Crime and Security Bill

I suggest that at some time the Home Secretary goes and looks at the detailed statistics behind offending. He will know that the peak age for antisocial behaviour is 15; the age of onset for antisocial behaviour is 12. The right hon. Gentleman's Government came up with an option to march yobs to cash points. Most of us who are parents know that 15-year-olds do not have cash cards. The Government might get their policies right if they did the detailed work and did not come up with ideas utterly unrelated to the lifestyles of the young people who commit these acts of antisocial behaviour. When we publish our detailed proposals, the Home Secretary will see that our approach will make a difference, unlike the record of the Government in the past 12 years. Their approach has made very little difference to communities up and down this country. In some cases, it has led to a shocking abuse of the lives of innocent people. The Bill also seeks to create a new offence of possession without authorisation of a mobile phone, or parts of one, in a prison. We support that measure, but why has it taken so long for the Government to realise that they need to address the problem? Yes, phones are banned from prisons, but thousands have been found in the past year, hundreds in high-security prisons. The number of phones found in prisons has more than tripled; in 2008, more than 8,000 mobile phones and SIM cards were confiscated in prisons in England and Wales, compared with just over 2,000 in 2007. In 2007, a convicted al-Qaeda supporter was caught using a mobile phone to build a website from inside a high-security prison. A report by the counter-extremism Quilliam foundation wrote that in 2007 Tariq al-Dour, jailed for running jihadist websites from London, was caught accessing the internet from Belmarsh prison using his laptop, provided by the Prison Service, and a smuggled mobile phone. Furthermore, the extremist cleric Abu Hamza is thought to have got an audio message out of Belmarsh that may have been recorded on a mobile phone and passed to supporters outside. [Interruption.] Government Ministers—[Interruption.]