Congratulations to Adam Jogee (whose campaign I blogged about before) on winning the election to be member of the Youth Parliament for Haringey.

Adam tells me that his two deputies are Farjina Begum from Tottenham and Sam Newton-Fenner from Muswell Hill – which makes for a nice cross-borough balance: one from the west, one from the middle and one from the east.

Adam’s stickers clearly worked!

In case you’ve not seen any reports of this so far – at least one local person has been conned by a group of people pretending to be Haringey Council waste collection staff.

The scam seems to be that they spot properties with rubbish in the front, offer to remove it, charge a small fee and then just dump the rubbish round the corner. Needless to say – they aren’t genuine Haringey staff.

If you spot anyone trying out this scam, or are suspicious about someone passing themselves off as a council worker, you can ring Haringey Customer Services on 020 8489 1000.

I’m quoted in The Times today, talking about the Government proposals to cut off the phone lines used in newspaper or phone booth adverts for prostitutes:

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat equalities spokeswoman, said: “It is a very good thing that the government is looking at this, but there is a danger that it could drive prostitution underground. Any moves to try to eradicate the client side would have to be incredibly carefully handled. In an ideal world prostitution shouldn’t exist, but we don’t live in an ideal world.”

You can read the full story here.

I don’t know about Seb Green other than how his case has been reported in the media, so with that caveat – it looks an interesting story of how someone who has committed a crime paying restitution to the community can be better outcome for all concerned than simply locking them up.

This teenager from Weymouth stole a boat in 2003, headed out to sea, ran into trouble, had to be rescued (running up large costs for the emergency services), was prosecuted – and given a supervision referral order. So far, so normal – and you can easily imagine how this case might have seen people jumping on the ‘tough on crime’ soapbox demanding tougher sentences for people in such cases etc etc.

Except – and to his credit – Seb Green is now carrying out a sponsored walk around Britain to raise funds to give the local coastguard and also another charity in order to pay amends for his earlier behaviour.

All in all, I think his future (not a trivial matter – both because he’s a fellow human and also because even if you give someone a tough jail sentence in such circumstances – they still come out of jail again at some point) and also our community are better off for this outcome.

This makes it a good reminder that simply always demanding longer jail sentences isn’t the smart answer to tackling crime. Having youth and charity workers help put Seb Green back on the straight and narrow has almost certainly worked much better than sending him to jail would have.

Important report from the Commons Select Committee just published – details courtesy of the BBC. (Select Committees are made up of MPs from all parties – which gives reports like this more weight as you know their conclusions are ones shared across parties).