Thin blue line

Government Promises Action Over Crime Record

The Home Secretary Jack Straw vowed to cut police paperwork and get more officers out on patrol to tackle Britain's "shocking and startling" record of street crime.

Mr Straw also promised to give the police extra powers to end their "frustration" in the uphill struggle against what he described as "neighbourhood disorder, local terrorisation by criminal neighbours and high levels of juvenile crime."

"What, however, I am determined to do is to see more police officers released for patrol work by attacking the levels of bureaucracy that have built up during the previous administration," said Mr Straw during a visit to Brussels for a meeting with his European counterparts

"There has been a huge increase in bureaucracy inside the police force often generated by constant changes in legislation," he said. "We must also give the police the powers they need to tackle much of the cause of this sphere of crime, particularly juvenile crime where the police face huge frustrations because of their lack of powers and the lack of powers of the courts to deal with it particularly where the kids are under 15."

A new survey showed rates of violent crime higher in England and Wales than any other major industrialised nation.

The findings came in a preliminary report from the 1996 International Crime Victimisation Survey, which measures the proportion of a population who say they've suffered from crime.

The study of crime victims from 12 countries found people in England and Wales were most likely to suffer crime and ran the highest risk of being burgled or having their cars stolen.

Alun Michael: Blames the Tories

Alun Michael: "Appalling record..."

They faced the same risk of "contact crime" as those in the US. The category covers robbery, assault and sexual attacks on women, with the rates here and across the Atlantic running at about three per 100 people per year.

English and Welsh society is described as "one of the most pressured by crime" in the world in the survey, which will be published in full in July.

"What this report shows is that people's experience of crime is much higher in England and Wales than in other countries," Home Office minister Alun Michael told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

The minister attacked the former Home Secretary, Michael Howard, for failing to tackle crime.

Findings of study

"We already knew that violent crime went up by over eleven per cent last year, so how on earth Michael Howard was able to maintain that mixture of complacency and self-congratulation I don't understand," he said.

"That challenge that he issued was actually followed by the biggest fall in crime since records were first kept in 1857, so we certainly were making progress, but I always accepted that more needed to be done," he said.

But on the same programme, Mr Howard defended his record, insisting that while in office he had met Tony Blair's challenge to produce an overall fall in crime.

Mr Howard warned that victim-based crime surveys needed to be read with care. They "can sometimes be used to create a more frightening picture than actually exists", he said.

He pointed to a much more comprehensive survey published a few months ago which showed that Britain had the highest fall in crime of any developed country between 1993 and the last time figures were available - 1995.

Howard: defends his record

Michael Howard: "Making progress..."

In response to the new study, the Liberal Democrats pressed the Government to provide funds for an extra 3,000 police officers.

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Alan Beith, also called for better crime prevention and victim support measures. He called for an immediate shift in emphasis in spending on law and order measures.

"In the face of new figures confirming the extent of crime and the fear of crime, the Government still refuses to put resources into appointing extra police officers on the streets," Mr Beith said.

"Labour is still too locked into its pre-election rhetoric to face up to the reality that the thin blue line needs strengthening," he said.

The former senior Home Office official Professor Michael Hough, who worked on early crime surveys, predicted that crime would continue to rise in Britain unless action was taken.

On BBC Radio 4's The World at One, he said he believed that studies like this latest one were a better basis for comparing crime levels than those based on police figures.

"The difficulty is criminal justice systems vary over areas. There are different police procedures for recording and the recording process can vary over time in different countries," he said.

Professor Hough, now director of the criminal policy research unit at South Bank University, said one factor was the high urbanisation in Britain.

Predicting higher crime levels, he said: "The British crime survey suggests that crime in this country is still upward and I think, if one was to put bets on it, one should expect crime to continue to increase unless one does something constructive about it."

The International Crime Victimisation Survey is based on interviews from England and Wales, the US, Sweden, Finland, Canada, Scotland, Switzerland, France, Holland, Austria and Northern Ireland. It found England, Wales and Holland were jointly the most prone to crime of the countries surveyed.