Cameron Calls For Action Over Youth Violence

David Cameron called yesterday for action to confront the growing “anarchy in parts of the UK” and for magistrates’ maximum sentencing powers to be doubled to 12 months.

{mosimage}In a wide-ranging speech, made only hours before an 11-year-old was shot dead while playing football outside a Liverpool pub by what appeared to be a youth on a BMX bike, the Conservative leader decried the “rising tide of youth violence and antisocial behaviour”.

He said he wanted to see a wider use of the power that courts already have to ban young offenders from holding or applying for a driving licence.

“Common sense suggests that with young people you need to hit them where it hurts: in their lifestyle and their aspirations…I want to see this measure more widely used – and I don’t believe it should only be targeted at driving-related offences, as the government guidance suggests,” said Mr Cameron.

“I’d like to see judges and magistrates tell a 15-year-old boy convicted of buying alcohol or causing a disturbance that the next time he appears in court he’ll have his driving licence delayed. And then I’d like that boy to tell his friends what the judge said.”

The power to ban young offenders from driving was put on the statute book in 2000, but was not brought into force until 2004. There is little published evidence that the power has been widely used.

The Tory leader also demanded that powers contained in the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, but never brought into effect, allowing magistrates to hand down maximum jail sentences of a year, instead of six months, should now be implemented. “A 12-month sentencing power would enable community-based lower courts to get real criminals off the streets,” he said in a speech in Darwen, Lancashire.

He argued that current parole arrangements meant that those sentenced to six months were considered for release after only 13 weeks.

He claimed that magistrates’ sentencing powers were limited to little more than two months when the emergency early release scheme, which lets prisoners out 18 days before the end of their sentence, was taken into account.

Mr Cameron repeated his pledges to scrap the early release scheme, replace the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights that “chimes with British traditions and common sense” and create a “general bonfire” of targets which force the police to spend “more time on paperwork than they do on patrol”.

The measures were needed because Britain was suffering “a crisis of order” in which “violence grows in the fertile soil of antisocial behaviour”.

Describing two recent murders in Lancashire, he said: “These terrible events are part of a national trend – a crisis of order on Britain’s streets. A father in Warrington, Garry Newlove, who went outside to confront a gang of youths ended up bleeding to death on his doorstep. Seventeen dead children in London this year alone. This year, Tony Blair suggested that this spate of murders in our cities is a ‘specific problem within a specific criminal culture’ – that is, not part of a wider social problem. To me that betrays a deep complacency.” However, the proposal to double the sentencing powers of magistrates to 12 months was strongly criticised by penal reformers yesterday.

“Taken in isolation it could result in a massive increase in the prison population, compounding the existing problems of chronic overcrowding,” said Geoff Dobson, of the Prison Reform Trust. “The number of people given custody at magistrates courts has already risen from 25,016 in 1993 to 57,250 in 2005.”

Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, claimed the speech represented another “lurch to the right” by the Tory leader. Talk of “anarchy in the UK” was little more than “irresponsible scaremongering”.

She defended the government’s record on tackling antisocial behaviour, including a £4m investment in practitioners to work with youngsters at risk of becoming involved in crime.

She added: “The fact is that the Tories have no solutions and no family policies to speak of, other than going back to a two-tier family tax policy that would disadvantage and treat as second-class all children and families whose parents are widowed, separated or divorced.

“David Cameron is not proposing solutions for the future of our country, he is just lurching to the right to try to appease his divided party.”