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Crime (London)

I shall be very brief and not go down the route taken by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter). I think that the tetchiness that we have seen from Labour Members indicates that a raw nerve has been struck and that our points have hit home. I do not seek to talk London down or to denigrate good work that is done in London. However, I want to know, as do all of us who have constituents in London, how we can make things better and why, against this background, London's great competitor city of New York has done better at dealing with crime than we have and is now safer than London. I have two key points to make on that. First, I went to New York recently and spoke to a precinct captain in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn—a tough area. He made the point that the political commitment of Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg was a key factor in giving the drive necessary to support police officers and the community as a whole in tackling crime. Secondly, the specific technical advantages of the CompStat system and crime mapping had given the police and the community the material that they needed to work together to tackle crime in one of the hardest parts of New York. I am sorry that that proposal from my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) has been so airily dismissed by Labour Members. London deserves better than that. It is a serious proposal, accepted by serious people tackling crime in another city. I would have hoped that we were broad-minded enough to work together and take that on board. I would have thought that we all wanted to do justice to the tackling of crime in this city in such a constructive spirit. I am sorry that that has not always been achieved in this debate.