The British Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, last night challenged head-on the populist view that increasing police numbers will lead to a decline in crime. Mr Straw was unveiling the details of a £250 million crime reduction strategy.
The Home Secretary also distanced himself from some forms of "zero tolerance" policing as he warned chief constables they too must accept the kind of efficiency reforms that had swept through the rest of the public sector under the Conservatives.
Mr Straw told MPs of the details of his crime reduction strategy, aimed at tackling the family breakdown and the social exclusion which breeds crime, as the Home Office published "seminal" new research which challenges some of the more populist "law and order" notions about the effectiveness of putting more "bobbies on the beat", of passing more and stiffer prison sentences and of setting up neighbourhood watch schemes.
In its place the "evidence-based" crime reduction strategy pushes the police to concentrate their efforts on repeat attacks on the same victims and to focus crime prevention measures on crime "hot spots". It also requires the criminal justice system to tackle the social causes of crime through long-term investment in children, families and schools.
The Home Office research will be used to channel the extra funding into programmes that work in cutting crime and disorder. Projects that fail to pass the "what works" test will face losing funds.
Mr Straw announced he was cancelling a planned £6 million cut in the probation service and instead giving it an £18 million boost next year. A further £660 million over the next three years is to be made available for the prison service to pay for extra capacity to meet rising numbers and to expand treatment programmes.
The official research published yesterday, "Reducing Offending", questions the effectiveness of "zero tolerance" policing - a policy Mr Straw once strongly espoused - saying that while there was "moderately strong evidence" it could reduce serious crime in the short term there were large question marks over its long-term impact.
But the Shadow Home Secretary, Sir Norman Fowler, claimed the new police budgets would mean that many police forces would face reductions in their strengths: "Rather than more and more policemen and women on the beat, we face the prospect of less, and they would not sensibly be replaced by red-coated local authority street patrols," he said.