime is committed and when society has failed, it is the police who come to the rescue on our behalf. Putting aside that issue, the implication in the White Paper is that too much police time is spent on bureaucracy ; but what about the traffic division of the police? It does not combat crime ; it ensures mobility and makes certain that traumatic and harrowing accidents are dealt with expeditiously and humanely and that proper reports are made for the victims and the various authorities. It is nonsense to suggest that there is a vast police bureaucracy which merely shifts paper. The Government's repeated charge against these good professional public servants is very unfair. I reject the charge and wish, on his behalf, to defend the average police officer. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Fry) said that we must have regard to police morale. I agree that police morale is low, and it is low for a variety of reasons, including underfunding, lack of support from the House and also because of documents such as those which have been published this week.

Police officers are deeply cynical about the Government's intentions. The Government announced a little while ago that they were setting up the Sheehy inquiry into pay and conditions-- [Interruption.] If the Government Whip will contain himself, he will hear what I have to say. The Sheehy inquiry was to look into the pay and conditions of service of police officers. It was supposed to be independent but, within a short time, the Government announced that they were also publishing a White Paper. The White Paper on the future structure of the police has this week preceded the so-called independent Sheehy report--clearly the Government have pre- empted the Sheehy inquiry.

I believe that the pay, conditions and structure of the police service are indivisible. The White Paper has been published in advance of the Sheehy report. Either the Government decided to pre-empt Sheehy or there has been collusion between that inquiry and the Home Secretary ; which would mean that it is not to be an independent inquiry. Police officers have noticed this and they are deeply worried because their service is not being judged fairly or objectively.

There is a Cinderella part of the police service which has not yet been mentioned, or at least not while I have been here, and I should like to remedy that omission. I am referring to the many dedicated police officers who are in what are known, inappropriately, as non-Home Office forces. They do not receive the attention that they deserve. They include the British Transport police, the Ministry of Defence police, the Atomic Energy Authority police and the Royal Parks Constabulary as well as the Northern Ireland Airport police which the Government recklessly and foolishly intend to privatise. That is breathtaking.

When police officers, whether they are in the Home Office or non-Home Office forces, realise that forces can be privatised, they regard it as a great threat to the dignity of their office and their capacity to protect and promote our interests. They know that the Government's secret agenda is to extend the privatisation of police services, as happened with the Port of London police authority which was privatised before the last general election. The Northern Ireland Airport police force is now to be privatised. Many officers fear that these are intended as experimental runs before the hiving-off of many other police functions.

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At the same time as the Edmund-Davies report which, like the Sheehy report, dealt with Home Office forces, the Government of the day commissioned what became known as the Wright report. This looked into the pay, conditions of service and structure of non-Home Office forces. I hope that the Minister will give an assurance to those police officers in the non-Home Office forces that their service will on this occasion have a matching inquiry and report into their pay and conditions of service, comparable to the Wright report of 1979. If the Government get around to legislating, I hope that they will think it appropriate to define carefully what a police constable is and what his or her basic training should be. It may concern hon. Members to know that the Government have no knowledge about how many police constables there are or where they are. They know where the Home Office constables are but they do not know the number or location of many officers from a variety of small constabularies ; although they are also sworn constables. It is not fair to those constables and it is bad public policy not to know exactly who and where they are.

I think that all hon. Members will agree that it is important that every constable should be of a common professional standard. He should not be sworn in at an obscure magistrates court, given a surplus police uniform and told that he is a constable. However, that is what happens at the moment in some cases. The London borough of Wandsworth and the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea have their own police officers in their parks. Those officers do a superb job, and I do not knock them, but central Government do not know who they are or how many there are, and they certainly do not oversee their training. The same is true of constabularies elsewhere. It is bad for police officers generally, and a proper standard should be applied. I am also worried that non-Home Office forces are not subject to the same rules of inspection as Home Office forces. I recently tabled some parliamentary questions and learnt that forces, from the largest to the smallest, from the British Transport police down to the Wandsworth park police, are not automatically subject to inspection by Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary. They should be ; that is in the interests of the officers. Their federations and professional associations would welcome it.

It is an important fact that when inspections are made by Her Majesty's inspectorate, the federations do not automatically have an independent meeting with the inspector ; in some cases, rather unhealthily, I believe, management or senior officers are present. I should like an assurance that the federations, professional associations and police trade unions will be able to have independent meetings with Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary. The Sheehy report seems to contain a threat to the ability of police officers to be represented to the fullest possible extent by the Police Federation. Page 109 of the report contains an ominous paragraph which states :

"Police Federation and other staff association representatives should be paid when attending joint meetings with management or preparing for them but not for attending meetings concerned solely with staff association business ;".

That is worrying because it is subjective about what is meant by preparing for joint meetings and what is meant by "solely staff association business". Common sense

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should prevail. I had assumed that it always did prevail, but the introduction of such a paragraph is deeply disturbing because it threatens the Police Federation and its officers.

Page 134 of the Sheehy report contains a definition of

"in the execution of duty".

London contains not just the Metropolitan police and the City police but the Royal Parks Constabulary, which plays an increasing role in security in the Westminster area as well as the British Transport police in the tube and British Rail stations. On many occasions those officers are inhibited from spontaneously executing their duty because the law is unclear about when and where they have the right to act as police officers. Those officers should have co-jurisdiction in central London and similarly such co-jurisdiction should also apply to uniformed officers serving with the Atomic Energy police and the Ministry of Defence police, and so on. Their powers are unclear, and that is unfair to police officers who have to make split-second judgments that could subsequently embarrass them or their force. I hope that that matter will be examined.

Our police do a good job and I am proud to have this opportunity to say that in the House. They are the meat in the sandwich of rising crime and public demands for a change in the law and order climate. They are overstretched and underfunded. The proposals in the White Paper and in the Sheehy report do nothing to improve their morale ; they will do the reverse. These documents will not halt the rise in crime.

The Government must reassure police officers that they have the confidence of the House and that they will be properly funded. Special constables are good public servants who volunteer their time. Increasing their numbers should not be seen as a way of getting policing on the cheap. They should be increased but not at the expense of providing the requisite number of properly paid police officers. Not only the House but the people we represent expect the Government to provide such a professional force.

8.33 pm

Mr. Harold Elletson (Blackpool, North) : I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on their appointments to office. Many Conservative Members are nothing less than overjoyed at their appointments because we know about their commitment to solving some of the many law and order problems that give rise to such great concern. There was a Liberal Democrat spokesman in the House earlier, but the Benches of that party are now empty. The Liberal Democrats often make an issue of law and order and cynically whine about crime figures and issue "Focus" newsletters on the subject, but it is disgraceful that they cannot take the time to listen to this debate. Much of their rhetoric is humbug, and we shall tell our constituents that when the chips were down and the House had the opportunity to discuss law and order the Liberal Democrats did not even bother to turn up.

In many ways, law and order is the most important issue facing the country and it concerns ordinary people far more than anything else. They are especially worried about property-related crime. Most hon. Members who are fortunate enough not to have been burgled, robbed or attacked will certainly know someone who has been.

The scale of the problem was clearly brought home to me a few days ago when I was at a football match in

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