The Conservative Manifesto 1997

Law, Order and Security

Our reforms are aimed at ensuring that crime does not pay. And they are working - the pessimists and the scoffers are wrong. Recorded crime has fallen every year for the last 4 years. It is now 10% lower than it was in 1992. That is over half a million fewer crimes - the biggest drop since records were first kept in the middle of the 19th century.

But crime is still too high. We must do more. Our aim is to keep crime falling over the lifetime of the next parliament. This is what we will do.

Safer Communities

We will support chief constables who develop local schemes to crack down on petty crime and improve public order.

Closed circuit television has proved enormously successful in increasing public safety.

We will fulfill the Prime Minister's pledge to support the installation of 10,000 CCTV cameras in town centres and public places in the 3 years to 1999. We will provide �75 million over the lifetime of the next Parliament to continue extending CCTV to town centres, villages and housing estates up and down the country that want to bid for support.

We will also continue to take other steps to improve the safety of our streets and communities. In this parliament we have given the police power to seize alcohol from under 18s caught drinking in public. The police have been given the power to stop and search in a specified area for up to 48 hours if they reasonably believe people to be carrying knives.

Identity Cards can also make a contribution to safer communities.

We will introduce a voluntary identity card scheme based on the new photographic driving licence. It will, for example, enable retailers to identify youngsters trying to buy alcohol and cigarettes or rent classified videos when they are under age.

Tackling Juvenile Crime

We will encourage these local child crime teams to refer children from primary school age upwards who are at risk of, or actually, offending to programmes to tackle their behaviour and fully involve their parents.

The courts would be able to impose an order - a Parental Control Order - on the parents of children whom they believed could keep control of their children but were refusing to do so.

Courts will be given the power to attach conditions to Parental Control Orders. Conditions might include a requirement to keep their children in at night, taking their children to and from school, attending a drug rehabilitation clinic or going to sessions to improve their skills as parents. Parents who breached these conditions - in defiance of the court - would face a range of possible sanctions.

Appearing before a youth court should be a daunting experience for the juvenile concerned. All too often it is not. At the moment about a third of all juveniles appearing before the youth courts are discharged without any punishment at all. This sends all the wrong signals to youngsters - particularly first time offenders - who then feel they can get away with crime.

We will give the courts the power to impose speedy sanctions on youngsters, involving wherever possible an element of reparation to the victim. The probation service - rather than social services - will be responsible for enforcing community punishments for under-16s.

Persistent juvenile offenders need to be properly punished. We are piloting a tough new regime, with a heavy emphasis on discipline, at a young offender institution and at the military prison in Colchester. In 1994 we doubled the maximum sentence for 15-17 year olds to 2 years detention in a young offenders institution. We have given the courts the freedom to allow the publication of the names of convicted juveniles. We will give the courts the power to detain persistent 12-14 year old offenders in secure training centres once the places become available.

We have given the courts the power to impose electronically monitored curfews on 10 to 15 year old offenders. We will introduce pilots to test their effectiveness. If successful we will consider extending them nationwide.

Catching, convicting and punishing

We back the police every inch of the way. There are now about 16,000 more police officers - and over 18,000 more civilians helping them - than when we took office. We are providing chief constables with the resources to recruit 5,000 extra police constables in the three years to 1999.

We support police initiatives to target the hard core of persistent criminals. Intelligence is crucial for this. We will establish a national crime squad to provide an improved nationally coordinated approach to organised crime.

Once caught, criminals must be convicted and then properly punished. The public need to be protected. We have reformed the right to silence, despite opposition from Labour. The number of suspects refusing to answer police questions has nearly halved as a result.

We have piloted curfew orders for adult offenders. They have been shown to keep criminals indoors - curbing their freedom as a punishment - and keeping them out of trouble in the meantime.

We will extend electronically monitored curfew orders nationwide for those aged 16 and over.

Persistent offenders account for a high proportion of all crime. Prison works - not only as a deterrent, but in keeping criminals off the street. Those sent to prison are less likely to re-offend on release than those given a community punishment. We will provide another 8,500 prison places by the year 2000.

We will introduce minimum sentences for violent and persistent criminals to help protect the public more effectively, reversing Labour's wrecking amendments to our tough Crime Bill.

Anyone convicted of a second serious sexual or violent crime, like rape or armed robbery, will get an automatic life sentence.

Persistent house burglars and dealers in hard drugs will receive mandatory minimum prison sentences of 3 and 7 years respectively.

We will restore honesty in sentencing by ensuring that criminals serve the sentence intended without automatic early release.

Support for Victims

We will give courts in all cases the discretion to allow witnesses to give evidence anonymously if they believe them to be at risk from reprisal.

We will also take action to allow a judge to stop a defendant from personally questioning the victim in rape cases and other cases where the victim is particularly vulnerable.

Conservatives are on the side of the victims not the criminal.

Strengthening the fight against City Crime

The City's unchallenged position as Europe's most dynamic and successful financial centre owes a great deal to its reputation for honesty and fair dealing. We will help ensure that this reputation is maintained.

We will bring forward in the next Parliament a package of measures designed to modernise the current systems for dealing with City fraud.

This will include legislation to allow the Inland Revenue to pass confidential information to the police, the Serious Fraud Office and the financial regulators to assist in the investigation of cases involving serious financial fraud. We will also remove the remaining legal obstacles to the controlled exchange of confidential information between the police and the regulators in this kind of case.

Faster Justice

Last October the government set up a review of delays in the criminal justice system. It made a series of detailed recommendations. We see merit in those recommendations and will seek the views of interested parties. We believe that taken together they could dramatically speed up the prosecution process, bringing the guilty to justice and acquitting the innocent more quickly.

All defendants would appear in court the next working day after they were charged. At least half of them would be convicted the next day compared with just 3 per cent at the moment. And the time taken to bring juveniles to court would be cut from 10 weeks to a matter of days.

Civil Justice

We have greatly improved the service the civil courts provide for the aggrieved citizen. The simple procedure for small claims has been extended to claims up to �3,000. For large claims the county court now provides an efficient local service with specialised courts in many locations around the country, leaving the High Court to deal with the more complex and difficult issues.

We will push ahead with the major reforms now under way which will greatly speed up the process and improve the delivery of justice without imposing additional burdens on the taxpayer.

The Legal Profession

Legal Aid

But more is required:

We will change the structure of legal aid to ensure that it, like other vital public services, functions within defined cash limits.

This will enable us to identify priorities and serve them much more efficiently than the present system.

Drugs

The Conservative Government has a comprehensive strategy, launched in 1995, committed to fighting drugs in communities and in schools. It is tough on criminals and vigilant at our ports. It is respected throughout the world. We spend over �500m every year in tackling all aspects of drug problems.

We will continue the fight against drugs through a coordinated approach: being tough on pushers; reducing demand by educating young people; tackling drug abuse at local level through Drug Action Teams; saying "No" to legalising drugs; and working with international agencies and foreign governments to resist the menace spreading.

This pernicious evil has to be fought by all of us.