---

4.4 pm

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Jack Straw): I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

"welcomes the fact that recorded crime has fallen by 7 per cent. since March 1997, with domestic burglary down by 20 per cent. and vehicle crime down by 14 per cent.; applauds the Government's investment to boost police recruitment; supports the Government's strategy for tackling crime and the causes of crime through better prevention, improving the performance of crime and disorder partnerships, the police and the criminal justice system, more effective punishment of offenders and securing greater support and protection for victims and witnesses; backs the radical reforms of the youth justice system, including swifter punishment for persistent offenders; and notes that all this is in sharp contrast to the record of the previous administration when crime doubled and the number of offenders convicted fell by a third."

The best that one can say about the speech of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) is that at least it was brief. Her problem is that while the Leader of the Opposition has taken over her job, she has been spending too much time signing copies of her book.

Miss Widdecombe rose--

Mr. Straw: I shall give way to the right hon. Lady in a moment, but I have only just begun.

I am always glad when right hon. and hon. Members do not become completely obsessed by politics but find other things to do with their spare time, so it is in the spirit of great affection in which I hold the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald that I congratulate her on the production of "The Clematis Tree", her first novel. [Interruption.] With her customary modesty, the right hon. Lady has described it as a very good book. I am still waiting for a signed copy. However, as any gift must be declared in the register these days, I should declare that I would be happy to pay for it.

I have not yet read the book, but I have read the reviews, which were like an allegory for her speech today. Some reviews you agree with and some you don't, Madam Speaker. One with which I entirely agree--and one which showed that her writing skills have fed through to her speeches--said of the book that it was completely devoid of plausible contemporary reference. One with which I wholly disagree is that the right hon. Lady is lacking a knack for fiction. She has shown today that she can produce fiction not only in novels, but in speeches.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire): I am somewhat confused by what the Home Secretary has just said. Is it his practice only ever to read reviews before making his mind up, rather than reading the book itself?

Mr. Straw: If the hon. Gentleman wants a serious answer, the best books page that I read is to be found in the Financial Times. Rather than wasting my money, I see what is recommended by its expert reviewers and then buy it.

24 May 2000 : Column 980

I welcome this opportunity to debate the Government's record on crime, not least because it already compares well with the appalling record of the Conservative party when it was in government. In the first two and a half years following the 1997 general election, overall recorded crime fell by 7 per cent., with domestic burglaries down 20 per cent. and vehicle crime down 14 per cent. In the first two and a half years of Margaret Thatcher's Government, crime went up by 15 per cent. In the same period of the Government led by the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), crime rose by 31 per cent.

The right hon. Lady can tinker with start dates and nit-pick over footnotes--we will no doubt hear more of that--but the incontrovertible truth is that over the 18 years of Conservative Government, crime doubled while the number of offenders punished fell by a third. Crime did come down towards the end of the Conservatives' period in office, but only back to the appallingly high levels of 1990.

The Tory record was clear--much more crime and many more criminals getting away with it. It is little wonder that the former Tory Home Office Minister David Mellor was moved to admit at the last election that the Conservative Party had

lost the plot on law and order.

In contrast, we have already put in place policies fundamentally to reform the way in which the criminal justice system works to ensure that it is tough on crime and tough on its causes. The programme includes tougher sentences for repeat and serious offenders; radical reform of the way we deal with young offenders; greater support and protection for victims and witnesses; effective action on preventing crime in the first place, and better detection when it does occur in rural and urban areas; and an overhaul of our system of criminal justice to cut delays and put an end to revolving-door justice.

Miss Widdecombe: The Home Secretary talks about being tough on the causes of crime. Presumably that is exactly what his child curfew orders and anti-social behaviour orders were meant to tackle. There has not been a single instance of the first and, for juveniles, there has been less than one every two weeks of the second. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that his efforts have been the most abject failure?

Mr. Straw: Not for one second. I will refer to anti-social behaviour orders in a second, and we will want to know whether the right hon. Lady supports them or not. Residents, police and victims all support them.

On the issue of child safety orders--

Miss Widdecombe: Where are they?

Mr. Straw: I would like them to be used, but it is for local authorities to use them.

In the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced by the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), a number of offences were laid down that have not resulted in a single conviction. I do not complain about that. I thought it sensible to have such offences. The act has broadly worked well. The parenting orders in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which were derided, have been used

24 May 2000 : Column 981

by the score in the pilot areas alone. People said that they would not work, but they are working extremely well. The reparation order, the action plan order and all the other orders that we have introduced to reform the youth justice system, left in such disarray by the Conservatives, are working and ensuring that fewer young offenders reoffend.

We are taking action to tackle the social conditions in which crime and criminality breed. We developed our policies by listening to those at the sharp end of the fight against crime: victims of crime, the police, councils, and Members of Parliament whose surgeries were full of constituents angry at the levels of crime and disorder in their communities. We also drew on the experience of the previous 18 years and on the reasons for the previous Government's failure to tackle the problems.

The fundamental reason for that failure on crime was the fact that the Conservatives did not have an overall strategy. Yes, during the 1980s they put money into the police, and numbers rose, but they coupled that with changes that disrupted the ability of the police to do an effective job, such as the flawed introduction in 1985 of the provisions in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the disastrous way in which they established the Crown Prosecution Service a year later.

There was also the absence of any means or method of helping local communities to fight back against disorder and anti-social behaviour. There was even--I ask my hon. Friends to comprehend this--a sentencing regime that gave the green light to criminals to offend again and again, with the Criminal Justice Act 1991, under which the courts were to be prevented by law from taking previous convictions into account in determining whether and for how long an offender should go to jail. That incoherence and incompetence led the British people to lose faith in the Conservatives' ability to keep our communities safe.

Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham): Was it not an alarming admission on 8 May that no fewer than 11 prisoners have been illegally let out of jail early, before serving the minimum tariff required, including people convicted of drug trafficking, assault, burglary and sex with a minor? Why did the Home Secretary not consider that serious enough to justify a full statement to the House?

Mr. Straw: As the House knows, I am never slow in offering to make oral statements. Of course it is a serious matter, and no one denies it, but if the hon. Gentleman wants to start trading statistics about people who are let out of prison illegally and early, I might remind him, although I do not want to cause embarrassment to the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe or the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald, that 500 prisoners, not 11--the figure mounted day by day--were let out early owing to the incompetence of the service over which they were presiding in the summer of 1996.

The Conservative Government not only had no strategy: they did not understand that they needed one. As crime soared to its highest ever level, they did not have a clue what to do, so they cast around for scapegoats, for

24 May 2000 : Column 982

someone--anyone--to blame, provided that it was not themselves. Who did they choose? They did not choose the criminals, nor even the "liberal establishment". Instead, they alighted on the police.

As former Home Secretary Kenneth Baker remarked in his autobiography:

I found that while several of my ministerial colleagues and Tory MPs supported the police in public, they were highly critical of them in private.

The then Government's revenge against the police was the Sheehy report, which the then chairman of the Police Federation, Alan Eastwood, described as a "monumental blunder" that had

thrust this Service to the edge of a cliff.

It is fair to say that it was the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who has now been adorned as a member of the liberal establishment and who is a former Home Secretary and Chancellor, who nearly brought the police service to the edge of that cliff. However, it was the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe who failed utterly to rescue the situation--indeed, he did the reverse. He implemented the biggest ever cut in the housing allowance, which has been a major factor in the recruitment problems now affecting the London police. He also forced a real-terms cut in spending on the police in 1995-96 and promised thousands more officers while securing many fewer.

---