Home Affairs and Justice

I note what the Secretary of State says, but I stand by my comments, particularly in respect of violent crime. I must now make progress. When it comes to defending our security, the Government have consistently opted for rhetoric over action and headlines over effectiveness. We have had, and we continue to face, proposals to extend detention without charge to 42 days, despite their being roundly rubbished as unjustified, unnecessary and unworkable by security experts and Members across the House and the other place. It still persists, however, as a sort of fig leaf for the Government's previous climbdown, which was forced on them because they entirely lost the arguments over the issue. The Home Secretary is introducing ID cards—at a cost that we believe, on an independent assessment, could rise as high as £19 billion at the worst of economic times—that will be incapable of stopping terrorists, illegal immigration or benefit fraud. We are developing a database state and hoarding an increasing volume of data on our citizens, but the Prime Minister readily admits that he cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe, which, on the current record of the last year, is a gross understatement. There are real fears that Britain is turning into a surveillance society, with local councils stretching powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to monitor dustbins and dog fouling and to trail children home from school to check their catchment areas. The thirst for headlines and the inflation of ineffective bureaucracy and legislative hyperactivity distract the Government and successive Home Secretaries from the real job at hand: getting more police on the street with the single imperative of cutting crime, and a dedicated border police force to reverse our current vulnerability, which has seen the street value of cocaine and heroin slashed by almost half, while estimates show that the numbers of young women and girls trafficked into prostitution have quadrupled. I should say at this point that I entirely welcome the fact that the Government have signed the Council of Europe protocol on human trafficking. I am also delighted that they moved on this matter after we indicated to them very firmly that they should and that they would have our full support when they did so. I am slightly distressed by the fact that it has still taken quite a long time between that assurance being given to the Government and the piece of paper actually being signed. We also believe that we need practical measures such as lifting the ban on using intercept evidence in court to prosecute terrorists to protect lives while protecting our way of life and preserving our liberty and our shared democracy. I am afraid that the consequences of the failures of the Government are plain at present. The Government are in fact very short of ideas, as is quite clear from a reading of the relevant sections of the Queen's Speech. They are scrambling to find answers to problems that are of their making and papering over cracks from 11 years of failure. The proposals presented by the Home Secretary in the policing and crime Bill are particularly disappointing given the serious problems that Britain now faces. I know that Home Office officials do not always feel it necessary to keep the Home Secretary updated on what is going on, as we have discovered today, but does she accept the advice of Sir David Normington? I put this to her rather than to the Secretary of State for Justice. She claims that violence has dropped by 40 per cent. since 1997, which is contrary to Sir David's statement that recorded crime statistics indicate that levels of the most serious violence are higher than they were 10 years ago. I hope that we can get a response later from the Secretary of State for Justice on that. Is Sir David wrong? He and the Home Secretary cannot both be right. The Flanagan report on police bureaucracy set out a whole series of ministerial failures: perverse incentives given to the police in the way in which they handle crime reporting; a raft of targets; and officers straitjacketed by process—the entire product of Labour's effort over the last 11 years to use the criminal justice legislation to achieve those targets. The consequences for the police have been dire, as the Home Secretary is now being obliged gradually to admit. The Home Secretary has not listened, which is why the police, despite all her promises, spend more time filling in forms than out on patrol. She has become obsessed by making political noise and neglecting to take sound advice. As a result, a glaring omission from the policing and crime Bill is serious and concerted action to deliver on all those bold pledges to release officers from the burden of forms, targets and red tape. It is left to the Conservatives to provide a serious alternative for police reform: cutting the stop and account and stop and search forms; removing the bureaucratic hoops to allow police officers to charge in less serious cases; saving 1 million police hours per year; slashing the targets, which as Sir David Normington noted, have distracted officers from dealing with the most serious crime; and consolidating the excess audit that led one police force to face 15 separate inspections in a year. The only substantive proposal for police reform in this rag-bag of measures is the proposal for elected crime and policing representatives to sit on existing police authorities. That looks to me a half-baked idea—a pale imitation of our proposal for elected police commissioners who would be responsible for local policing, directly accountable to the communities they serve and taking over the functions of police authorities. As I speak to senior police officers, it becomes apparent that there are serious concerns that the elected representatives are far more likely to lead to politicisation—[Interruption.]