Category: Criminal Justice

The speech made by Oliver Letwin, the then Shadow Home Secretary, at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton on 25 June 2003.

Some time ago, I made a speech about how we aspire to prevent crime in our inner cities. Instead of asking what were the causes of crime, I asked what are the causes of the neighbourly society?

I argued that a strong neighbourly society is about the establishment and preservation of the right relationships between individuals and that only strong relationships can foster strong communities.

Whilst many would agree with these aspirations, it is much harder to make them a concrete reality.

My task as Shadow Home Secretary is to try to formulate a set of foundations on which the neighbourly society can build:

First and foremost a neighbourly society must be one which fosters and encourages the networks of support between individuals, families, neighbourhoods and community associations. It depends on active citizens. and gains enormous benefits from voluntary activity.

Second, a neighbourly society is one which welcomes the society we have today, not one that hankers after the society which existed fifty years ago. It means establishing a framework in which neighbours of differing creeds and colours, backgrounds and aspirations, lifestyles and mores, can agree to differ and live together in harmony. They share the common enterprise of sustaining a neighbourhood, and the common enterprise of ensuring that their children are brought up to be law abiding and active citizens. From the many one.

Third, a neighbourly society requires providing young people with exit routes from the conveyer belt to crime. Parents of very young children facing difficulties need help. Persistent offenders need long term rehabilitation and young addicts need serious and effective drug treatment.

Fourth, a neighbourly society depends on the police. We need to give them the ability to recapture our streets through the real and sustained neighbourhood policing that we have had in Brixton – actively pursued by Borough Commander Richard Quinn and Inspector Sean Wilson. We will support this commitment by allowing for a real and substantive increase in police numbers. We are pledged to increase police numbers by 40,000 – roughly a third – over eight years which would mean an extra 8,482 extra officers for London alone.

The strange thing is that – in an age in which obligatory disagreement between politicians of differing Parties has become almost a religion (though not a religion of which I am an adherent) – these propositions have not attracted much opposition.

I should love to believe that the lack of disagreement is wholly due to positive and enthusiastic agreement – a positive consensus.

And I do believe there is a degree of consensus.

There is agreement on the scale of the problem in our inner cities. There is agreement on the nature of the problem in our inner cities. There is even agreement on many of the particular things that we need to do to tackle the problems.

But I fear there is another, much less comforting reason for the lack of opposition. I believe that my political opponents – and many of the commentators – think that the establishment of a neighbourly society in our inner cities is no more than a pleasing, nostalgic pipe-dream.

They think that the problems of the inner cities are so vast as to be insoluble. They are happy for the Government to take initiatives – but, as Barbara Roche’s interesting commentary has recently emphasised, they do not really believe that these initiatives will do much more than to show willing by bringing about temporary improvements. They regard the idea of what I have called sustainable social progress in the inner cities as desirable but naïve.

I do not agree with them.

In another context, I recently described myself as a naïve optimist who believed in miracles.

I am, and I do.

I believe in the miracle of the establishment of a neighbourly society – the bringing about of sustainable social programmes in our inner cities.

Yes. This is a dream. But only in the sense in which Martin Luther King used that term in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was the greatest speech of the twentieth century, and the dream he dreamed that day has surely been coming true ever since.

We too must have the capacity to dream – and the will to make our dreams come true.

I say this as much to my own party as to any other. As Iain Duncan Smith has made abundantly plain, the Conservative Party cannot be seen merely as the Party of the leafy suburbs and of the rural shires.

The Conservative Party is committed and has to be committed to a fair deal for everyone. No one held back and no one left behind.

To fulfil that commitment, the Conservative Party has to be the Party of the Inner Cities.

We have to believe in our dream of sustainable social progress in the inner cities. We have to believe in our dream of establishing a neighbourly society in the inner cities. We have to believe that we can lift young people off the conveyer belt to crime.

Of course, we have to recognise that there are grounds for – at least reasons for – the pessimism and cynicism that is so prevalent.

In just over fifty years, as we have vastly increased our national income, we have moved from a “deferential society” through a “liberated society” to a “celebrity society” in which David and Victoria Beckham’s comings and goings attract more attention than an earthquake in Algeria. We now live in a society in which millions of our citizens prefer to vote characters off reality TV programmes – using their mobile phones at 25 pence a shot – rather than turn up at polling booths for elections.

The paradox is that this prosperity and celebrity are not enough. Behind the glitz and glamour of much of modern life there is an underbelly of material and spiritual poverty. One estimate from Dick Atkinson – an expert in urban renewal – suggests that 20% of the population live in 3,000 troubled inner and outer city neighbourhoods. A further 10% teeter on the brink.

To have almost one in three of our fellow citizens facing such circumstances is shocking enough. Add to this the knowledge that a crime is committed every five seconds, that criminals only have a 3% chance of being convicted and that 75% of young offenders re-offend following their sentences, and the “celebrity society” begins to look very threadbare indeed.

No wonder great pessimism abounds about the breakdown and, what some have termed, the ‘atomisation’ of our communities. No wonder there are some who believe that nothing can be done.

And, beyond the spiritual poverty of the celebrity society, there lies another reason for pessimism: the all too frequent failure of well meaning Government initiatives and Whitehall sponsored schemes that offer a lot of hope – and money – but do not achieve what they set out to do.

Take ‘zones’. Education zones. Health zones. New Deal zones. It sometimes feels as if we now live in a kaleidoscope of zones. And, as the kaleidoscope is shaken, as one zone turns into another, as Whitehall celebrates another initiative in another place, the troubled, hard-pressed neighbourhoods are left with the same fundamental problems that they had before the men from the ministry moved in.

As Dick Atkinson says :

“While we may end up with say 50 Education Action Zones, even 100 Health Zones and 40 New Deal communities, these will hardly touch the 3,000 troubled neighbourhoods and the 15,000,000 people who live in them…..
…..the honest intentions of government risk being diverted again into icing the crumbling cake instead of helping bake a new one”.

Or take another example of huge regeneration schemes. Earlier this year it was revealed by the Birmingham Evening Mail that an organisation set up in April 2001 – with £54 million cash – under a new deal project for Aston in Birmingham, managed to spend just £5 million of which £538,000 was spent on bureaucrats and hundreds of thousands more on consultants doing feasibility studies. 14,000 residents in Aston who had been told that their neighbourhoods would be transformed did not experience any changes at all.

As the newspaper stated:

“lots of bluster about holistic visions and overarching statements cloud the fact that in three years virtually nothing has been done”.

No wonder the All-Party Commons Select Committee on Local Government warned in a Report earlier this year that “the targets and outcomes of area based regeneration programmes need to be aligned to the needs of the area concerned”.

Or as Rachel Heywood puts it:

“We want sustainable solutions; we’re weary of the quick fixes, parachuted in expertise, the plethoras of short term projects, bored of being an experiment. We know that we have expertise on the ground, we know that we could lead the way in best practice.. the community is aware of the scale and the complexity of what is going on and what needs to be done.”

Rachel is right and the pessimists are clearly wrong. Community, not bureaucracy is the answer.

But the fact that there are reasons for the pessimism and the cynicism does not mean that the pessimism or the cynicisms are justified.

On the contrary, I know that the pessimism and the cynicism are unjustified.

I know that they are unjustified because in some places the dream is becoming true.

I know that miracles can occur, because in some places they are occurring.

These miracles have not been bought about by politicians or by bureaucrats. They have not been brought about by plans, or initiatives, or targets. They have not been brought about by money or celebrity or glitz or spin.

They have been brought about by faith and hope.

They have been brought about by communal effort, by people determined to make, for themselves and their neighbours, sustainable social progress in the inner cities – the very commodity that the cynics and the pessimists believe cannot be manufactured.

Three Miracles

Brixton

I have been taken to the Pulross Playground by Rachel Heywood and Inspector Sean Wilson, Head of the Brixton Town Centre Team. Rachel tells me that her activities began in 1996 with a campaign to save their dangerous playground from property developers. Not only did Rachel and other local residents ward off the developers, but they warded off the drug dealers as well. How was this done? Through sheer determination, courage and community action. The mess was cleared, gardens were planted and events organised. They have transformed a dangerous playground full of drug needles and other detritus into an oasis of tranquillity for the children who live nearby. They have restored a community spirit and pride in a neighbourhood that was previously known for its local crack houses.

What is even more remarkable is that Rachel and others have moved on from rescuing a playground to helping to renew a whole community. Their work in building close relationships with the police, the anti drugs campaigns, the positive messages sent out to young people cannot be understated. This, coupled with the efforts of the Brixton Police to engage with the local community and build close relationships, is all having a dramatic effect.

The result is undisputed both anecdotally and factually. For example, the leader of a Rastafarian temple invited police to clear out drug users from the temple – something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Over the past year, crime figures for Lambeth have radically improved. Since August 2002, robbery is down 36% and burglary down 50%. Over 140 abandoned cars have been removed, over 900 graffiti sites cleansed and 30,000 needles collected.

Haringey

Joel Edwards who has done such remarkable things with the Evangelical Alliance once said:

“Christians are all called to be ambassadors – agents of reconciliation pointing people to forgiveness in Christ and reminding us of our obligations towards one another. In the book of Revelation, we read of the time when, the kingdom of this world will become “the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” In the mean time, preacher, priest or politician – all of us – must seize every opportunity to work for that society. A society which anticipates the time when hostility and hatred ends. And it will start in our families, down our street and across our communities as we dare to think of ourselves as God’s ambassadors of reconciliation.”

I was reminded of Joel’s powerful words, when I visited the Haringey Peace Alliance a few months ago – a remarkable organisation set up by Pastor Nims in 2001. The Haringey Peace Alliance has many qualities, but its key role is in building relationships between all sections of the community. The Alliance draws together local clergy (of all faiths), local authorities and the police and takes a lead role in organising campaigns against drugs, gangs and violent crime.

When violent crime was at an all time high, the Alliance staged a Week of Peace which involved seven days of continuous activities including a youth festival. When young people needed support and advice, the Alliance set up a Pastor’s initiative, training a team of twelve committed individuals to go out to mentor troubled youngsters.

When there was distrust between the police and local inhabitants, the Alliance worked with the police to arrange for local people to accompany them on night duties. When the police received funds from the Crime and Disorder Partnership, instead of just spending it on their own immediate and short term needs, they shared it round with the Alliance and other community groups. When a police officer died in a car crash, the Alliance gave a public show of solidarity by organising members of the public to turn up to the funeral.

The Alliance applies for Government and agency funding wherever possible. But because the community from the grassroots are applying directly for funds, the money they receive, whilst not huge, is spent much more wisely. This is the Brixton story all over again.

Asked what is the secret ingredient to the Alliance, Pastor Nims has a simple answer. The Alliance works because people with a passion are working together for the good of their neighbourhood and are establishing relationships which are strong because they are personal rather than bureaucratic.

What has been the effect of the Alliance on crime? The first Peace Week led to a big decrease in violent crime, a fortnight after the event had ended. Firearm crimes involving murder and attempted murder have dropped by 47% over an eight month period. These figures speak for themselves.

Birmingham

Earlier in my speech, I gave an example of a bureaucratic top down regeneration scheme in Aston in Birmingham, which has clearly failed. Yet by contrast, just around the corner there are social entrepreneurs who are working from within their neighbourhoods to improve people’s lives.

Recently, I visited Handsworth in Birmingham where I met two groups, Parents United and the Partnership Against Crime. These groups were set up in response to the violent gang culture in the area, exemplified by the tragic murder of teenagers Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in Aston on New Year’s Day. They are determined to work with residents and existing groups such as local churches to draw their young people away from the gun and gang culture and off the conveyer belt to crime. They are doing everything possible to ensure that the tragedy that befell the families of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis does not happen to another family. Because they have been established by local people within their neighbourhoods, they are able to build relationships where none existed before. They are able to offer young people exits from the conveyer belt to crime, because they know and understand the young people concerned.

Although it is early days, there is every possibility that Parents United and Partnership against Crime will achieve the same success as the Brixton Crime Forum and the Haringey Peace Alliance.

Conclusion

What is my message to the miracle-workers? What is the message of my Party?

It is that visiting these examples of extraordinary human achievement is not enough, and that politicians like me need to help the spiritual flowers we have found take root in other, currently barren soils.

It is that the purpose of the state must be to recognize, to celebrate and to assist – but not to seek to replace or supplant their efforts.

It is that, in their efforts, their successes, their miracles, lies the route to the establishment of the neighbourly society, the route to sustainable social progress in our inner cities.

The pessimists will never be able to kill off their neighbourhood action and the renewal of the neighbourly society because it works. These are miracles, but they are not complex and they can be replicated. They do not involve splitting the atom, or inventing eternal motion. They involve human beings learning to feel differently about one another.

Michael Groce has a very important message which I hope he won’t mind me quoting. He says:

“I don’t think they can ever kill off the community of Brixton”.

From what I have seen, I could not agree more.

We have much to thank the optimists for…… for working miracles in our inner cities.

The speech made by Oliver Letwin, the then Shadow Home Secretary, in Newport, Wales on 11 September 2003.

This is an age in which the worst insult you can hurl at someone in my profession is “politicians are all the same.”

I’d like to use this speech to argue against that. Politicians are not all the same. If only because they belong to different parties that each have a very different vision for Britain’s public services.

Today, I want to tell you about my party’s vision for the police service. I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it, but I can guarantee this: At the next general election you will have a genuine choice. A choice between what you have now under this Government and what you could have under a Conservative Government.

In a nutshell, our vision is this:

The restoration of neighbourhood policing as a fully-respected, fully-resourced function of the modern police service – of equal importance, and equal status, to any other aspect of modern policing.

Neighbourhood policing versus conventional policing

In other speeches I have described the difference between neighbourhood policing and conventional policing. Neighbourhood policing is sometimes called beat policing, but it is not only that. The beat is at the heart of neighbourhood policing, but this is policing with brains too – as anyone who has seen it succeed in America can tell you. That is why you will not hear me use the term “intelligence-led policing” to refer to conventional policing alone. Each form of policing is as intelligent as the other. But they gather, and then use, intelligence in different ways.

There are, of course, overlaps, but conventional and neighbourhood policing differ in emphasis: One deals with specific crimes, the other with general disorder; one targets major offences, the other minor offences; one is reactive and remedial, the other proactive and preventative.

These two forms of policing are complementary; they could and should form two halves of a whole in today’s police service. But they do not. Over the years, neighbourhood policing has been systematically disrespected and under-resourced.

As a result it has declined in importance and diminished in status. Debate over beat policing degenerates into talk of “bobbies on the beat”. And by that point, it is not long before predictable and patronising references to Dixon of Dock Green are trotted out. In this way the debate is lost, dismissed as mere nostalgia for an age long gone, if, indeed, it ever existed at all.

Cargoes

On the principle that I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, I’m going to indulge in a gratuitous act of nostalgia by looking back to my school days – the days when children were still taught to memorise poems by heart. I expect many of you will recall one particular poem by John Masefield, the one that begins like this:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

The next verse describes a “stately Spanish galleon” and its equally exotic cargo of “diamonds / Emeralds and amethysts / Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores”.

The final verse is in total contrast to the first two. It describes a “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack” and a deeply unglamorous cargo of “Tyne coal / Road-rails, pig-lead / Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.”

This poem is itself about nostalgia. The gritty realities of modern life are set against the golden age of the Stately Spanish Galleon and the even more distant glamour of the Quinquireme of Nineveh.

Gritty realities

One could draw a parallel here with the police service. On the one hand there are the gritty realities of neighbourhood policing, while on the other there is the glamour of conventional policing – which normally goes by a more glamorous name like “intelligence-led policing” or “high-level policing”. Just as the “dirty British coaster” goes “butting through the Channel”, so neighbourhood policing concerns itself with ordinary life in ordinary places. Sure enough, the neighbourhood police officer sees past the polite façade of those lives and places, but what he sees is not the stuff of TV drama. There is no thrilling heart of darkness, just a dim reality of commonplace crimes and misdemeanours.

The neighbourhood police officer is unlikely to encounter Mr Big on his beat. But he can stop Mr Insignificant from selling Mr Big’s heroin on street corners. Which might mean that Miss Hopeless makes something of her life. Which might mean that Old Mrs Frightened feels safe enough to venture outdoors. Which might mean that the neighbourhood regains some sense of community, the essential first step to regeneration and renewal. Not bad for a dirty British coaster.

But Masefield’s poem isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s also about progress. The dirty British coaster was a workhorse of the industrial age, at the cutting edge of modernity. The quinquireme and the galleon were undeniably more glamorous, but it was the coaster that, quite literally, delivered the goods.

And this is where my analogy might appear to break down. Because conventional policing is not only seen as more glamorous, but more modern too. Neighbourhood policing, on the other hand, is seen not only as dull and dirty, but out of date too – a relic from yesteryear to be patronised and disrespected.

The attack on neighbourhood policing

But this is a misperception, and there are two main reasons for the misperception.

The first is technological. Pursuit vehicles, surveillance equipment, computerised databases, DNA analysis and many other applications of technology have transformed the possibilities of policing. While paying due regard to civil liberties, it is entirely right that these possibilities should be fully explored and exploited. And yet, however adept we become in the use of technology to target serious crime, there can be no substitute for human intelligence, in particular, intelligence derived from the wider community that provides the context for every crime, serious or otherwise.

The second reason for the disdain of neighbourhood policing is ideological. To some, for whom crime is a response to a system of oppression, and for whom the police are agents of those who control the system, neighbourhood policing is seen as something to be expelled from the community. In previous decades, those who laboured under this delusion moved to weaken the police presence in our communities, in order to bring about a shift in the balance of power. As a result, the forces of law and order have lost ground in towns and cities throughout this land.

These two tendencies of very different kinds – the enthusiasm for top-down, technology-led policing and the ideological disdain for traditional authority – have together led to a Britain in which neighbourhood policing has in general been allowed to decline. In my view, this is a calamity, because the real balance of power lies not between the police and people, but between crime and the community. The front line runs through our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, a front line from which police have been systematically withdrawn, leaving the weakest, most vulnerable members of our society alone and defenceless against the real enemy.

Parallel with the medical profession

To understand the full scale of this calamity, imagine that something similar had taken place within our healthcare system. The medical profession has its equivalent of the neighbourhood police officer: a class of professionals who are based in the community, who are involved in the day-to-day lives of those in their care, who deal mainly with minor complaints, but are best placed to know when and where to call in extra resources and specialist help. These professionals are known as GPs. Most of the glamour and the fame may attach to other roles within the NHS, such as that of surgeon or consultant, but the respect in which the family doctor is held is second to none.

Now the NHS has its problems, but imagine how much worse these would be if the role of GP healthcare had been subject to the denigration and neglect that has befallen neighbourhood policing. Imagine the fear and frustration of the public; the stress and despair of those GPs who remained in place; the deterioration of untreated minor ailments into major emergencies; the loss of local intelligence leading to massive misallocation of specialist resources; the inevitable decline in the nation’s health.

It is not for nothing that the service provided by GP surgeries is known as primary healthcare. It is so fundamental to the functioning of the NHS as a whole that it is impossible to think about it in any other way. And indeed the primary importance of primary healthcare has never been in doubt. That is why, whatever the problems of the NHS, one thing we haven’t seen is a general decline in the nation’s health.

However, what we certainly have seen is a general decline in law and order. And on that measure, the problems facing Britain’s police service are deeper than anything facing the National Health Service. Deep problems require deep solutions, the deepest of which would be the restoration of neighbourhood policing to its rightful place in today’s police service, in today’s Britain. We need to think about neighbourhood policing as primary policing, of primary importance to policing as a whole.

Police numbers

That is how my party thinks about neighbourhood policing. But what would the next Conservative Government actually do to make that vision real?

First of all we will provide the necessary resources, by which I mean sufficient funding for an unprecedented increase in police numbers – that is an increase of 40,000 police officers.

There’s no small print in that commitment. We will increase police numbers by 40,000 over and above the level we inherit from Labour at the next election. And to give credit were it’s due, by the next election this Government will have increased police numbers by about 5,000. It’s also true that, over the same period, they’ll have increased Home Office central staff numbers by 10,000. This may tell you something about this Government’s priorities. It may also tell you why you’ve got so much paperwork to deal with.

So while this Government has increased police numbers by 5,000 over eight years, we will increase police numbers by 5,000 every year for eight years. That makes a total of 40,000 – an increase of almost a third. For every three police officers now, there will be four. My intention is that this significant shift in the level of resourcing should enable a quantum leap in the level of neighbourhood policing. If every one of the 40,000 extra police officers is devoted to neighbourhood policing, then that will, I believe, triple the number of police officers on the beat.

The conveyor belt to crime

Of course, this isn’t just a numbers game. In a moment I’m going to say something about what else is needed to restore neighbourhood policing to its rightful place. But first I need to make something else clear:

Neighbourhood policing is essential, but it isn’t sufficient. We won’t give you the impossible job of winning the war against crime single-handed.

This is what Sir Robert Peel said when he founded the modern police service all those years ago:

“Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

In other words, it is society as whole that needs to wage the war against crime – or, as another Shadow Home Secretary once said, we must be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

It’s a great line. But now we need some action. The next Conservative Government will start with the greatest single cause of crime – which is drug addiction. Heroin and crack cocaine addicts are responsible for one-third of all crimes in this country. And that can only get worse as the army of addicts swells by 10,000 every year. For the addict there are only two ways out: One is death, the other rehabilitation. Unbelievably, there are just 2,000 places on rehab programmes in the entire country. The system will prescribe methadone like mother’s milk, but if you want to get clean, this country won’t help you.

That is why my Party is committed to a ten-fold increase in rehab capacity. That’s 20,000 places, enough for every hard drug addict between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. Whether they like it or not. Because our policy will be backed up by compulsion.

But our attack on the causes of crime goes well beyond addiction. We will implement policies at every stage to get offenders off the conveyor belt to crime. We will institute much longer but much more constructive, rehabilitative sentences for persistent young offenders, with a period of serious rehabilitation in open custody and a long period of supervision based on the C-Far model.

We will focus more effort on helping the parents of very young, troubled children before those children have a chance to go off the rails. And Damian Green and I will shortly be making announcements on helping those excluded from school to return to the rails.

Conclusion

It is fashionable these days to talk about partnership. But this really is about partnership. Government must do its part by providing the resources for neighbourhood policing and for policies to get young people of the conveyor belt to crime. And the police must do their part, which in particular depends on the people in this room.

If fully-funded, fully-respected neighbourhood policing is going to work, it’s got to work at the level of the BCU. It will be the captain of the Dirty British Coaster that delivers the goods. Not the Chief Constable on his Stately Spanish Galleon. And certainly not the landlubbing politician, running up and down the beach, trying to direct the fleet.

You can’t steer a ship from the shore. And you can’t police a neighbourhood from Whitehall. The Home Office has got to let go. Because, sooner or later, the obsessive, centralising tendencies of the current regime will end in disaster.

The next Conservative Government will reverse the direction of policing policy. We will push power down from the politicians and bureaucrats, through the police force hierarchies and to the police officers on the front line against crime and disorder. Each of you will be accountable, not to me, but to the neighbourhoods in your care.

At next month’s Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, I plan to make a major announcement on how the next Conservative Government will change the relationship between the Home Office, each police force and the general public. And, as with our plans for police numbers, that change will be dramatic.

We are determined to create the basis for a serious revival of neighbourhood policing in this country. We are determined to let the stimulus for such policing come from local populations rather than from above. And we are determined to let you get on with the job, rather than telling you how to do it.