---

Home Affairs and Communities

I will give the hon. Gentleman the arguments on identity cards later in my speech when I deal with the issues in the letter that the Home Secretary wrote to me. On crime, I welcome the fact that the Government have said that they will take action on issues raised during the general election campaign: violence, social disorder, drug abuse and drunkenness. The Government have committed themselves again to creating safe and secure communities as well as fostering a culture of respect. But surely it is reasonable to ask what has happened to those communities and to that culture of respect in the past eight years. Which Government have presided over the corrosion of discipline in our schools, the growth of drunken disorder on our streets and the disarray of our police forces faced with the burden of bureaucracy, targets and red tape? Let us look at the Government’s performance on their own measure. In October 2002, the then Home Secretary, the then Lord Chancellor and the Attorney-General published a document called, ““Narrowing the Justice Gap””. The justice gap is recorded crime less solved crime: it is a measure of unsolved crime, a measure of uncaught and unpunished criminals. That document said:"““The justice gap . . . is the key measure of the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and a crucial indicator of success in reducing crime.””" I agree. To listen to the Home Secretary, one would think that the Government cut the justice gap. Not a bit of it. It has grown by almost 1 million since the Government came to power. There are now 900,000 more crimes not being solved each year than there were in 1998. That means that, each year, the perpetrators of 5.5 million crimes are not brought to justice—that 5.5 million victims see the perpetrators of the crimes against them walking free. What is the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety’s answer to that? Her answer is to dress criminals up in orange suits, an idea so irrelevant that even Downing street dropped it within 24 hours. None the less, the Minister did manage to get the Home Secretary into trouble. The headline on the front page of yesterday’s edition of The Sunday Telegraph was, ““Six falsehoods in 100 seconds: how the Home Secretary misled public over ‘yob crackdown’.”” Despite the Home Secretary’s opening remarks, I have a higher opinion of him than that. I do not believe that he deliberately misled the public but rather that this situation demonstrates all too clearly the careless way in which the Government have designed their gimmicky and ineffective crime strategy. Of course, the Government love playing with statistics. They love to claim that crime is coming down, which nobody believes, least of all those in the communities that suffer the most.