On Monday I went to visit the new, wham bam, all singing all dancing communications centre for the Met Police.

Having spent much of my time when on the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) banging on about the appalling lack of response when people tried to ring their local police stations – today was pretty satisfying.

About five years ago or so I carried out a survey of police stations with front counters across London. We rang them all – allowing up to 100 rings (6 minutes +) – for them to answer. The results were a damning report to the MPA showing that something like 60% were not answered within that time.

I then wrote to all the Borough Commanders in London with their results. No – it didn’t win me a popularity contest – but it sure made the point!

Anyway – the centre is meant to be the answer to all those unanswered or late-answered calls. The new centre along with the new policing pledge means that you will have your 999 call answered within 10 seconds and the police will aim to attend within 12 minutes. Your call to the non urgent number 0300 123 1212 will be answered within 30 seconds and the police aim to be with you within an hour.

Given how much of the dissatisfaction about the police is around their non-answering and their non-turning up in timely fashion – this is definitely the way to go. And the new centre and the enthusiasm of the lead and staff in this state of the art centre is pretty impressive.

So now they have the building, they have the system and they’ve made the pledge. Proof and pudding we look forward to!

Met with Dave Grant, Haringey’s police commander, this morning. Haringey police are doing really well and almost all the indicators are green (they use a traffic light system to show what’s on target, what’s nearly on target – and red shows that something is not right). The next key area they are going to tackle with the same determination as the crime reduction targets is public confidence – which is a really good area that does need some work.

A few years ago I was so fed up with hearing from local people that they couldn’t get through by phone to their local police station or that they had rung the police about a crime and no-one had come that I did a constituency wide survey on unreported crime.

Unreported crime is important – because police resources are targeted where crime is reported – therefore if people don’t bother to report it – no funding comes along and it is a self-defeating circle. The survey showed – not hugely surprisingly – that people didn’t report crimes mainly because they didn’t think there was a point. Either they couldn’t get hold of someone (short of 999) or even if they did – no one came or showed much interest in catching criminals.

Those days have diminished and with more police on the street, PCSOs, Safer Neighbourhood Panels and so on there is far more of a good relationship between police and those who are policed working together.

But there is still some work to do on better response times and making sure that the people you are responding to are looked after properly. So I am very pleased that Commander Grant is making this a priority in the coming months and look forward to the next set of great statistics in due course.

Spent about three and a half hours at Haringey’s Youth Offending Services receiving a thorough briefing on all aspects of how our young people are treated in and around the justice system. I met a number of very, very committed officers and volunteers who are incredibly enthusiastic about the work they are doing.

The area that slightly worried me was around restorative justice – where the people are phenomenal, the effect on dealing with crime justly and cutting crime very welcome – but the funding is minimal.

The Government seems to have very deep pockets when it comes to shoving people in prison – where young offenders learn from the criminal experts and don’t change their behaviour, with the result – very high reoffending rates. But those pockets turn very shallow when it comes to smarter approaches to cutting crime – such as putting in more effort to help change people’s behaviour so that they don’t commit more crime in the future.

Followed by one of my last visits to sheltered housing on my summer project of visiting every sheltered housing or supported housing scheme in Hornsey & Wood Green. Just as last year – when my mission was to visit every shop on every little parade or high street on foot – and I only got to around 60% – so this year I have only managed about 60% of the schemes. However, I may be over-ambitious (and short of time) but it has been so worthwhile – and outside of taking up the key issues which are, as ever, about bus driver behaviour, broken and dangerous paving stones, closure of our local Post Offices and free foot care (lack of) – I have had the most interesting and rewarding time talking to the people I have met about their lives.

The Metropolitan Police Authority (on which I served for five years) is having a ‘have your say’ on policing in London to hear what Londoners think should be policing priorities for 2010/11.

Whatever I think about the new management – for those who don’t get my nuance – I mean Boris Johnson, who has taken over the chair of the authority (which is why Ian Blair went bye-bye) – it is still an opportunity to say what you want the police to concentrate on in future.

The real question is whether contributions will see an affect on outcome as we are all very suspicious of consultation here Haringey. However, born an optimist, I hope people will contribute, and am then happy to do battle to get open and transparent analysis of the submissions and fight for them in the outcomes!

The questionnaire can be downloaded from www.mpa.gov.uk/yourviews/haveyoursay.htm

That’s the headline on a piece I did for the Liberal Democrat Education Association’s booklet, Liberal Democrats in Education: what we are thinking and doing, which has just come out:

Labour has poured huge sums of money into the youth justice system since they came to power in 1997 – but failed to make an impact on youth offending. Labour has used the justice system as the main focus for the provision of the social support that at risk children need through Youth Offending Teams and spent more than 10 times as much money on youth courts and custody than on preventative measures. This has led to more children entering the youth justice system than ever before without altering the level of criminality. This approach is based on an assessment of the symptoms rather than the causes of youth crime and a presumption that removing a few bad apples will save the barrel – but it will not work if the barrel has dry-rot.

There needs to be a shift in emphasis; criminalising children should be a last resort, not the first option. It is essential that young people are given the support and guidance they need to grow into responsible adults. A key factor in this is involvement in adult-supported activities. Whether this is the Cadets or a local drama group, it is through constructive activities that young people learn how to behave. Children from wealthier backgrounds tend to be involved in more adult-supported activities than those in poverty- and it is here that social exclusion enters the debate.

As with education, deprivation is a significant factor in determining outcomes. This is partly because wealth allows us to buy dance classes and drama lessons for our little cherubs, but also because people living in wealthier areas tend to be more willing to set up Scout Troupes or drama groups- they tend to have greater community spirit. This is where I believe good government can make a difference- by enabling community activities and releasing the latent good will that there is in our communities we can begin to build the community capital.

The fact is that stronger communities lower crime – the more people you know within a fifteen minute walk of your home, the lower the crime rate will be. Stronger communities mean more likelihood of intervention when people misbehave. The question must therefore be: how do we strengthen communities to prevent youth crime?

Central to this is giving back to communities a genuine role in the justice system – restorative justice, where victims confront a criminal with the consequences of their crime give both victims and perpetrators a better understanding of the motivation and impact of crimes; Community Justice Panels, where representatives of the local communities agree a course of reparation with the offender allow the community to feel that justice has been done; and Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs) which agree levels of acceptable behaviour with an offender can all contribute to a genuinely community-led justice system.

There needs to be an understanding of the context that allows young people to become criminals and a focus on creating the communities and activities that will divert children away from crime. Changing the system to include the community can help with this but it is also essential that adult-led activities – such as drama and drill- allow young people to learn how to behave and to develop aspirations. By simply fast-tracking children to custody, all Labour has done is spent an enormous amount of money and increased the public fear of crime – not a good result!

Today’s speech was about fighting crime – again. This time it was at a Local Government Association event, with a particular focus on young people.

Three kids wearing hoodies walking down the street towards you. What do you see? Three people about to mug you? Just another three people passing on the pavement? Or three kids whose birthdays you know? And who do they see in you? A suspicious stranger who doesn’t like them? Or a neighbour they say hello to?

It’s in that range of different actions and reactions that sits so many of the issues around youth crime and fear of youth crime – why it takes place, what its impact is and how to tackle it. It’s about how to tackle the evil-minded, how to reduce irrational fear – and also – and crucially – about how to build happy, cohesive communities where people are free to do there own thing – but also get along with, rather than fear, their neighbours.

So I am grateful to the Local Government Association for bringing us together to discuss this important topic and for inviting me to open this debate.

As an MP that represents an inner London constituency where our youth crime has become a national headline issue with stabbings and gang violence on the door step – answering the question of what we can do to tackle youth criminality is of great concern to me and my constituents.

And as our party’s Youth & Equalities spokesperson, I have been vocal is pressing our pro-youth agenda as opposed to the anti-youth agenda that dominates the news and the rhetoric of Labour and the Tories.

My third role and one that is perhaps less public is my continued and personal interest in home affairs issues. It’s really the area in which I cut my teeth as an MP, and I’m now a co-opted member of our the Home Affairs team in Parliament. I was pleased recently to endorse Chris Huhne’s new policy proposal on youth justice and crime.

The paper was called: “A life away from crime – a new approach to youth justice” – which I think goes someway in answering the question the LGA have set: is the balance right between prevention and enforcement?

The simple answer is no. Better enforcement simply will never be enough in itself.

We know this from some of the crime fighting successes – most notably cutting car thefts by making cars harder to steal, and not just trying to catch and punish car thieves. It’s been a similar issue with mobile phone thefts – yes, high profile policing has its role, but making a stolen phone unusable has a much bigger impact.

We also know this from a simple thought process: imagine a massively successful drive to better enforcement, with five times as many crimes resulting in a court punishment than at the moment. That’d be a pretty impressive leap forward wouldn’t it? But only around 1 in 100 crimes is punished in court at the moment. So we’d be multiplying up hugely the number of court cases and – even with any changes in sentencing rules – the number of people going to jail. And yet – both our courts and prison services are already hugely overloaded and frequently at breaking point. And in the end? We’d only have upped that figure from 1 in 100 to 5 in 100.

This isn’t just theoretical – we’ve seen a massive 86% rise in the number of 15 – 17 years in custody, and yet youth criminality remains the weeping sore of public policy. Because as the courts and jail services crack under the numbers, rehabilitation suffers, reoffending rates go up and crime doesn’t fall.

If you want to cut crime, we need to stop people committing it not just be punishing but also by preventing. That’s why I – and my party – are so keen to drastically increase spending on youth service provision. We have plenty of ideas of how increased spending would be spent. But sadly we seem alone in the national parties in advocating a coherent set policy that would see a significant redistribution of resources in favour of spending money on youth services to prevent crime in the first place.

The logic of this seems indisputable and the finances alone are pretty sound – preventing crime saves on money further through the judicial and criminal systems. In any question of how public resources should be allocated – prevention is always better than cure – if for no other reason than that it is cheaper. There are many five star hotels that are cheaper than a night at young offenders’ institution.

Our Home Affairs paper sets out clearly how we would charge local councils to draw up Youth Community Plans for more youth activity. But more radical than that, we would want to pass real spending powers to youth councils and the Youth Parliament.

Let’s be honest – what does a group of crusty councillors and politicians like myself know about providing service that will really capture the imagination of young people and instill the idea that there are alternatives to crime? A dilapidated youth centre, with ping pong and servicing Kia-Ora and a few stale biscuits is not going to cut the mustard with any self respecting teenager.

Another part of prevention is getting knives and guns off the streets. I have little doubt that this can be achieved by intelligence-led policing. Whilst not a new policy, the Liberal Democrat position of 10,000 more police officers instead of ID cards is relevant to our discussion. These officers, with youth dedicated PCSOs and neighbourhood teams, would be better placed to identify young people carrying offensive weapons.

And then there is rehabilitation, where local authorities have a pivotal role to play in rehabilitation. Whilst some young offenders do require incarceration where public safety as risk, prisons for young people just don’t work. Whilst they might create a few months respite for the communities plagued by antisocial behaviour, just think of how more anti-social those people are with the skills they have learnt on the inside.

Punishing someone for a crime in the past, but setting them up to offend many more times in the future is just short-sighted – vindictive rather than effective.

Liberal Democrats in Islington led the way with successful Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, which have slowed superseded ASBOs. The point is to work with the young person in addressing the causing of the problem and to set realistic targets – looking not just to remedying the past but also to stopping more crimes being committed in the future.

Anyway, I have spoken enough. I am keen to hear about successful ideas from the floor of how your local authorities have been addressing this issue.

But just to conclude. There is no silver bullet. It is a situation that is exacerbated by gimmicks and political attempts to steal the headlines by out toughing each other.

But that is just part of the story. I think at the heart of liberalism is the genuine belief of personal freedom – and one of those
f
reedoms is to be young. If we continue to demonise our youth, neglect public service provision and treat young criminals as outcasts is it little wonder they will turn their backs on us and ignore the rules we set.