The Rt. Hon. Sir John Major KG CH

Tag: Social Market Foundation

  • Mr Major’s Speech to the Social Market Foundation Conference – 26 April 1995

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s speech to the Social Market Foundation Conference on the subject of “The Future of Cities”, held at the Institution of Civil Engineers on Wednesday 26th April 1995.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Let me first thank you for inviting me to open your conference today. I’d like to use this occasion to set out some reflections on regenerating our inner cities, and how we are seeking to bring together the policies to tackle the poverty of opportunity that has often been associated with urban decay.

    Let me give you three snapshots of life in our inner cities today.

    Hulme in Manchester: 3 years ago, one of the worst inner city areas in Europe: high unemployment, soaring crime, above all a deck access estate which was quite simply dehumanising – not just the familiar problems, but the familiar problems in spades. Now these estates are being demolished. For the first time there will be homes to buy, alongside social housing, built by the private sector. Tenants have won a national award for participation in planning and design of the new mixed tenure housing that is now being built. Nearly 900 jobs have been saved or created. Most of the investment is private sector.

    In King’s Heath, Birmingham, a secondary school serving some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, surrounded by council house tower blocks. A decade ago, plagued by gangs and daubed with graffiti, Baverstock School was one of those schools that no parents wanted their children to go to. Now a Grant Maintained school, an enthusiastic headteacher has restored pride, discipline and standards. The number of children gaining 5 GCSEs at grade A-C has risen from 7% to 32%, and after opening its own sixth form the number staying on (for year 12) has risen from zero to 142 in just 3 years. Not surprisingly, the school is now massively oversubscribed – offering opportunity and hope to young people who previously had neither.

    In Walsall, a former power station site, fifteen years an abandoned eyesore: rotting concrete, rusty boilers, smoke-blackened weeds. Now it is being redeveloped: £8 million from Government levering in £54 million of private investment: nearly 300 houses built for sale, new industrial and business premises, a golf course and nature reserve. Again local residents are involved in designing the scheme. 1,250 jobs are being created.

    Fifteen years ago, even five years ago, none of these things would have happened. Now in nearly every major city in this country, there are new ideas, new thinking, bringing hope and opportunity to the people who live there.

    Earlier this month I set out in my speech to the Conservative Party’s Central Council some of the fundamental objectives that guided our principles as a Party and as a Government.

    I spoke of the importance we attached to creating the conditions where all could share in the prosperity and security that comes from a successful enterprise economy, and of building a society of opportunity and choice for everyone. It is those beliefs that make ambitious to tackle the problems of urban deprivation, and to tackle them with Conservative solutions.

    I believe I’m the first Prime Minister this century who grew up in an inner city and represented a deprived area of a local authority. That was chance. But that chance gave me valuable experience.

    In the 50s and 60s, I saw terraces not far from where I lived demolished. Communities, albeit poor, were re-housed in tower blocks that were more modern, clean, sanitary spacious but also soul-less. The best of intentions produced the worst of results. The housing was better but the community was lost.

    Some of those people were friends, neighbours, people I knew – so it’s hardly surprising that I feel strongly about this issue. When I spoke about the classless society it was people like that I had in mind. They deserve opportunity and choice. They do not deserve to be patronised and disregarded. I know their worth and they deserve to have it recognised.

    The experience of those years was one of the things that brought me into politics. I chose the Conservative Party because Conservatism is tough edged. It offers opportunity but it demands that people stir themselves as well. It does not believe Government is all powerful. It asks people to contribute, to help themselves and their communities. It knows the Government cannot replace individual effort.

    If you look at the experience of the last 40 odd years, in too many areas, what we have seen is the State taking on the role of the community. We created a system of authoritarian paternalism, where the state decided what people ought to want, where the Government, national or local, created its dependent client groups and sought to base its power on them, where the concept of mutual assistance was replaced by the primacy of the waiting list and the need to negotiate the paths of city hall power structures.

    Before, when people needed minor repairs to their houses they did it themselves. But then the Council took over and self-help was pushed aside.

    The Social Service departments started to take over, and community help was pushed aside.

    Education became the schools’ responsibility, not the parents. Parents were given no information and little choice.

    Too often the web of informal social support – the neighbourliness of our cities – all the things that make it possible for human beings to live together, broke down because the State intervened and controlled too much. Community help and self-help were disregarded. Government knew best. But the truth is – they didn’t. Good intentions had bad effects.

    I saw the mistakes that were made by politicians and bureaucrats believing they could do it all: the ghetto estates, the stunted opportunities. These mistakes stemmed from an essentially socialist approach: top down planning, welfarism rather than opportunity, public sector provision rather than individual choice, working against not with the market.

    When this Conservative Government first came to office, inner cities – like many other aspects of our national life – needed drastic action to reverse years of neglect and decay. The Urban Development Corporations came first: they were tough medicine, and they succeeded – turning around many of the worst city centre areas by bringing together the power of Government, the leadership of local businessmen and the confidence of sustained public investment.

    In their time the 12 English UDCs have reclaimed some 2,500 hectares of derelict land, stimulated over £10 billion of private investment and created over 140,000 new jobs in UDC areas. As they wind down their role over the next three years, they leave a tremendous legacy that few people would have imagined was possible when they first opened their doors.

    But we learned from these experiences to provide more flexible and effective policies, better able to deal with the problem as a whole. The first result was City Challenge, followed by our more ambitious Single Regeneration Budget. These new programmes:

    – not only promote physical development but also focus on creating jobs for local people;

    – they seek to tackle all of an area’s fundamental problems, such as poor schooling;

    – they build on the talents of the local community;

    – they create exciting new opportunities to lever in private finance;

    – overall they put the emphasis on results and not just resources.

    The challenging principle which underlies these new approaches has been a major innovation that is now being copied around the world. They target resources on good imaginative projects which bring together different kinds of help. They require local councils, business leaders and community groups to work together to bid for money – demonstrating how they can make a real impact on the opportunities available to people in inner city areas. As a result we are seeing public money drawing in massive amounts of private sector investment.

    Close to here, in Deptford, one of these City Challenges is targeting to provide over 2,000 new permanent jobs – and these results are being repeated all over the country; in Nottingham, in Tyneside, in Walsall and in Wigan to name but a few. In our first round of bids for the Single Regeneration Budget, £1 billion of SRB money is attracting £3 billion of private investment. For that we’re getting more than 50,000 new or improved houses, funding 7,500 voluntary groups and supporting 60,000 new businesses.

    So we are making tremendous progress, transforming the prospects for many in our inner cities – and offering new hope of a better tomorrow. It is the only way that is affordable to meet the needs of the future.

    But I would be complacent if I believed that these policies alone were enough to tackle urban problems in all their guises.

    Our regeneration policies in the urban areas are part of a much wider picture. That picture includes our policies on education, on housing, on job creation, on tax and benefit reform, on crime and almost every other aspect of Government activity. In other words all the things that touch on how as a nation we open opportunity and choice for everyone.

    In my experience people in the inner cities don’t want patronising concerns. They share the same ambitions, the same aspirations as everyone else. They should not be treated as though many of them are only capable of dependency. Give them opportunity and they will give themselves security.

    That’s why inner city policies are important. No more families trapped in cheap and cheerless tower blocks. No more children who do not learn what they need to learn to get on in life because of poor schooling. No more areas where people cannot get jobs because private enterprise has moved away. No more people frozen into dependency by misguided social experiment and the culture of welfare entitlement.

    We need better incentives for the unemployed to start on the job ladder. That’s why we are introducing a whole range of new incentives through the benefits system – insisting that unemployed people actively look for work while claiming benefit, and providing better in-work benefits like the Back to Work bonus, to encourage people to take part-time work as the first step on the ladder out of unemployment.

    We need opportunity for everyone in the inner cities to acquire the education and skills to succeed in the jobs market. So we’re tackling the problem of poor education standards in our schools – against the howls of many of the so-called progressives who bear so much of the responsibility for failing our children. Parents have the right to choose their child’s school. We’ve got the national curriculum – testing – teacher appraisal – regular inspection and reporting of results. It’s working. We are getting clear evidence from our inspectors that where they have found schools to be failing – local education authorities and governors are being galvanised into action to improve or close weak schools. Measures, by the way, that New Labour voted against. And our new system means that following OFSTED Reports, all schools have to publish action plans to address the areas of weakness that have been found.

    Within the national curriculum, there is increasing emphasis on technology and vocational skills. We’ve dramatically increased the numbers going on to further and higher education. Only one in eight children in 1979 went on to higher education, now it’s one in three. More mature students are taking up further and higher education courses – updating their skills. And we’ve set up a new improved apprentice scheme. Better skills, better training, better education offers the chance of higher wages with higher employment.

    But as we look ahead, I believe one of the major challenges we still face is the continuing legacy of large scale, sub-standard public housing estates – some in inner cities, some outside. For the problem they present is not only in the quality of housing itself, but in the associated poverty of opportunity in communities that have given up hope.

    Many were built as solutions to inner city problems; ironically they have now become major contributors to the problem. There they stand – grey, sullen, concrete wastelands, set apart from the rest of the community, robbing people of ambition, of self-respect. Monuments to the failed history of socialist planning – too many lives have been wrecked by growing up in such demoralising surroundings. So what have we done? First we have sought to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. 85% of Housing Corporation funds now go to small developments where people feel comfortable. We have also created diversity in existing estates by giving tenants the right to buy. Some 1.4 million have exercised this right in the last 15 years. 25% of social housing has been sold to tenants, creating new home owners.

    Second we have sought to give tenants a much greater say in running their own estates. We introduced the Tenant’s Charter setting out for the first time what tenants can expect, and giving them a say in the running of their estates. We will be issuing a new – and improved – Charter in the next few weeks. We are also tackling problem behaviour. Just before Easter the Government set out its ideas for introducing probationary tenancies. These would give local authorities the right to crack down on neighbour nuisance, and give a clear signal to new tenants that anti-social behaviour is unacceptable. We will follow this up with action to encourage quicker and more effective handling of cases by the courts.

    Third the Government has taken action to renovate and rebuild areas of poor quality public housing. Over £2 billion has been spent over the past 10 years improving 500 of the worst estates. And we are now encouraging schemes to get the private sector involved in rebuilding these old monolithic estates, bringing in more mixed forms of housing tenure, more opportunities for tenants to become home owners or own their own estates.

    Later today, for example, I will visit Dalston City Partnership, where a run-down local authority estate is being transformed thanks to this government’s initiative in promoting a City Challenge and Estate Action partnership. The old local authority estate is being replaced by over a thousand new homes for sale and rent. £14 million of private money is being invested.

    Let me be quite clear what has brought this about. This improvement would not and could not have happened without the direct involvement of the Government, of Challenge Funding, and of the private sector. Local authorities alone would not have been able to do it.

    We are determined to work with authorities of whatever political persuasion. And we will encourage the private sector to work with Conservative councils, with Liberal councils and with Labour councils. What we are concerned with is to produce better housing in areas that for generations have been run down. To improve the quality of housing, to improve the mix of income groups, to improve the environment, so that no-one in the inner cities may feel abandoned, whatever the nature of the council they live in. In my determination to improve the inner cities I am politically colour-blind.

    All of these measures will help address the sense of hopelessness that pervades some of our worst housing estates by giving the people who live there more choice, more opportunity, more say in their future.

    Mr Chairman, at Birmingham earlier this month I said that I wanted to develop plans and ambitions for the next phase of Conservative Government – ambitions that would build on what we had achieved and carry us into the next century. So let me tell you my aspirations to carry forward our achievements in urban regeneration, to build a society of opportunity and choice.

    We must build on the proven and exciting schemes we have set up to get private finance and private development involved in providing a better choice of housing for the poor.

    As we move towards the next century, we should be looking at how a Conservative Government can increasingly involve the private sector in the ambitious objective of transforming the remaining large scale, poor quality public housing estates in Britain. I grew up among 1950’s slums; I now want to end the monstrosities that too often replaced them. To create in their place housing on a human scale, mixed housing with less isolation, and communities that enable everyone to share the same aspirations, the same hopes, the same opportunities. The social benefits will be enormous if we can finish the job we’ve started.

    We must pledge to continue our fight for standards in schools, so that all inner city children have access to schools that offer the best standards of achievement and discipline. How many children can read by the age of 8? Shouldn’t schools know? And set targets for improvement? Doesn’t every parent have a right to know what its child’s school is aiming at? And be involved in helping set the targets? That is the direction in which we must go.

    I want to see individual schools setting their own performance standards building on the Parent’s Charter. I will be encouraging the first pilots on this later this year, including some inner city schools.

    We must be unapologetic about putting standards at the top of our educational priorities – the children deserve no less. And we are unapologetic about believing that the best guarantee of standards is for parents to have a real choice of schools – with access to the best whatever their income and wherever they live.

    Our objective must also be to continue bringing new jobs into urban areas year after year – bringing down unemployment, and creating new opportunities for individuals to get their feet on the ladder of experience.

    And we must ensure that Training and Enterprise Councils continue to play their part in giving everyone the opportunity to develop the skills and qualifications needed for tomorrow’s employment – working towards making Britain’s workforce the best qualified in Europe.

    Providing opportunity and choice, while continuing our policies to encourage new investment and new enterprise in inner cities – those are our challenges for the future.

    At heart our philosophy is about treating all people are equal citizens, people who need to fell self-respect just like everyone else. Yes, we believe in helping the less well-off, but we don’t want them to remain dependent on that help. We want to give everyone the opportunity to rise through their own efforts and share in the rewards of prosperity.

    Those principles lie right at the heart of what this Government is trying to do, and will remain our guiding principles for the future.

  • Mr Major’s Speech to the Social Market Foundation – 9 September 1994

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s speech to the Social Market Foundation, held in London on Friday 9th September 1994.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Robert, simply to put your mind at rest, yes I have certainly used the phrase “social market economy”, but as you rightly say that is not the subject of the remarks I wish to make to you today.

    Over the last few years one thing that has become absolutely constant in the minds of most of the electorate that I talk to is their concern over crime, not just in the last year or two, but certainly throughout the 15 years that I have been a Member of Parliament, and I suspect for many years before that, it ebbs and flows in the depth and strength of concern, but it is a consistent concern and I think it is easy to see precisely why that should be.

    We all have ambitions for ourselves, for our neighbours, for communities, we would like them to be safe, to be secure, to be prosperous, like them to be free of crime and safe for the vulnerable and for children.

    It is for that reason that since 1990 I have sought to keep the fight against crime high on the government’s list of priorities. Four years now have passed. I would like to take the opportunity today to take stock of the progress we have made and set out perhaps some of our plans for the future.

    Many of the strands of policy that we have developed since 1990 are now beginning to come together. It is a fallacy that you set out a policy one day and a thing emerges in completely mature form within a matter of the next few weeks, so often that is not the case. I believe now that we are beginning to see a series of events coming together that will have a material effect, a beneficial effect, in the general community fight against the level of criminality we all face.

    I have never accepted, as some occasionally appear to do, that increasing crime figures are an inescapable feature of modern life. And I believe today we can begin to feel a little more optimistic, though certainly not complacent. Events are showing that we can turn the tide against crime, we can begin to have confidence in what too often has been a province of despair.

    We should of course keep a sense of proportion. Of course there are appalling crimes which seize the headlines and shake the national consciousness. But overall this is a safer country than most, more civilised and more secure. And yet despite that, when I talk to people I sense that the fear of crime is greater than I personally can remember and my message today to those people is that we can beat crime.

    The fact is that recorded crime actually fell last year, the falling number of insurance claims for thefts and burglaries begins to say the same story. Many Police Chiefs are now more optimistic that this hopeful trend will continue. And when we put that in an historical context, that trend is all the more striking because crimes of all sorts have been rising steadily since the 1950s, in times of boom, in times of slump, they have been steadily rising. And not just here but in other countries across Europe as well. So although we have to treat the encouraging figures we have seen with caution, I think we are right to be encouraged by them because there are other encouraging signs as well.

    Throughout the 1980s we put substantial extra resources into fighting crime. The largest prison building programme since Victorian times has seen 21 prisons open since 1985; we have recruited more police; we have rewarded police officers more generously for the work that they do; we now have record staffing levels in police forces and we must keep it that way and use those record staffing levels to best effect. That investment in the 1980s was costly, but undoubtedly it was right and I believe we can be grateful for it today.

    And yet with all that effort crime went on rising, resources alone could not deal with the problem that existed. Equally important of course is how those resources are applied. And in addition to that, equally important, is the climate in which the police and the criminal justice system have to operate. From the 1960s onwards that climate of opinion has not always been supportive, it should have been but it has not been.

    A primary responsibility of any government at home is to take action to prevent people suffering from crime, we seek to protect then. And one of the first duties of the citizen is to obey the law and support those who uphold it, and that guarantee of law and order is essential to the British way of life, it is a basic element in any civilised society, and yet the philosophy of the last 30 years has manifestly failed to contain the rise in crime.

    In 1990 I concluded that we needed a new resolve, a revolution in attitudes, reforms to add to the power and effectiveness of the courts and of the police, and fresh thinking about some of the free and easy assumptions that have lain behind criminal justice policy for over a generation.

    Those were the objectives I set in 1990 – changes in attitudes, changes in policing and changes to strengthen the criminal justice system. Let me this morning take each of those changes in turn.

    Many perhaps will be surprised that I included a change of attitude as an objective, but I did it deliberately. The vast majority of people in this country would like to fight back against crime, to contribute to improving the safety of their streets, the protection of their children and the stability of their homes. They want to see blame for the bad and praise for the good, to rebuild respect for authority, to see responsibility rewarded and encouraged, they want less derision of decent social values, more support for those who contribute to our community and rather less for those who offend against it. They want communities where the streets are safe for the law abiding and not threatening for the vulnerable, they want to clamp down on all those who make some of our streets a frightening place to be, and that is true whether it is the professional drug dealer or the aggressive lout who makes life so uncomfortable for so many people.

    The boundaries of acceptable behaviour shift invisibly, but as they shift they change lives. It is not these days the big armed robberies that keep older people away from the city centres where they grew up, it is the fear they might be jostled, jeered at, made to feel insecure by rowdy or by offensive behaviour, and that minor crime – as some would see it – can have huge social consequences and make a dramatic impact in the quality of life for many vulnerable people and we need to face up to that particular problem.

    People rightly deplore in this country elements of what could be called a yob culture. Well let us set ourselves an objective to chance it, make a real national effort to build an anti-yob culture. No-one should pretend for a moment that this can be done just by politicians, legislation has a role but it also has its limitations. Parliament needs cooperation and no-one in any form of authority can afford to be a bystander if we are to win this particular battle. We need every parent, every teacher instilling standards of self-discipline and respect for others in our children, we need more Councils using new powers now available, like the by-law pioneered in Coventry against excessive drinking in public, to date 21 other Councils have gone down this route and others may follow. We need magistrates, using the powers they now have, to give the kind of tough sentence that some of these petty offences deserve. Many other examples could be given.

    All of us, without exception, can show by our attitude and by our example that we condemn and we reject loutishness, vandalism and crime, that we resent the mindless graffiti artists who deface our public places. Too often we have excused crime, patronising people as if nothing better could be expected of them. Too often we have allowed youngsters to slip further into bad habits condoning or repeatedly cautioning their offences when early action could have set a better path. Often it is right to say ‘No’, and to say ‘No’ both firmly and early, and I hope increasingly we will do precisely that.

    I believe that the right social attitudes will help to turn the tide against petty criminality across the next decades. But we also need to direct crime prevention measures now to make life hard for those who have turned to crime. And if we are to win that battle, I reiterate, it cannot just be done by legislation, it cannot just be done by legislation and the police, if we are to win that battle we must build a huge national partnership against the criminal in every city and county, every workplace, every school and every home, and partnership must be a key element in our crime prevention strategy.

    And that is why Michael Howard’s Partnership Initiative, to be launched later this month, will prove to be so important. Neighbourhood Watch offers already an excellent example. But the horizons of partnership need to be expanded. All over the country communities will have the opportunity to benefit from the security and the hope which this kind of action will bring. The aggregate of many small initiatives is an effective anti-crime strategy as a whole, and one way in which partnership can make a difference, it is one of many, is through the involvement of special constables. It is worth illustrating this to make the point. In the past most special constables have been required to undertake duties anywhere in their force area, but in some parts of the country specials are now being deployed to work exclusively in their own neighbourhood. In Cornwall a number of villages now have their own special constable who regularly patrols the village on foot and turns out for community events, and people do find this reassuring and I believe it is an area which may well extend to very substantial benefit.

    This Partnership Initiative, this new initiative, will extend the opportunity for people to serve their own community in this and in other ways. They will be able, if they wish, to serve only their own neighbourhood or immediate community. Schools must help, they have an important role by providing a disciplined environment and taking a strong line on truancy. To put it at its simplest, if children are in a class learning grammar they are not cut in the street learning crime. They can also help by offering competitive team sports, keeping youngsters active, learning to play by the rules and to lose as well as win, it helps build the sort of attitude and character that personally I believe is so important in later life and I believe we need to re-instil it by every means we can.

    Councils, designers, developers, can all play their own part, play their part by planning out crime – good lighting to expose the vandal and the mugger, strong locks to keep out burglars, roadside barriers to block ramraiders. Simple things perhaps, but they are the type of things promoted in our recent planning guidance and supported with growing success by the Safer Cities Programme, they are obvious but they are effective and we wish to see them introduced more widely.

    Car manufactures too can help to get to grips with the scourge of car crime, backing up the tougher penalties we now have for the thieves themselves. We are working hard for agreement in Brussels on high standards of alarm systems, door and steering wheel locks and immobilisers. Some car firms already have them, it would be helpful if all of them did. And I am glad to see moves within the insurance industry to lower the premiums for protected cars.

    So there is a big programme of sensible, in some cases low key, crime prevention already in hand. Some of the steps may seem small individually, but if you put the pieces of that jigsaw together they can change attitudes and they do cut down on crime.

    Modern science has a role to play as well and that is why we are giving the police more access to close circuit television, better information technology and DNA testing. Up-to-date methods like these will enable the police to stay ahead of the would-be offender. They help deter crime in the first place but if it is committed they help them catch the criminal.

    I would like to see if we can go further, so we are now looking at the practicalities of photo driving licenses, smart card technology and the likely value of identity cards. I know there are concerns expressed by some about civil liberties and it is right that we should consider these issues very carefully, and I promise that we will, but to my mind anything that can check crime and cut fraud must be worth careful examination, for above all it is crime, and the fear of crime, that most violates our civil liberties.

    Chairman, no single crime prevention measure would be more significant than success on the front against drugs. Last year there were 28,000 notified drug addicts, up 13 percent; there were 11,600 new addicts, up 20 percent; in 1992 there were 72,000 seizures of illegal drugs by police and Customs, up 3 percent; and in the same year there were 1,300 drug related deaths in England and Wales, up by 8 percent.

    Startling statistics, but those statistics tell only part of the story. Drug taking wrecks lives, but drug trafficking has spawned a vicious breed of criminal. So far this year there have already been 4 murders and 12 attempted murders in London alone connected to crack. Dealers and traffickers thrive on theft and violence to support their trade, much petty crime is also drug related as people seek cash to fuel their habit.

    I have already agreed an international drive on drugs at the European Council in Corfu and the Economic Summit in Naples. I pressed our partners hard to improve coordination in an international fight against drugs. One result will be that we will draw in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in that battle, essential given the huge new source of drugs and crime that the former Soviet bloc has created. Another will be more cross-border action by Europol, the new European Police Agency which we must get up and running as soon as we can.

    The world’s drug barons have their own perspective of Europe, to them Europe is a lucrative market and enough cocaine has been seized in the European Union so far this year to provide 24 million individual doses of cocaine. We must not lose that particular battle against the drug dealers and so we will use, wherever possible, the powers that many governments have taken to confiscate the assets of those behind the international traffic in drugs.

    But we also need more comprehensive action here at home. Tony Newton will shortly be publishing the results of his review of our policy, it is not ready yet, but I can tell you today that it will include a three year action plan and a new drug strategy. And let me make one thing clear at the outset, there will be no question of legalising any drug. I know some people make a case for legalising some soft drugs but frankly I do not agree with it, I believe there is too great a risk that experimentation with soft drugs is the first step towards dependence on hard drugs. There will be a new emphasis on education and prevention designed to reduce the acceptability and availability of drugs to young and increase the safety of every community from drug-related crime. We will be stepping up the campaign against drugs in schools. Schools must be havens of learning and opportunity, not the place where children get their first introduction to crime. So we will be putting more money into guidance on drug prevention to help make sure that every child understands the dangers of using drugs. And we are asking our independent school inspectors to do more to spread the lesson of how to stop drug abuse in schools.

    At the time tougher enforcement action will be taken on the streets. I mean the kind of action that we have seen in Kings Cross which shows that the dealers can be taken off. We want police forces everywhere to put the fight against drugs on their list for priority action, the public need to know that their local police force will be giving very high priority to the nationwide war on drugs.

    There will also be a major blitz on drugs in prisons. I prefer people to come out of prison reformed, not sucked into a sub-culture of drugs. We need to choke off the supply of drugs that still get into prisons so there will be improved perimeter patrolling, more thorough searching of inmates and better supervision of domestic visits which are the main source of drugs entering prison at present. New powers in the Criminal Justice Bill will allow compulsory drugs testing of inmates.

    And another component of the strategy will be that the treatment of drug addicts will be improved, with better access to drug services right across the country. And special attention will be paid to the needs of young people and their families, for few things are more tragic than the spectacle of young babies born with an inherited addiction to drugs.

    Finally, we have agreed to renew funding for the government’s drug prevention initiative. It is an imaginative scheme which works at the grass roots of society and focuses on young people, it puts in small specialised teams to work alongside local communities up and down the country. The teams will now expand their areas of operation, increasing coverage from 6 million people to 16 million people, and this will help spread the kind of work being done for example by Notts County Football Club and the Professional Footballers Association to draw youngsters into football training schemes and away from the temptation of drugs.

    All in all, the initiative that Tony Newton will be introducing will be the most comprehensive strategy to tackle the drugs problem that this country has seen, that that strategy will be the start and not the finish, the battle against drugs is one that we simply cannot afford to lose.

    Mr. Chairman, changing attitudes to crime in general and drugs in particular is one of the three main aims of our strategy. The old proverb is right, prevention is better than cure, yet not even in the Garden of Eden could all crime be prevented and that is why I have been equally keen to see ever more effective policing. Of course, not all criminals, sadly, are going to be caught but in common with our chief constables I believe that many more criminals could be caught and many more are being caught thanks new approaches as policing changes in the 1990s.

    A successful police service is central to everything we are trying to do against crime; that is why we put more policemen on the streets; it is why we have let them have the equipment they need, not just the technology I have mentioned but practical weapons like the new batons for the beat constable; but we don’t in this country have a paramilitary police force and I would not myself wish to see one. We have a citizen police force and I believe that is one of its greatest strengths. They don’t go back to the barracks at the end of a tough day, they go home to the flat next door, they are ordinary men and women of a rather extraordinary quality.

    The police force grows out of and is part of our community so I hope we will see less portraying of the police as if they are a force apart – they are not. Our police force needs and deserves public trust and public esteem, it is doing I believe a great deal to earn it. Wherever a wedge is driven between public and the police, only the criminal gains and the rest of us lose. The more successful the police are in combating crime, the more they will be respected; times change, crimes change, so too must the approach that the police take and that is why we have been making the most structural and functional changes in the police service which have been so widely debated in the last year or so. I know that changes of this kind are always a cause of concern but I am confident that the police will rise to the challenges and opportunities they have from the reform package that we have placed before Parliament.

    Our reforms are there to ensure that we get the very best out of the 5 billion pounds a year of taxpayers’ money that we spend on policing in England and Wales. They give more power to police authorities and to chief constables and they do so so that they can use their resources flexibly and maximise their effect in the fight against crime. They will encourage a more responsive service, people will be able to feed in views on what they want the police to focus on in their particular area and people from every walk of life, not just councillors and magistrates, will be able to contribute to the fight against crime as members of police authorities. There will be clear strategic objectives for the police, fewer petty controls, fewer unnecessary management tiers and less paperwork, freeing up officers for the sort of duties that they entered the service to perform.

    Crime-fighting is what the police do best and that is where we need them most. Of course, they will still help elderly people across the road and offer leadership in youth clubs up and down the land but what we are seeing today more and more clearly is how effective the police can be with clear targets and a freer rein.

    If you take burglary, for instance, the illustration is quite clear. I have always seen burglary as a key target and I remember some years ago rejecting the idea that there was any such concept as property crime which was expressed as though it was something slightly less serious. Well tell that to the widow or the other vulnerable person whose home has been robbed and their mementos destroyed! I don’t think they regard that as a petty crime and I don’t believe we should either.

    Police chiefs told me they thought they could tackle these villains but somehow the idea had taken hold that it didn’t matter so much, that it couldn’t be solved, it was scarcely worth taking the fingerprints or visiting the scene of the burglary but now the police have shown in a very clear fashion precisely how wrongheaded such defeatism is. Many of you I suspect will know of the Met’s “Operation Bumblebee”. By targeting and surveillance of a hard core of burglars, they have cut residential burglaries in London by 16% in just one year. Two thousand people have been arrested, property worth more than a million pounds given back to those to whom it belongs. Since Bumblebee’s launch, perhaps 100,000 fewer victims have had their lives blighted and this success has given a tremendous boost to the morale of those young policemen and policewomen involved.

    But today’s burglary isn’t as once it was seen by some, isn’t just a city crime, it is increasingly a rural crime as well. Right across the rural areas of this country people have begun to see professional burglars moving out from the inner cities to what they see as softer targets in the rural areas and now, as a result, up and down the country chief constables are adopting similar approaches to Operation Bumblebee. The Sussex police launched their own in October 1993 and that proved so successful – 600 arrests for over 700 offences and £630,000 worth of stolen property recovered – that they have extended it indefinitely. Better protection for the citizen through modern policing is spreading and a very welcome reality. A further example comes from Warwickshire where Operation Claw was launched in 1993. In just two months property in excess of £100,000 was recovered and 450 people arrested.

    This is a changing attitude. It is a changing attitude that deserves the oxygen of publicity, it is a changing attitude to put the burglar on the defensive, the belief that they are more likely to be caught than once they were is a change in attitude that will encourage them to be less active than clearly they have been but Mr. Chairman, catching the criminal is of precious little value unless he receives a sentence that straightens him out and deters him in the future and that takes me to the final strand of our strategy – changing the criminal justice system itself – and that is the purpose of the legislation that we have been taking through Parliament in the last two years.

    Making changes is often controversial, sometimes I think it is invariably controversial. We have faced difficulties in Parliament and challenges outside often I have to say from those who were reluctant to see the most liberal assumptions of the last thirty years challenged but we were right to address the problems as we did and it is reasonable that everyone should now embrace those changes and help to make them work. I make no apology for taking a harder-line approach with the criminal. The criminal justice system has to give the right messages, they must be unambiguous messages that wrongdoers will be punished and victims supported. There is a place for punishment and there is a place for prison as punishment and that is the fundamental case for change and it is a case accepted not just by the British Government but by governments across Europe and in the United States.

    Over the last twenty or thirty years, the criminal justice system has tended to drift away from public opinion. There is a role for professionals and above all for the judiciary to lead but a system that does not carry confidence loses consent and there is now little or no public support for the social orthodoxies of the ’60s which still hold sway in social work training and in parts of criminology as well. The public would like to see people have a chance to get out of crime but they would also like to see those who go on offending being dealt with firmly; they want common sense policies, tough and challenging penalties for persistent young offenders, not visits to safari parks as the holiday of a lifetime; they want remand and not bail for people who risk repeating the kind of violent crimes for which they are awaiting trial in the first place.

    We need a criminal justice system from the social services right through to the judiciary that is in touch with day-to-day concerns, not academic, not out of touch, not overindulgent of deviant behaviour and not despairing about the prevention of crime or punishing the guilty. Whatever theories people come up with to establish the causes of crime, none of them can justify crime.

    Crime is a decision, it is not a disease. There isn’t an excuse for crime. Just because you are poor doesn’t mean you are likely to be criminal and just because you are rich doesn’t mean you will lead a life of virtue. The privileged may turn to crime and the most uneconomically unfortunate may be pillars of rectitude in their own community because what people often forget is that far from being perpetrators of crime, the poor are often the main victims of the criminal, they are too often the victims of repeated crime. Go on some of the worst council estates up and down our country and you will find people who have suffered most from the activities of the criminal not once, not twice but repeatedly. People who have least often suffer most from some of the criminals that we have in this country. Crime does come smashing on the door of the poor. One study found that half of those who were victims of crime had been victimised before and that they suffered 81% of all reported crime. People suffering four or more crimes a year accounted for 44% of all reported crimes. Tackling this, as the police are now trying to do, will not only cut crime, it will help the most vulnerable in our society.

    Whatever doubts I may have had about the prevailing views of the ‘60s, the ‘70s and parts of the ‘80s, l have been struck by the way the criminal justice system has now begun to reflect the changing public mood. Courts have now begun to make greater use of the range of penalties available to them; there has been a 50% increase in the proportion of cases involving 10/17 year olds where the parent is ordered to pay a fine or compensation; there has been an increased use of custody by the courts in line with the hardening of the public mood against crime. The Government’s prison-building plans are making more places available and we must make sure that the courts need not be nervous of long sentences where merited or the use of remand when they think it is right.

    The signs are that the system is now responding to the public mood and with more prison space as a result of the investment programme there need be less nervousness about long sentences or the use of remand. All parts of the criminal justice system – police, courts, magistrates, the crown prosecution service, prisons, probation, social services – need to bear public concerns in mind. We in Government must lead and Parliament where appropriate must legislate; then others must join us in carrying forward the responsibility for making sure this strategy succeeds.

    I know, going round the country, that some people are still apt to say: “What are you doing about crime?” and yet a great deal has been done since 1991 and of course the measures in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill have yet to take effect. I don’t intend this morning to give a great litany but let me just touch on a few of the key steps we have taken to change already the criminal justice system:

    We have cut down on the scandalous overuse of cautioning for persistent offenders; we are tightening-up on the granting of bail. How could we have got ourselves to the point where 50,000 crimes were committed last year by offenders who were out on bail before facing the courts on earlier charges? We have given new sentencing powers to the courts for violent and sexual offenders and for drunken drivers and the Attorney General has a new power to refer over-lenient sentences to the Appeal Court for fresh consideration. We are allowing the courts to take proper account of previous convictions when passing sentence and we are ending the abuse of the right to silence which has often been woefully exploited by experienced criminals, and now in our present Bill we are giving the courts tough new powers to detain juvenile offenders for a spell of up to twelve months and even following release they can expect a further twelve months under intensive supervision. I know for some those are controversial powers but I see no other way of dealing with that handful of young criminals who offend and offend and offend and offend again.

    More work is also in hand on the way those found guilty are handled. We are looking at ways of making prisoners earn their privileges and at ending the abuse of home leave. We also propose to make sure that community service is tough and is demanding; we are planning a Green Paper on community sentencing and we are revising the national standards governing them to ensure that they are. Punishment in the community can be a real alternative but it is to be a real alternative it must be a deterrent, it must involve real work and not just a soft option.

    Let me read you something that was written recently by the Chief Inspector of Social Services:

    “A strategy must command the confidence of the public and victims and not give messages to the young people concerned which they might misinterpret as society being soft on them. They should be made to repair the damage of their unacceptable behaviour and help people less fortunate than themselves.”

    I agree with every single word that he said.

    Mr. Chairman, there is one group that does deserve much gentler treatment and I refer to the victims of crime. The best thing self-evidently one can do for victims of crime is to try and stop them becoming victims in the first place and that is what our measures on prevention and policing are aimed to achieve but when we do have victims of crime we do make very serious subsequent demands upon them. We must do all we can to make their ordeal less painful and less unpleasant, not least because this will remove any reluctance to assist the police and courts in bringing criminals to justice and that is why the Criminal Justice Bill will make it easier to prosecute a variety of intimidating behaviour; it will protect witnesses better and it will punish revenge attacks very hard indeed. We are doing away with old-style committals. We are doing that so that vulnerable or frightened witnesses will not have to give the same evidence twice and last year we increased the resources made available to victim support and also, in line with the provisions of the Citizen’s Charter, I want to see far more done to make victims feel comfortable in court. One ought not to overlook the ordeal it is on someone who is a victim of crime then having to go to court, confront the person perhaps guilty of that crime and give evidence in public. I believe the criminal justice system needs to work much better here than it has in the past. Let me give you some examples:

    It should be routine, for example, to tell victims in advance what is expected of them as witnesses and what evidence might distress them; to provide separate waiting areas wherever possible and keep waiting times to a minimum both in the run-up to the trial and on the day itself; give better information to victims on the detection of crime, on court hearing dates and on sentences and above all let them know if and why a case has been dropped in which they are concerned. They are simple points but I think they would make a great difference to many vulnerable people who on behalf of all of us collectively go to court to give evidence against someone who may have been guilty of crime and I believe courts also should pay full regard to the effect of the crime on the victim. Sentencers have the power to do this and I sincerely hope that they will use it.

    Mr. Chairman, in the fight against crime it is my judgement that we have the overwhelming majority of people in this country with us. Down the years, Britain has had a reputation for decency, civility and order. I believe we have all been distressed to see that good name at times cast in shadow. Our aim now is to build a new and better name for Britain as a pioneer in successful strategies against crime not by decriminalising or by diverting from justifiable sentence or by moving the statistical goalposts but by getting to grips with the real problems of prevention, protection and punishment. By changing attitudes, changing police approaches, changing the balance of the criminal justice system, we can put crime on the defensive and criminals on the run. The evidence from recent figures is that the steps which we have taken are coming together and beginning to have an effect.

    Michael Howard and I are committed to taking forward this programme of reform. Later this year, Michael will be publishing a further comprehensive account of the strategy we are adopting in our determination to reduce the level of crime. The maintenance of law and order is the foundation of a stable and a secure society. Without it freedom is limited and choice is confined. Whatever the controversies there may have been in Parliament or press, I have been struck in going up and down the country by how strongly the public attitude has changed. There is a real sea change against crime and I believe we must catch that tide if we are to make the reduction of crime a permanent trend.

    That is not an easy ambition to meet but I believe it is an ambition that we must seek to meet not just in the short term but in the long term and I believe the partnership with the public at large that I spoke of earlier will add an immensely valuable part to the Government’s armoury in dealing with crime. [Applause].