Home Affairs and Justice

I hope that the Secretary of State will bear in mind what I said about the need for a mature debate. I come back to what Sir David Normington said in his letter to the Home Secretary of November 2008:"““In view of the fact that more serious violence has not reduced in the way that we would have wanted in recent years, and that these offences cause the most harm to individual victims and to society as a whole, our long-term strategy on violence focuses on seriousness. This includes homicides, serious wounding and serious sexual offences such as rape. Recorded crime statistics do indicate that despite recent falls, the levels of the most serious violence are higher than they were ten years ago.””" [Interruption.] The Home Secretary is right to say from a sedentary position that that was not a letter to her—it was a briefing document.