---

Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, I add my congratulations to those already offered to the noble Lord, Lord Alliance, on his most endearing maiden speech. He is rich in life's experiences and clearly in entrepreneurial talent. As a first-generation immigrant whose parents came to this country as penniless refugees on a Dutch lifeboat, I welcome him warmly from these Benches. He will clearly be a great asset to this House, and I look forward to the many contributions that I am sure he will make to our future deliberations. I shall speak this afternoon on home affairs and focus on some of the Bills that we have been promised by the Home Office. That great department of state will be extremely busy during the next 18 months, so it is fortunate that the Ministers in it and their senior civil servants are so full of energy and resolve. One of the early measures will be the return of the identity cards Bill. I am not going to dwell on that measure now, except to say that I warmly welcome the Bill in principle, as did a large majority of the people whom I had the pleasure of canvassing during the recent election campaign. I look forward to debating what, for me, will be the most important aspects of that Bill: what is the most appropriate and advanced technology that can be embedded in the cards; how to ensure that this major national investment is managed in the most cost-effective way; and how to ensure that the citizens of this country get the maximum benefit from the cards at the most reasonable cost. I welcome the Government's continuing commitment to creating safe and secure communities. As we have seen again during the past two months, issues of community safety and anti-social behaviour are very high on the everyday agendas of the people of this country. As the long-standing chair of my local community safety partnership, I was appalled by the indiscriminate and completely uncontextualised use during the recent elections of violent crime statistics in crude advertisements and election leaflets from the Conservative Party. I was not alone in my reaction. That reaction was not based on party political considerations, but on the danger of undermining a lot of hard work which had been undertaken across the country by people of all parties and none to make our streets safer and to ensure that our older residents did not feel they had become prisoners in their homes but could venture out confidently. I was interested to see that senior police officers in particular shared my concerns and made both public and private protests. There were several reasons for our reaction. The first, as I have already mentioned, was the likely effect of crude statistics on the more elderly members of our community, increasing their concerns and making them even more fearful of venturing out on to the streets of apparently dangerous neighbourhoods. Yet your Lordships know that our streets are pretty safe and that older people constitute the group that is least likely to be the victims of violent crime. It is young people who are most at risk, particularly young men, but that is the group that is least worried about the threat to its safety. The second reason for our reaction is that around a quarter of violent crime is committed in the home as domestic violence, which we want to be more widely reported. So increased levels of violent crime are actually concealing good news—that more victims of domestic violence are being helped and their offending partners are being brought to court and sentenced. Thirdly, our town-centre cameras are picking up scuffles and drunken brawls which would not always have been reported in the past. Crime is now being reported on a different basis, where individuals rather than the police are deciding whether a crime has been committed. However, I have been very interested in the conclusions of the extensive research that has been carried out by Professor Jonathan Shepherd of the University of Wales College of Medicine. His violence research group looked at a number of accident and emergency departments of hospitals across the country. That research has revealed that admissions to accident and emergency departments of victims of violent crime, especially on weekend evenings, have gone down. It was a shame that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, deplored the apparent rise of around 80 per cent in violent crime without any qualification or attempt to explain that figure.