Home Affairs and Justice

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I hope that the Secretary of State for Justice—or someone else who was listening—can deal with that issue in the wind-ups. Before I finish making the point about coroners playing a crucial part in holding to account the abuse of state power, let me say that we welcome and will support many other aspects of the proposals. We do not, however, feel that the police reform proposals go far enough. We have argued—on police pay review, for example—for a complete review of the police contract. For example, an issue that we do not hear about from either Conservative or Labour Members, yet is pertinent in current circumstances is the very restrictive nature of the single point of entry for chief constables. Broadly, people should come into the police force from the bottom, and there is an honourable tradition, as in the French army at one stage, of every corporal carrying a field marshal's baton in their knapsack. However, with complex issues such as the prosecution of fraud, for example, where a degree in accountancy and some experience as a forensic accountant might be of considerable use to someone leading an investigation, there must be enough exceptions to bring in people if they have particular expertise. We would like to open up the issues regarding the police contract such as lifetime employment, pay linked to seniority, pensions and the effectiveness of the incapability procedure. We must also touch on the subject of prostitution. I am sure that every hon. Member wants to protect women from exploitation, but the sort of proposals that the Government have made for a Finnish system of criminalising clients indirectly has a very poor record of successful prosecutions, and I do not believe that that is the way forward. Overall, there will be elements that we welcome and others that we criticise. I hope increasingly that we can find some consensus about what works in criminal justice, rather than finding ourselves locked in populist battles about retribution and vengeance—which the Secretary of State for Justice is quite keen on, as a political theme. Surely, the key issue for any hon. Member who is concerned about cutting crime should be what works. In that context, we are a very long way from taking on board the evidence from the United States—nor do we spend as much as we should on research to find out what works here. If we did, the Government would be much less disposed to be a threat to our civil liberties than they have proved to be since they were first elected in 1997, and the essential conflicts that inevitably exist between the use of state power in going after criminal activity and the defence of our civil liberties would be less acute if we could anchor the criminal justice debate rather more firmly in real evidence of which interventions work, and at what stage.