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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Caroline Flint): That is rubbish. Get the facts right.

Mr. Wiggin: I hear Government Front Benchers claiming that the figures are wrong. I wish that they were and I hope that the Government will continue to do more to cut crime, but they are not succeeding.

The Prison Service now believes that in some jails up to 80 per cent. of prisoners are hard drug users. Other estimates suggest that half of all crime is drug related. We should think how many crimes could be prevented if drug offenders were treated effectively, but it is simply not happening. There are examples everywhere of the failure of the Government's methods for tackling drug crime. In my own constituency of Leominster, known drug dealers are left unpunished. Indeed, local people have been to see me to express their anger and despair at the fact that drug dealers are flouting the law, openly
 
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selling drugs on the streets and laughing in the face of justice. Drug addicts need to be given the simple choice between rehabilitation and criminal punishment. We want a system that will work for everyone and not leave drug addicts to suffer and hurt others. Harm done to others is, of course, one of the saddest results of crime.

Let us consider the increasing problem with gun crime in the UK. We do not have to look any further than the tragic news stories that come out so often nowadays to realise that gun crime is growing. The facts and figures are there to prove it. Home Office figures show that, in England and Wales, there were nearly 25,000 firearm offences in 2003–04 compared with fewer than 15,000 in 1998–99. Firearms used in crimes, excluding air weapons, increased by 36 per cent. between 2000 and 2003, and the number of firearm fatalities has increased from 49 in 1998–99 to 81 in 2002–03. However, clamping down on legal gun owners is not going to help matters. Forcing more and more legislation on responsible, law-abiding gun owners is not going to help cut crime. I do not believe that any of the firearms crimes were committed by legal owners of guns. It is time to think again on that. If I am wrong, I know that the responsible Minister will intervene, but I suspect that she is thinking that suicide is the only crime in which a legitimate owner may have used a gun against himself. Making legislative changes, which the Government believe will help, will not succeed in tackling the problem.

It is also time to think again not just on crime, but on the way our police work. Our police work hard. Unfortunately, they have to spend most of their time hard at work at their desks, buried under the unnecessary paperwork that the Home Secretary has forced on them. Just 17 per cent. of police time is spent out on patrol—and most of that in vehicles. We do not need much of the super-political correctness that leads to most of that red tape—the sort that requires forms to be filled in every time a policeman stops or speaks to someone in the street, even if that person has not done anything wrong and it would be a waste of time to take down details. Of course, it does matter. The police should be on our streets, where we need them and, importantly, where they want to be. They should be visible and active within the community, where they are clearly failing at the moment. Survey after survey reveals that people feel the presence of police on their streets is too low.

The police should be able to focus on their local issues. They should not be chained to Government directives affecting everything they do. Policing plans, targets, funds and grants are forced on to them at national level, without consideration for local priorities. The Government provide up to 85 per cent. of police funding. A significant amount of that money is granted through specific ring-fenced funds. That means that what is in many cases desperately needed cash has to be spent on particular schemes, such as community support officers. There is no guarantee that such schemes will be the best form of policing for an area. Local police, not Whitehall, should be tackling the issues that matter most in their area. Nor should the police have to worry about the 58 performance criteria—a ridiculous number—or the best value
 
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regime, which add to their work load. They should also be accountable to the residents of the area they police, which cannot happen while they are so controlled by the Government.

The Government make much of the increase in police numbers in their time in power. Indeed, the hon. Member for Gloucester—my neighbour—did so in his contribution. But we all know how much police authority precepts—the income from council tax—have increased in that time. The £955.5 million increase between 2000–01 and 2003–04 could have paid for an extra 19,100 police officers. That is nearly 7,000 more than were actually recruited. So even the improvements are not all that they might have seemed to be. We have more police officers, but not as many as we could have had.

Many of the additional police officers are part of the community support schemes and are officers with very limited powers. They are police officers, but not as we know them. The Government need to realise that their schemes are not working. We need many more police and many more prison places. Community sentences simply are not effective, and approaches such as the early release scheme are impractical and dangerous. Red tape and bureaucracy are stopping our police forces doing their job. The people of Britain deserve better than to live in fear of criminals. It is the criminals who should be living in fear of punishment. There is no escaping the fact that crime is a growing scourge on the lives of people in Britain.

The new regulations and initiatives that the Government have introduced on crime are worthless if they have no effect. We all want a decline in crime and an effective system for rehabilitating criminals. We all want to make Britain's streets safer. Unfortunately, the Government are failing to achieve that.

9.7 pm

Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington) (Lab): I am grateful to have a chance to speak in this important debate and I have listened with care to the contributions of hon. Members on both sides of the House. For more than a decade, gun crime has cast a shadow over my constituency. Sadly, every so often an incident occurs, normally involving a young girl or girls, such as the incident in Nottingham or the incident in Birmingham 18 months ago, and for a few days gun crime makes the headlines and we have debates in the House. But in Hackney, parts of Brent, Lambeth and Southwark and other inner-city areas in Birmingham and Manchester, gun crime has taken its toll year in and year out for a decade.

It is always important to remember in our discussions that levels of gun crime in this country are still only a fraction of those in cities such as New York and Chicago. I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench on the steps that they have taken to deal with the gun crime menace—including increasing sentences for carrying a firearm and funding community organisations that address the issue. My Labour colleague, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has also been responsible for putting many more policemen on the streets of London, with the results that we see.

The particular problem of urban gun crime that I face in Hackney seems to be rediscovered every 18 months or so. We have always had armed professional criminals
 
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who commit a crime, take the gun home and put it away, but what has been happening on the streets of inner London for more than a decade is new. For young men—it is primarily young men—going out routinely armed is part of their style. They are not dressed to go out clubbing of an evening unless they carry a gun. The notion of guns as a style accessory that is part of a person's culture is new. As an east-end MP, I know all about professional armed robbers, but what we see on the streets of Hackney, Lambeth, Brent and Southwark is something else. We see young people for whom the gun culture is part and parcel of their youth culture.

Although the level of gun crime is tiny and it is important not to sensationalise it, the fact that an increasing number of innocent passers-by are caught up in the crossfire creates real fear in inner-city communities. The people most likely to be on the receiving end of a bullet fired by a professional armed criminal is another professional armed criminal and, sadly, security guards. In Hackney, however, people waiting at a bus stop have been caught up in gun crime. People have gone to clubs, a gun has been fired in one room, the bullet has travelled through a wall and has hit an innocent person in another room. Most recently, an 18-month-old child was shot as a result of a gun incident. Such pervasive and random crime creates fear in the community out of all proportion to the statistics.

In the short term, it cannot be repeated often enough that the majority of gun crimes are performed with replica weapons that have been re-engineered. I have asked Ministers about that before and heard about the difficulties of definition. I can only repeat that the police and people in the community want a complete ban on replicas. It cannot be beyond the wit of Home Office lawyers and the great brains that advise Ministers to devise a way of dealing with the menace of replicas that does not mean arresting children for carrying toys. The majority of the guns involved in inner-city gun-crime incidents are replicas. As has been said, a policeman called out to an incident at which there is a gun does not know whether he faces a replica or a real gun. It will not be too long before a policeman opens fire only to find that he has fired on a kid with a replica. I urge Ministers to consider a total ban of replica weapons.

Other steps need to be taken to keep guns off the street in the short term. I am chairman of the all-party group on gun crime, which last year took evidence on the subject. We were concerned to find that Customs does not keep records of the number of guns it confiscates when people try to smuggle them into the country. It needs to make gun crime more of a priority by tracking guns going in and out of the country. It is extraordinary that it cannot produce those figures. We need a more joined-up approach to gun crime, that embraces what is happening in Customs. Those are some of the short-term measures.

In the medium term, we need to do something about witness protection. A witness to a major gangland killing will be whisked away by the police, have their identity changed and the rest of it. Unfortunately, in Hackney, as in other inner-city areas, gun crime is almost too routine for that to happen. I cannot speak for Nottingham, Gloucester or other parts of the country, but gun crime in inner-city London is not stranger crime. By and large, people know who committed the crimes. If they do not know the individual, they know the gang.
 
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The problem is that people are still frightened to come forward, because they believe that the police cannot protect them. As I have told Ministers before, more needs to be done to protect witnesses, not only witnesses to major gangland killings but to the intermediate type of gun crime. A middle-aged woman visited my advice session. She was a churchgoer and had gone to court as a witness. Since seeing someone go down for a gun crime, that woman, who is in her 60s, has had to move four times. She rings the police to ask for help, but the trial is over and they no longer have a role.

How can we crack down on gun crime if people who genuinely want to be witnesses feel that the police cannot protect them? We need to focus on witness protection, not just for major crimes but for the intermediate gun crime that is tragically an everyday reality in my constituency.


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