Crime and Policing

Part of Opposition Day — [4th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 1:40 pm on 8 September 2010.

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Photo of Alan Johnson Alan Johnson Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities 1:40, 8 September 2010

When we were in government, we decided to pick the priority Departments, and the chosen areas were health, education, international development and crime and policing. It is extraordinary that the present Government- [ Interruption. ] Hang on! I am answering the question. It is incredible that the present Government believe that international development, health and, to a certain extent, education must be prioritised, and that they are more important than crime and policing. Quite frankly, I can say as a former Health Secretary that we did not commit to increase the health budget above the rate of inflation. That budget was £110 billion. I went from the Department of Health, which had a £110 billion budget, to the Home Office, which had a budget of about £10 billion. We would have saved £73 billion; we would not have gone for a saving of £113 billion, which Boris Johnson described only yesterday as cutting too savagely and too deeply. It is a central feature of this argument that the Government are going too far with the cuts and that they are failing to treat crime and policing as a priority in the comprehensive spending review, even though it is a priority for constituents everywhere.

During the summer, the Home Secretary made a speech saying that we needed to "move beyond the ASBO". I want to make two things clear. First, the antisocial behaviour order is the most serious of a range of civil powers introduced in 1998 so that the police, local authorities and other agencies could tackle the problem in a co-ordinated way. They needed to tackle the kind of behaviour that falls short of criminality but nevertheless destroys people's lives. These powers are not driven from Whitehall, as the Home Secretary suggested, but through community safety partnerships that involve community groups and social enterprises.

The second thing that we need to be clear about is that, where those powers are used effectively, they work. I shall lapse into what I hope is uncharacteristic immodesty for a moment when I say that they worked particularly well during my year as Home Secretary, when an additional emphasis was placed on the victim and on intensified activity in localities where public perception of antisocial behaviour was above average.

The social affairs correspondent of The Guardian said recently that these measures had had no discernible effect, but they had a discernible effect in the one place where an effect can be discerned-namely, the British crime survey. The Home Office, under the current Home Secretary, stated on 15 July that, whereas previous reductions had been in one or two specific areas,

"the reduction between 08-09 and 09-10"- the glorious year of Johnson-

"reflects falls in the proportion of people perceiving a problem with almost all types of anti-social behaviour that make up the overall measure".

That refers to reductions in abandoned cars, noisy neighbours, drunkenness, drug use, youth nuisance, litter, vandalism and graffiti. Those are all issues for which there were insufficient powers prior to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The statistical release went on to say that antisocial behaviour was now at its lowest level since records began, with, for the first time, a majority of the population agreeing that the police and councils were dealing with antisocial behaviour in their local area.