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5.14 pm
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): I did not intend to speak in the debate this afternoon. I had come to listen and to put a limited factual point to the Home Secretary in an intervention, but I have been provoked into making a speech by the hotch-potch of misdescription, exaggeration and sheer distortion that we heard from the Home Secretary. I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to make this speech, which I hope will be relatively brief.
The hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) made an interesting speech. I thought it a bit rich when he accused my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) of making what he wrongly described as a knockabout attack on the Government's record. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman was during all those years when we were subjected to attacks from the Opposition Benches that were so crude that they did not merit the description "knockabout". I imagine that he was present on at least some of those occasions and has not totally forgotten them.
The hon. Gentleman made one point on which I wish to join him. He paid tribute to one of his constituents who stood out against the drug dealers and, in time and with the help of the police--he said that it did not come quickly enough--had managed to combat effectively the activities of drug dealers in that part of his constituency. I came across a number of examples of that when I was Home Secretary. The people involved--often in the least privileged communities, acting with enormous courage in the face of real risk--deserve enormous credit, praise and tribute, which they rarely get. Not only their local community but the whole of our national community owes people who take that kind of stand in those difficult circumstances a great debt.
The first of the two points that I wish to cover is the crime figures. In, I think, the first debate that took place after I became Home Secretary, the then shadow Home Secretary, now the Prime Minister, issued a challenge to me. He asked whether I would be content for my tenure in office to be judged by what happened to the crime figures. I suppose that as they had doubled between 1979 and 1993--I shall come back to that point in a moment--he thought that he was on pretty safe ground.
I confess that I was not sufficiently confident of my ability to turn things round in the relatively short time that I would have available to take up his challenge, so, to my
eternal regret, I declined to accept his challenge. I wish that I had done so because between 1993 and 1997 we saw a fall in crime of about 18 per cent. We never hear that figure from the Home Secretary when he talks about crime under the previous Government, or, indeed, from the Liberal Democrats. We hear only that for the period as a whole from 1979 to 1997 crime doubled under the Tories. It is an accurate figure--it did. It more than doubled between 1979 and 1993. What they never say is that crime had increased even faster under the previous Labour Government between 1974 and 1979 and had increased under the Conservative Government before that.The truth is that crime had increased for all those years. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was right to draw attention to that fact and to the relationship between it and the extent to which the liberal establishment held sway throughout that period.
Mr. Simon Hughes: I have always accepted and confirmed on the record that whereas 1992 was the peak in crime figures, after that they dropped. One of the reflections that I do not hear very often from the Leader of the Opposition is that the period when crime dropped--when the right hon. and learned Gentleman was Home Secretary--was when the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) was Prime Minister. Crime rose under Baroness Thatcher and dropped when the right hon. and learned Gentleman was Home Secretary. That is hardly an indictment, even for the Tory party, of the liberal establishment.
Mr. Howard: The hon. Gentleman is wrong. There was a classic conspiracy--I do not want to spend the whole of my remarks on this--between the criminal justice establishment and the civil servants in the Home Office and the Treasury to keep down the number of people in prison because prison is expensive. One of the classic objectives of criminal justice policy during most of that time--the hon. Gentleman is one of the few people who still subscribe to it--was to keep as few people in prison as possible.
The truth is that one of the key elements in the turnaround in crime during my period of office--it was not the only element; there were others as well--was the increase in the prison population. I believed, and I said, that prison works, in the sense that--as my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said just a few moments ago--while persistent, prolific, professional criminals are in prison, they cannot commit crime.
The other day, in a debate on these topics, I was very interested to see the junior Home Office Minister in the other place--I do not know whether the Minister of State would himself subscribe to this--come out with the phrase that the Government "believe that prison works". I was very pleased to hear him utter that phrase. When I was being criticised for uttering those words--the criticism was widespread and very considerable--I do not recall anyone from the Labour party coming to my support and saying that he agreed with that proposition. That policy, however, was a key factor in the fall in crime.
My point is simply that if one accepts the proposition that prison works in that sense--as the Government do, according to the junior Minister in the other place--it makes no sense at all deliberately and as a matter of
policy to let people out of prison before the earliest date on which they would otherwise be released. It grieves me that crime has now started to rise again, and I hope that the increase is a temporary blip. I am not sure, however, that it will be.If one is looking for the causes of that rise in crime, it is difficult to escape the inference that the early release of prisoners--my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald, in opening the debate, gave all the details of the numbers and the extent to which those who had been released early had already begun to commit crimes again--in some way and to some extent is connected to the fact that crime has now started to rise again.
Mr. Heald: Does my right hon. and learned Friend recall that a little earlier, when I said that he had had that insight, the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) commented "not much of an insight"? Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that it was really quite a deep insight, and that the danger is that it is being lost again--not only in the early release scheme, but in the worrying idea that we should imprison people from nine to five, rather than from 12 to 12 and at weekends? Does he fear that what is happening is that the Home Office empire is striking back?
Mr. Howard: There is a good deal in what my hon. Friend says. It was striking that the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), in one and the same breath--I am constantly amazed at his ability to speak without drawing breath--said, "Of course we all share that insight. But if people reoffend and are reconvicted as soon as they leave prison, what is the point?" The point is that they do not reoffend to any greater extent having been in prison than they do if they are dealt with in some other way, and that, while they are in prison, the public are safe from their attentions. That is the point.
Jackie Ballard (Taunton): Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman think that the exceedingly high crime rates and the very high prison population in the United States are proof that prison works? Is he aware that although crime rates are still very high in the United States, they have been gradually decreasing for the past 20 years? In the United States, there is no correlation between a reduction in crime rates and whether a conservative or liberal sentencing policy is in effect. Reduced crime rates are correlated with access to employment and housing and the maintenance of close family ties--all of which are damaged or broken when someone is in prison.
Mr. Howard: The hon. Lady simply could not be more wrong. She needs to look at the evidence much more carefully. I commend her particularly to a study that has been done by Professor Charles Murray--who I think shared a platform with the Home Secretary at a very recent conference on these matters. His research shows very clearly that, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, as the risk of being sent to prison increases, crime falls. Graphs demonstrate that fact very clearly. One of the things that happened when I was Home Secretary was that the risk of being imprisoned increased
quite significantly and crime fell. One can see exactly the same pattern happening in the United States. There is a very direct correlation between the two developments.Those were my only comments on crime figures. I should like, however, to say a word about police numbers. Just as one never hears the Home Secretary talking about crime in the last four years of the previous Government, when crime fell, but only about crime doubling over the whole period of that Government, so one never hears him talking about police numbers over the whole of the period of that Government, when numbers increased by 16,000, but only about the last four years, when the numbers did indeed fall--although, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald was right to point out earlier, the number of constables on the front line continued to increase.
I should like to set out very clearly the position on funding because I think--I am not certain--that, in my earlier intervention, I may inadvertently have read out an incorrect figure. If I did, I certainly want to put that right. The figures are absolutely indisputable. In 1993-94, Government provision for police expenditure in England and Wales--in real terms, at 1998-99 prices--was £7,001 million. In 1997-98, the year in which I left office, the figure was £7,294 million. That was a real-terms increase of 4.2 per cent. In the current year, 2000-01, the figure is £7,278 million: a real-terms reduction.
It is true that we passed legislation that gave chief constables much more power to spend as they saw fit the money that was made available to them. I ensured that the United Kingdom police service had the money that it needed to maintain police numbers--if that is what they decided to spend their money on. We did provide the money that was necessary to make good the previous Prime Minister's pledge to give police enough money to recruit 5,000 extra officers. The difference between that period and the period since the general election is that, whereas there was a 4.2 per cent. real-terms increase in spending on police during my time, there has been a real-terms decrease under the current Home Secretary. In other words, in my time chief constables had the money they needed to maintain police numbers, had they chosen to do so; under the current Government, they simply have not had the money.
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