30 March 2004
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Effective local partnerships with strong leadership are at the heart of tackling anti-social behaviour and crime effectively. Today you have heard many excellent examples of partnership working on the ground.
But those local partnerships need the backing of central government. You need the right legal framework to give you the power to take tough action, and you need the resources to ensure that you can enforce those powers and follow up the actions that you take.
First, we gave much needed new powers to councils. These have been highly effective where they have been used:
-in Birmingham an Anti-Social Behaviour Order was used to ban a persistent vehicle criminal from all city centre car parks. The result - an 80% drop in vehicle crime. And when he finally broke the order he went straight into custody
-in Slade Green in Bexley, a council led partnership backed with funding from the Home Office used ASBOs and cut robbery by 39% and burglary by 25%.
We acknowledge there have been some difficulties in using ASBOs and are now streamlining the process.
And additional powers are coming into force in the next few days.
We have been rolling out nationally powers which we have successfully piloted locally. From the beginning of April all police forces in England will be able to issue Fixed Penalty Notices for Disorder.
Penalty Notices can be issued in just 15 minutes and mean that police officers do not have to attend court hearings. Over 6000 were issued in the pilot areas last year. In Essex, where 1500 were issued, cautions for drunk and disorderly behaviour fell by two thirds, and prosecutions fell by three-quarters. Bureaucracy cut, punishments enforced. One local officer called this "the best thing to happen to policing for a long time."
These powers are on top of existing powers which can be already used where pubs and clubs are a problem. But it is crucial that local police are aware of the potential of the powers and use them effectively.
Additionally, we are taking action on graffiti: from the 1st of April there will be a ban on sales of spray paint to those under 16 years old.
Second, we need new approaches to drive down drug-related crime. Through the Proceeds of Crime Act there are greater powers to seize the goods and assets of criminals - preventing them from profiting form their crime.
We’ve introduced Drug Testing and Treatment Orders, and are funding arrest referral workers in every police station. Now we are broadening and deepening that approach.
Last year local police started drug testing people charged with acquisitive crime in the 30 highest crime areas in the country. Over 3,500 offenders a month are now being tested for class A drugs. Over half of those are testing positive for heroin or cocaine or both. Those testing positive should be assessed by an arrest referral worker and directed as rapidly as possible to appropriate treatment with the courts being kept informed of their results and progress.
From the beginning of April we are extending this approach to cover another 36 areas: more problem drug users being taken from custody to treatment.
There is still a long way to got but we have started a process that will lead to every addict being identified and then tracked into treatment, managing their case through the whole criminal justice system, including aftercare for those leaving prison. Tackling not just the crime itself, but the underlying cause.
Third, with increased investment we now have record police numbers. Over 138,000 in England and Wales - 11,000 more than when we came to office in 1997.
Increasingly, these officers are backed by Community Support Officers. More than 3,000 of them now. A guaranteed, visible, effective, reassuring presence in communities up and down the land - who can stay on patrol when uniformed officers may be diverted to other tasks.
We should be looking to expand CSOs as a good support to local police. We want a modern police service more responsive to local communities and better able to deal with all types of crime.
Fourth, Police, probation and courts are working together far more closely than ever before.
Lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service are now moving into police stations to provide advice and support on charging, and later this year will take over this role on a statutory basis.
The Crown Prosecution Service and courts are working together to manage cases end to end through the system and to support witnesses much better through the process.
Chief officers from all local criminal justice agencies are meeting regularly through the new local Criminal Justice Boards to agree local performance plans and strategies for improving public confidence.
All of this backed by the most radical overhaul of criminal justice law and procedure in a generation through last year’s Criminal Justice Act.
And these measures are having a real effect:
-Pilot schemes where the CPS advised the police on charging have led to a 15% increase in conviction rates and a 30% increase in guilty pleas.
-Ineffective trial rates in the Crown Court have fallen by almost a quarter
-Fine enforcement rates are rising - to 74%; and
-The number of offences brought to justice each year is almost 70,000 up on what it was two years ago
A clear message is now going out to offenders. The days of multiple adjournments and games playing are over. Where you are charged with an offence, expect that trial to go ahead. And where you are convicted and sentenced expect that sentence to be enforced in a tough and rigorous way.
But there is more that we must do to cut crime in our communities. We have been working hard with the police on the issue of the handful of individuals make the lives of the law-abiding majority a misery, blighting whole communities.
A hard core of prolific offenders - just 5,000 people - commit around 1 million crimes each year, nearly 10 percent of all crime. That’s only 15 or 20 people for each of our Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. Yet they are wreaking havoc.
The financial loss is estimated to be at least £2 billion a year.
We need catching and convicting these prolific offenders to become a key priority for local Crime and Disorder Partnerships.
We will ask them, by the summer, to identify in each of the 376 partnership areas an average of 15-20 people - more in bigger CDRPs, fewer in smaller ones - who are the most prolific offenders, the most persistently anti-social in their behaviour and who pose the greatest threat to the safety and confidence of their local communities.
This hard core of offenders may include local gang leaders, drug dealers, vandals, car thieves and others whose prolific anti-social behaviour is causing most harm to local neighbourhoods.
We will use the National Intelligence Model to help identification. Once targeted, it will be possible for all of the Agencies concerned to focus, and bear down on, the same key group of offenders.
To target these prolific offenders the police will deploy modern surveillance techniques and intensive intelligence gathering - including individually targeted CCTV - to collect evidence to support more successful prosecutions. This is especially important in neighbourhoods where prosecutions for anti-social behaviour have been hindered by witness intimidation.
We are determined to tackle this small group of offenders who do so much harm. And if we have to give new powers to the police - we will do so.
One issue has already been raised with me by the Metropolitan Police. That is whether existing powers to intercept the phone calls of known criminals can be used to gather intelligence on these prolific offenders.
Currently, interception of communications or intrusive surveillance can be authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), against any offender who is likely to commit a serious offence. This is defined as an offence which, if committed by an individual over 21 with no previous convictions, is likely to attract a sentence of at least three years imprisonment.
The Met believe that the threshold is too high for intrusive surveillance and prevents them from carrying out such activity on people who may be prolific offenders but whose offending has not reached the level required by the Act.
We will review this situation with them and, if necessary, legislate to give the police the powers they need.
Equally, we will ensure that once caught and convicted these offenders face appropriate sentences through the new sentencing guidelines.
In prison, or when serving community punishment, they will get intensive support and supervision to help them to break with the life of crime.
When those who have been in prison are released they will be intensively supervised to consolidate progress made in prison and to prevent relapse into drug taking and offending lifestyles.
But it will also be made clear to them that they have a real choice - ‘Reform or Return’. We will ensure that these individuals are monitored intensively. And if they take up crime again then they will face a very swift return to the courts.
Tackling the prolific offenders will bring real relief to our communities. But in the long-term we must ensure that others do not drift into crime and in their return become hard-core offenders.
Prevention is the key. We have set out a framework for identifying vulnerable children in the Children’s Green Paper. Now agencies at a local level must work together to identify those children and young people most at risk of becoming prolific offenders. And put in place intensive programmes of support to prevent them sliding into anti-social and offending behaviour. To give young people the best start in life we are investing in the early years through SureStart And for those individuals and communities left behind in the nineties, we have offered opportunities through the New Deal and our regeneration programmes.
The essence of this approach is local partnership.
We can’t make the decisions, but we can provide a framework of powers. Then it is the job of local leadership to act.
We will work with you. If you need greater powers, we will give them to you. We share a common interest.
The powers we have given you can be used to make a real difference and it is the quality of the local partnership which makes the difference between policing that is random and inconsistent and policing that is genuinely in touch with the local community.
It is essential that we take this agenda forward together. We can help but only you can make it happen on the ground. My purpose in addressing you today is to offer you a genuine partnership with us in meeting the challenge of crime and disorder in our communities. It is in all our interests that we succeed.
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