itself is called into question. The danger that people will begin to take justice into their own hands can become a real one. And from there it is a short step to a real breakdown of law and order.
When I became Home Secretary in 1993 public confidence in our system was at a low ebb. Not long before in Norfolk, a young man who had been suspected of committing an offence but had not been brought to justice by the police, was attacked and injured. The perpetrators were, of course quite rightly, themselves brought to justice and sent to prison. But that outbreak of vigilantism was a warning sign.
There were others.
I spent my first few weeks in the job listening. I listened, especially, to police officers. I visited police stations, sat down in their canteens and over many cups of tea and coffee, asked the officers how they saw things.
The answers I got were not encouraging.
Very often they would say:
“Why should I bother? If I succeed in tracking down the person who committed an offence the chances are the Crown Prosecution Service decide not to prosecute.
If they do prosecute, the chances are he’ll be acquitted.
And if he is convicted, the likelihood of his getting a sentence that amounts to effective punishment is very remote.
So I ask myself, why do I bother?”
That seemed to me a very serious state of affairs. I was determined to do something about it.
That was not a course of action which was enthusiastically supported by my officials.
When I first took office they showed me a chart. On it was a line which showed the apparently inexorable rise in crime over the previous 50 years.
They said to me:-
“This is what has happened to crime over the last 50 years.
It is going to carry on rising. And the first thing you must understand, Home Secretary, is that there is nothing you can do about it.”
“Your job,” they said, “is to manage public expectations in the face of this inevitable rise in crime.”
I didn’t take that advice and that Autumn I announced a comprehensive system of measures – 27* in all – to make a start on tackling the problem, across the board. They were designed to help deter criminals from committing crime, to help detect them if they did, to help convict them when they were brought to court and to help punish them properly when they were convicted.
[Those measures ranged from widening the collection of DNA evidence to cover all recordable offences, new guidelines to end repeat cautioning and cautioning for indictable offences, a new power of arrest for the police for breach of Police Bail, 6 new prisons to alleviate overcrowding and house more offenders, testing for drugs in prisons, Secure Training Centres for persistent offenders aged 12-14, toughening up sentences in the community and modification of the Right to Silence.]
The Shadow Home Secretary at the time, someone called Tony Blair, described them as “gimmicks”.
But they were implemented. And they contributed to the unprecedented eighteen percent fall in crime which took place during my period in office.
At the end of my four years as Home Secretary – a rather longer tenure than most incumbents since have managed – about a million fewer offences a year were being committed than at the beginning.
Those figures are based on the recorded crime figures.
But the British Crime Survey too showed a fall in that period – the first ever fall, as a matter of fact, that it had ever recorded.
And that brings me to the whole question of statistics in the criminal justice debate. Their use is frequently criticised and they are certainly imperfect. But we must have some criterion on which we can judge the performance in this vital area of Governments and indeed Home Secretaries.
Indeed on this point, if on few others, there is something of a political consensus.
During the first debate I had with Tony Blair, my Shadow, when I became Home Secretary, he asked me whether I would accept as the criterion of my success, or otherwise, what happened to the crime figures.
Based on the history of rising crime he probably thought it was a safe criterion from his point of view, to advance. But it was a perfectly reasonable question.
And I’m ashamed to say that, no doubt because I too was aware of what had happened to crime over the previous 50 years, I didn’t pick up the gauntlet.
But if the crime figures are to be in the criterion, or at least part of the criterion, we have to use them with integrity and at least a degree of consistency.
Let me first acknowledge their imperfections. It is a truism to say that not all crimes are recorded. That is obviously a flaw in the recorded crime figures in as much as they are used to reflect what is actually happening in our society.
But the British Crime Survey too is not without its flaws.
It is based on the experience and recollections of victims. It is based on asking people whether they have been a victim of crime over the previous 12 months. It is a large sample survey.
And it deliberately excludes a wide range of crimes:
• Murder and manslaughter (which the Home Office refer to as “Crimes where the victim is no longer available for interview”!);
• Drug and alcohol misuse;
• Fraud;
• Sexual offences;
• All crimes against commercial and public sector establishments – including shoplifting;
• Crimes against those in institutions and the homeless;
• And all crimes against those under 16 years old.
As you will know, these account for a huge proportion of crime. In particular, it is known that under 16’s are much more likely to be a victim of crime than someone who is 16 or over. Taking these categories together, the British Crime Survey excludes millions of offences.
And it is not a huge leap of the imagination to realise that some of those categories, drug and alcohol offences, and crimes against under 16’s for example, will have seen a greater increase in recent years than crime as a whole.
So the best approach is to look at both the recorded crime figures and the British Crime Survey, and be very cautious in the claims that are made if the two do not appear to be moving in the same direction.
As we have seen in the mid-nineties, they did move in the same direction: downward.
Since 1997 the picture is much more murky.
It is true that there has been a continuing fall in the British Crime Survey – though the very latest figures show a small but statistically insignificant increase.
The same is not true of the recorded crime figures.
The basis on which these figures are compiled was changed in 1998 and again in 2002.
So we cannot make a direct comparison with 1997.
But we can compare the figures for 1998/9 and 2001/2, then 2002/3 and 2006/7.
Crime increased from 1998/9 to 2001/2 from 5.1 million offences to 5.5 million offences.
From 200/3 (when the National Crime Recording Standard was implemented) to the latest figures for 2006/7, crime fell from over 6 million offences to over 5.4 million offences.
So when we are told, as we frequently are, that crime has fallen since 1997, this is true only in regard to the British Crime Survey which excludes millions of offences and many categories of crime that are likely to have increased.
Unfortunately, the crime figures are not the only area where the transparency which is a necessary pre-condition of confidence in the system has been sadly lacking.
One part of my approach to dealing with crime – only one part but an important one – consisted of a greater emphasis on imprisonment. I said – and make no apology for having said – “prison works”.
What did I mean by that, much-quoted, phrase?
Well, one of the things which had become clear by the time I took over at the Home Office was that a disproportionately large number of crimes are committed by relatively few persistent, professional, offenders. If they could be apprehended, convicted and imprisoned, the public would be protected from their criminal behaviour.
But if you adopt policies which are likely to lead to an increase in the prison population, you have to accept the necessary corollary: you have to build more prisons.
That’s what we did. In 1993, I announced the building of 6 new prisons, which helped to house increases in the prison population, and in 1996 I commissioned a further 8,600 new prison places to be built by the year 2000. Ken Clarke announced funding for these places in his 1996 Budget.
As a result of those 8,600 prison places that I commissioned, overcrowding fell to the year 2000, despite the face that the prison population continued to rise.
It has gone on increasing every year since then. But the prison estate has not kept place with that increase.
The Government repeatedly claims that they have “built” 20,000 extra prison places. Answers I have obtained in Parliament show that this is very far from the truth. The figure of 20,000 includes the 8,600 places I commissioned in 1996 and an increase of 6,258 in prisoners held in overcrowded conditions.
This is regarded by the present Government as the provision of extra places! This increase in overcrowding has had dire results.
Not only has it led to early release by executive action – and there are few things more likely to undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system than that.
But it also has devastating consequences for the effort which needs to be made to educate, rehabilitate and reform those who find themselves in prison. You don’t need to be starry-eyed about the prospects of success to recognise that this is a real responsibility which must be given high priority.
Yet when the prison estate is as overcrowded as it is today, with prisoners being moved from one establishment to another with minimum notice, these programmes are the first to suffer.
Sad to say I think the state of confidence in our criminal justice system today is not very different from what it was in 1993.
Look at some recently quoted comments from the police.
In April this year DC Johnno Hills, who had resigned from the Greater Manchester Police earlier in the year, exposed how, and I quote,
“Target-driven policing and excessive government bureaucracy have left our streets devoid of a regularly visible police presence.”
Paul Kelly, the Chairman of Greater Manchester Police Federation, described the way in which the Government’s policy had distorted policing as “utter madness”.
And no less a person than the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, recently warned that police need to return to using their discretion and personal judgement.
What we need now is a return to the comprehensive approach I adopted when I went to the Home Office in 1993. A programme to deter criminals from committing crime, to detect them if they do, to convict them when they’re brought to court and to punish them appropriately when they are convicted.
That is the only way in which confidence in our criminal justice system can be restored. It is not an easy task. But the record shows it can be done.
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