I’ve come here to plead guilty. Over the years, I’ve put out dozens of articles, hundreds of press releases and thousands of leaflets. In them all, the probation service has barely featured. So yes – I am guilty of largely neglecting what should be one of the most important public services.

I hope I’ve begun to put that right since joining the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team in Parliament last year. And why do I feel that the probation service should be considered one of the most important?

It’s because it is at much at the forefront of fighting crime as the police. The figures are stark: six out of ten people released from jail go on to commit another crime within two years of their release.

Right there – at the heart of where the probation service works – is a key front in the fight against crime. And in case my military metaphors mean you mistake me for a general (or Paddy Ashdown), let me add that there is also another, more humane perspective. If we are to cut re-offending rates, that means helping people who leave jail put their lives back together, getting them out of the cycle of crime and back on their own two feet. Many of them are people who, frankly, have committed horrible wrongs and are people you or I probably wouldn’t want to sit down and share an evening with. Yet those in the Probation Service have to work them, do work with them, and we all benefit from when they succeed.

Because – unless we cut those re-offending rates we are hobbling the struggle against crime. And our rising prison population will not fall.

So, yes – the theory of the Government’s plans for the National Offender Management Scheme (NOMS) should be music to Lib Dem ears – the potential for end to end management of each offender with all the services and support needed, with costs saved, innovation encouraged, and giving the courts and the public greater confidence that community sentencing can work, all leading to lower re-offending rates – oh, and I’m the Christmas Fairy.

Because the key word is “potential”. NOMS has the potential to improve joint working between those involved in working with offenders in custody and those doing so in the community.

It has the potential to improve the resettlement of offenders by developing co-ordinated resettlement plans. It has the potential to increase the effectiveness of the way in which individual sentences are planned and managed from the pre-sentence report right through to release. Perhaps, most importantly, it has the potential to reduce re-offending.

But the restructurings and mergers are chaotic, and fragmentation and profit are not the natural allies of success. And the rush to launch NOMS makes us question the rigour of the business plan and the likelihood of success.

The thorough consultations which heralded in the new form of probation servicein 2001 followed lengthy consultation with all parties involved in the Criminal Justice System.Most who worked in the system felt that the establishment of 42 regional probation boards gave the Probation Service a national voice and clear focus, while maintaining the local accountability that was at the root of its success.

But now probation boards, which have a statutory obligation to provide services, will be replaced by probation trusts, which will not.The strength of the Probation Service has been rooted in it being run on a local level. The Probation Boards have brought a broad range of skills and experience to their work because they are part of the local community and of statutory services.

Under NOMS there is the risk of losing these benefits of a service rooted in the local community. Local co-operation between the courts, the police, the CPS and the Probation Service has been crucial in reducing crime and in public protection work, most notably with sex offenders and youth offenders.

Losing this local co-operation will be counter-productive as it will be produce a less efficient and less effective Criminal Justice System.

One of the risks is that without proper care outside of prison, the courts (and the politicians and public pressuring them) look to lock up more people for longer periods of time – putting more pressure on a prison system that is already struggling to cope.

Whereas prison should clearly remain the penalty for anyone who commits violent or sexual crime, Liberal Democrats believe that non-custodial sentences can be a more appropriate punishment for some offences as indeed can be restorative justice.

Tough community sentences can be more effective than prison at reducing re-offending and giving offenders skills for legitimate work, and are more cost-effective. Restorative justice can produce real results too.

But for all that to work, we need a fully functioning Probation Service too.

The aim must be to ensure that those sent to prison leave crime behind on their release and become responsible citizens and those sentenced to non-custodial sentences are properly managed.

Only then will we have safer streets and social justice.

You think the intensity will never fade – but it does. Just after the July 7 tube bombings we were all so alert. We all looked around every tube carriage we entered, stared at everyone carrying a rucksack, worrying about people fidgeting with cables (Walkman? IPod? bomb?). Vigilance fades. The atmosphere is nowhere near as tense as it then was. But the threat is still here.

And let’s be clear. I don’t want to die. I certainly haven’t finished annoying my children as yet and look forward one day to aggravating them further by offering them my advice on how to bring up their children – should they ever produce any. So I welcome the Government’s Terror Bill that began its journey through Parliament this week.

Much of the proposed legislation is a no-brainer – for example making an offence of going to a terrorist training camp or being found preparing a terrorist act. But there is one part of the bill that seriously worries me. And the way Parliament works, most of the time you have to vote for or against the whole package – passing everything or rejecting it all. Both of these outcomes would be highly unsatisfactory as the legislation stands at the moment.

The Government had to back down on one of its proposals before publishing the Bill – to make an offence of ‘the glorification of terrorism’. It was so woolly, so undefined – one man’s freedom fighter being another man’s terrorist.

It would be easy to legally define Nelson Mandela as a terrorist (remember when the ANC believed in bombs and the armed struggle?)- and so catch out any who praise him. Which makes the point that blanket, poorly worded definitions catch all sorts of people other than those intended who we might all agree should be the targets of legislation.

This leaves the big remaining problem – the Government’s determination to change the rules about holding terror suspects without charge from 14 days to 90 days. They are now trying to move the goal posts by saying that a judge must have oversight and the police will have to request continuation of such an extension every seven days.

Detention without charge strikes at the heart of the principles of the British justice system. This isn’t though about vague legal principles or nice warm words – it’s about whether ordinary people can be locked up even if there isn’t enough evidence to bring them to trial. That should only be done in the most extreme of circumstances for the shortest possible period.

Of course the authorities always say they really know X is dangerous – but then they really “knew” there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq didn’t they? Just as they really “knew” the Birmingham Four, the Guildford Six and Judith Ward were guilty. Only one small problem – they weren’t guilty of the terrorist acts the authorities “knew” they’d done. They were innocent. And while innocent people were locked up, the guilty were left roaming free.

Now whilst the police are doing a truly extraordinary job in terms of keeping us safe – particularly in London where the attacks took place – it is in the nature of policing to want more powers. And it is in the responsibility of politicians to ensure that the powers granted are appropriate – not simply automatically agree.

There are other, far more legitimate ways a suspected terrorist could be detained if the police feel they need more time than 14 days. For example, people could be charged with a lesser offence – such as the new one of acts preparatory to terrorism, while evidence is being gathered for other charges.

Far too often the Government take the soft option of talking tough and introducing legislation – curbing liberties as a first choice, not a last resort. They talk the talk about extreme circumstances, great care, carefully supervision and on and on, but we end up with the farcical absurdity of an old man being held under anti-terrorism legislation for shouting one heckle at a Labour conference. What would they have done if he’d dared heckled twice … ?

These days pretty much everyone talks tough on crime. It sometimes feels like it is harder to find a politician who doesn’t talk tough on crime than it is for the police to catch a burglar, though even in London the police do sometimes catch burglars!

But there are two very different types of toughness. There’s the vindictive toughness and there’s the crime-cutting toughness. The two aren’t the same.

What do I mean? Well, consider this statistic:- if someone leaves prison and gets a job the chance of them committing a crime is cut by between one-third and one-half compared with someone who leaves prison and heads into unemployment.

So what’s your response if the government puts on special measures to help released prisoners find work? Do you go for the vindictive toughness, screaming in tabloid speak about how that’s all wrong, it’s special perks for prisoners, it’s rewarding wrong-doing and it’s typical of the moral decay of the country, blah blah blah?

Or do you praise effective action to cut crime – focusing on the future crime victims who have been saved the trauma and damage by action which cuts the number of future crimes?

Do you talk tough now or do you cut crime in the future? What matters more – being vindictive now or saving people from crime in the future?

I think you can guess my answer . . . ! Because whilst there are some crimes I want to see tougher jail sentences for – such as those involving knife crime (oh by the way – tough on crime Mr Blair and his Labour MPs – didn’t want to vote for that. Strange isn’t it how they want to increase jail sentences for just about everything under the sun except if the Liberal Democrats suggest it? Not exactly grown up politics) – we’re never going to be locking up for life and throwing away the key everyone who is jailed for any offence.

People come out of jail – and whether or not they re-offend is one of the crucial decisions we – the community, the government – can influence to alter the overall crime rate.

It’s much like raising children really – you can beat them, punish them, keep them in their room – and if a child is brutalised it will be brutal – if a child is neglected – it has less chance of taking a responsible role in society. It’s not rocket science.

This doesn’t mean that children shouldn’t be punished. Oh yes they should. Rules are rules. Boundaries are boundaries. And when crossed there has to be something tough- tough enough to make them stop, make them think, make them understand and motivate them not to do it again. Them’s the basics.

As it is with children – it is with adults – with knobs on – so to speak.

So we have this problem. The prison population is rising and the vast majority of people released from prison re-offend within two years.

Violent and repeat offenders must be locked up. There are, however, a large number of low-level, non-violent offenders who currently get prison sentences often for drug offences of a few weeks that would be better dealt with through tough community sentences.

We need to deal with the drug problems that so many who commit crimes have – not just expose them to the drug dealers in prison and risk making them more dependent on the most dangerous drugs.

An appropriate punishment, rigorously administered to non-violent offenders to pay back their debt directly to the community. They would be armed with usable skills that would help cut re-offending.

Those offenders sent to prison should be subjected to a tough working day, with education and training the priority. It is no surprise the re-offending rates are so high when many prisoners leave unable to read or write.

These measures will cost – if done properly. Talking about teaching prisoners to read and write so they have a better chance of a job and a lower chance of re-offending is easy, but will only happen with resources.

But at the moment huge sums of money are spent on reinforcing failure. It costs just under £100,000 on average to create a new prison place (that’s the average cost in the last five years) and then it costs between £15,000 and £50,000 each and every year for each prison place.

Putting more effort into cutting re-offending there isn’t only good for cutting crime – and never forget those future victims of crime who are thereby saved – but it can also make financial sense. Gordon over in No.11 really should approve of such prudence!

In terms of tackling crime outside of handing out prison sentences – anti-social behaviour is the most important area. Labour loves dishing out ASBOs – and they’re certainly good for sounding tough in the media – but far, far too often they don’t work. The latest figures show that four in ten of all ASBOs were breached.

Lib Dems take the tougher route. In Islington we pioneered the ASBO+, an ASBO that comes with a support package to help stop the behaviour that caused the anti-social behaviour in the first place.

We also pioneered the use of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs), in which the perpetrators of nuisance behaviour have to sign an agreement with the police and local authority setting out minimum standards of conduct.They work.Even the Home Secretary Charles Clarke last year praised the ABC on Question Time, describing it as “better than an ASBO.”

And it is the Liberal Democrat councils around the country that have tackled anti-social behaviour and crime effectively and swiftly up and down the country.

Between 2002 and 2004, when Labour were controlling Newcastle City Council, violent crime rose by 54% and motor vehicle crime rose by 14%.Between 2004 and 2006 with the Lib Dems in control, violent crime fell by 12% and vehicle crime fell by 11%

Between 2001 and 2004, Labour-run Manchester saw burglary increase by 6%, whereas Liberal Democrat-run Liverpool saw burglary decrease by over 20%.

Lib Dem-run Islington has seen a drop in robbery of over 25% between 2002 and 2005, whilst Labour-run Brent has seen an increase of over 16%

And we do it – we achieve results – with long hard work and policies that don’t make great headlines but do get great results.

So – I believe Lib Dems have to hold on proudly to our approach on crime and justice – to keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs. As to accusations of LibDems being soft on crime – I say – don’t let the buggers get you down. Results are what count. Effective action is what matters, not cheap headlines in the name of toughness.

I gave this speech during the debate at conference on the party’s Meeting the Challenge policy paper.

Into my surgery comes yet another complainant, and the complaint this time – gangs of youths hanging around, or zooming on mopeds or just sitting on a wall.

Moving or still, it seems, young people attract complaints – just as if they’re silent, they’re sullen and threatening, and if they’re making noise – they’re rowdy and threatening. Sometimes they really can’t win – it is as if the problem is being young – but at least they can say they are moving to putting youth behind them each and every day.

And if they wear hoods … well, I have to say nice things about hoodies because one of my daughters has been known to wear one, and she is just the loveliest … and if watching this, now doubtless squirming with embarrassment at her mother!

But seriously – the problem is real. It may often be one of perception rather than reality, but fears needs addressing whatever they are based on. And think about the underlying causes – the environment, the buildings, the street layout around them.

I recently gave evidence to a local planning enquiry to support local people against yet another thoughtless, ugly, cheap, squashed, anonymous tower block. It was the third in a year like that which I’ve appeared at. If these developments were well-designed and attractive – they would not run into the sort of hail of protest that regularly greets them and they would not blight the built environment nor the aspirations of the people living there for decades to come.

We desperately need more housing – but we don’t need built-in future deprivation. But the presumption is in favour of development in planning rules encourage exactly this. For if the developer loses a planning decision – they can appeal. But if the residents lose – they can’t. Big business can appeal; ordinary residents can’t. Where’s the fairness in that?

And developers can come back again and again and again with application after application after application until they succeed – but if someone in the area campaigns against them, gets elected to the council – does all the right and praiseworthy things about taking part in our democratic process – they get barred from the decision making process in the interests of “fairness”. Well that’s not fair either – that’s kow-towing to big business and developers again. What has New Labour come to where it bans people from making a decision if they stand up to big business interests? No wonder David Cameron wants the Tories to be more like Blair’s Labour – they’re even more in hock to big business interests that the Conservatives ever were.

And so we end up with high rise, poorly designed, lowest common denominator housing fostered on areas of deprivation on the cheap. Cheap, shoddy housing is then defended on the grounds “but it is needed”. But that is no excuse for poor quality.

Developers won’t like me for this – but I think they get away with murder far too often. And yet their record at producing good or bad, popular or unpopular, developments barely features in decisions about whether to let them go ahead with a development or not. I think that should change – we should make the quality of a development a top priority in giving or refusing permission – and we should make sure the views of the public are genuinely represented in setting quality. Let’s have a developers’ league table – test them by interviewing the residents of their previous developments. If residents and neighbours like them – go to the top of the table and have a better chance of getting future planning permission. Fail and be unpopular – then it should be sorry, you’re not building round here next time.

But to return to where I started – how can you not hang out in the streets when your bedroom meets only the minimum size requirements? And when your bedroom is a box and your parents are in the sitting room – where else can you be with your friends? Have can you get on well with your neighbours when paper-thin walls and poor sound insulation means every squeak and thump gets on your nerves? How can you avoid annoying our neighbours when there’s no place to throw the ball but against someone’s wall?

There has been a lot of talk in recent decades about designing-out crime. It’s about time we stopped developers designing-in anti-social behaviour. Of course there is much more that goes wrong with serious anti-social behaviour, but we should tackle the causes of those initial frictions and hostilities that feature so frequently in the parade of people who come to see me in my surgery.

And it is always the folk living in the most deprived areas who are the more blighted by these problems – locking in problems rather than helping people reach their potential, when what we really need is the best building there is, to raise people’s eyes and aspirations and give them the surroundings to thrive.

I commend the paper and support the motion, but I ask conference to remember that equality and removing barriers take many forms.

I gave this speech at the launch of Britian after Blair, to which I contributed a chapter.

Blair will leave this country far more racially divided than when he came to office. That is the Blair legacy.

I could spend the whole fringe meeting, all day, even all week talking about the problems of racism in this country. But as I’m no William Gladstone and I think you’ll start waning about the third hour of a speech (and our chair tonight is quite fierce), I’ll restrict myself to one small but highly illustrative example.

A couple of years ago, Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson was being asked about a transfer shenanigan involving his club and a Spanish club. He was asked about public comments made by the Spanish club. His response, as reported in the Guardian? “You can’t trust these people. You are expecting me to trust a Spaniard.”

The response to this? Well, nothing. The Guardian buried it in the middle of another story on page 5 – of their sports section – and that was about as high profile as it got. But just ponder his words (as reported by the Guardian, libel lawyers please note) again. Dismissing millions of people as being untrustworthy because of their race. What would your response be if I got up and said “All Asians were untrustworthy?” or “All blacks?”

Yet no-one thought this was a story – and indeed if Alex Ferguson’s words were twisted, nor did he think it necessary to correct them.

What does this incident tells us? Well it tells me there is no room for complacency in the fight against racism. With an increasingly diverse population, we can no longer think of racism as only being about whites and blacks – or whites and blacks and Asians. In a multi-cultural society there is a multiplicity of different racisms possible – not all involving white-skinned people and with white-skinned people sometimes being on the receiving end too.

And second, it tells me that far too often we are far too casual about racism. That quote should have been a major scandal – or a major egg on face for the media depending on whether the quote was true or not. We see it too in the shrug of the shoulders and general indifference to the shocking figures of discrimination in the police’s national DNA database.

One third – that’s right, one third, of the black population of England and Wales is already on the database – a number far out of proportion to their share of the overall population. Of course, the racists of the BNP just mutter, “oh well, blacks cause lots of crime so it’s no wonder there are so many of them in the database”.

This does not stand up to examination; what the figures show clearly are that the police are disproportionately arresting black and ethnic minorities. They also show that disproportionately more innocent DNA is from black and ethnic minorities than from other communities – i.e. they are arresting not only disproportionately but wrongly. For example, in London, 57% of all innocent DNA is from black people.

With only 3,000 words to play with for my chapter (although Teather I note you got away with more!) I could barely begin to scratch at the issues of racial harmony, multiculturalism and bridging the gaps between our communities.

And it is the unquestionable result of Blair’s American-inspired foreign policy, played against the backdrop of a rising tide of religious fundamentalism in the world, that matters have worsened. Add to this the pressures on public services – which make it oh so easy to blame people from a different background for your health waiting list, or your lack of school places – and the natural tendency of new communities to stick together – with the divisiveness that can bring – and I think we have to face up to some serious problems.

Labour’s remedy – legislation, the Union Jack and the Britishness test ain’t going to do it. We have to bridge the divisions that Blair has created.

The first bridge must address the divide between those already living here and newcomers as they clash over the pot of scarce public resources. It Presents itself in my surgeries as ‘not fair’ because ‘asylum seekers get all the houses’. But it goes to a very deep and unresolved schism-that of’need’ versus ‘entitlement’.

I argue that we have to address these issues around the Holy Grail of’need’ head on – in order to balance it more fairly with the ‘entitlements’ of the already heres.

This is most acute when it comes to housing. We need not only to introduce a system of allocation that is fair and addresses that clash of need versus entitlement – but to have one that is seen to be fair – published and audited – rather than the often obscure and unpublicised housing allocation rules which can feed rumours and hatreds. And that in order for people to agree that it is fair – you need public participation in decisions over the process and systems in the first place.

The second bridge we need addresses the issue of segregation where it becomes extreme or hostile to other communities. We saw in France and Holland where burying heads in the sand leads: to race riots sparked by the incendiary neglect of inequality and segregation.

Under Blair we have become more segregated – both residentially and socially. I believe we need to rebalance our historical financial support for separate communities with financial incentives for joint working – but obviously without destroying diversity and its benefits.

For example, we need to address issues around schooling – where the current common parental preference for a school where the majority of the pupils match the ethnicity or race of their own child will almost certainly exacerbate segregation unless counter mechanisms are introduced.

Of course the best way forward has to be through ‘soft’ measures. Sport is perhaps the most obvious soft way of bringing communities together – but we need to think much wider – from twinning towns with Middle-East towns,having schools of different faiths sharing common facilities through to looking at what we teach in history – perhaps it is time for more Sulieman the Great and less Napoleon?

And the third of the great divides that we can thank TB for and must bridge- is the growing discrimination against, and fear of, Muslims – which is greater than for any other group.

There has been so much damage done to the image of Muslims with the reporting of news from overseas, where so-called Islamic terrorists often feature – but when those fighting the terrorists, or the victims of terrorism, are also Muslim this often goes unmentioned. The drip-drip effect of linking the word ‘Muslim’ and the word ‘terrorism’ – but not linking “victim” and “Muslim” in the same way – is pernicious.

Part of the solution is to be firm in our values. We live in a democracy.No group-be that Muslims, Jews, Christians, or anyone else has a right to express its disagreement with the democratically elected government by any means other than peaceful protest or political campaigning. That is anon-negotiable first principle.

But we need to also welcome debate and change within the Muslim community.We need a greater cultural exchange and we need much more than my time allows.

Bridging communities in Britain after Blair is going to take improved communication; funding initiatives and schemes that encourage communities together; locally negotiated compromises and fairness and transparency in the allocation of scarce public resources; the use of politics as a uniting rather than a dividing force; a more realistic understanding of the negative impact of our foreign policy; and a greater degree of mutual understanding and cultural awareness.

While these ideas won’t create the melting pot ideal of my youth, they should go some way to ensuring that all the different peoples and communities in our land can live more harmoniously.