Crime and Policing

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who did a great deal during her time at the Home Office to pursue this agenda. I think that all social strata can suffer from this problem, but she is right in what she says about poor areas. That is why we must never go back to the days when the typical response to this problem on the Labour Benches was saying that we should not get involved in it. We did; we have; it succeeded. We pioneered restorative justice. We began linking drug treatment to prison sentences. We trebled investment in prison education. As a result, reoffending is down by 20% and youth reoffending by nearly 25%. The Home Secretary said in her July speech that for 13 years people had been told that"““the ASBO was the silver bullet that would cure society's ills””." I want her to give me one example—just one—of a Minister ever making any such claim. We never did. It took a whole range of measures to deal with the spiralling crime that we inherited, and that is what we did. As usual, the only thing wrong with the Home Secretary's pronouncements is the facts.