Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I ask the Minister to sit down and talk with his own noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond, who does understand this. I agree that patterns of crime are widely varied and that is why you should work on the basis of statistics. If your main aim is to please an electorate you deal with the loudest voices. That is the reality of elections. It is not just in inner-city areas. You get a pattern where people are worried and set up Neighbourhood Watch—a good thing which nobody is against—and do all these other things, such as coming to meetings with the police to ask them about a particular burglary, or whatever. In the poorer crime hotspots, where burglaries are more common, there is little addressed on that unless you have a very good local authority which then does a range of things, such as putting in caretakers, and all the other things that go with that. What we are doing here is saying that there is a crime plan and that we will fund some of the things, as indicated in Clause 9, but giving no indication of what will happen when other organisations, most notably the Home Office—or a local authority, for that matter—withdraws the funding and says that it is over to the crime plan to replace that. As my noble friend on the Front Bench said, I would almost predict that crime goes up again and continues to go up if we do not give a clear direction to those organisations to take on crime prevention in a very clear way, based on statistics of crime. An MP in an area can then look at the different aspects, not just in relation to the election of the police commissioner but focusing on those statistics and reducing them in each area. If you do not do that, it will be the electorate who are most interested in the issue, in middle-class areas where crime is lower. In working-class areas with high rates of crime they may rattle the bars of councillors but they will not necessarily get the same crime prevention plan. That is what has happened in the past—we do not need to look in a crystal ball—and that is what we must avoid. I ask the Minister to look at this again. If he wants crime prevention to be done by another body, or to keep it as it is, we need to be clear about that. The alternative is to give it to these bodies but recognise the financial implications.