Liberal Democrats vow to cut knife crime and put more police on our streets

8.32.17pm BST (GMT +0100) Sun 14th Sep 2008

Today, at their annual conference, the Liberal Democrats called for an extra 10,000 police officers on the streets, to be paid for by scrapping the ID card scheme, and for the use of neighbourhood policing, and an end to centralised targets that distort local police priorities.

Conference agreed that crime figures should be supervised by the Office of National Statistics and that crime and detection rates should be published at local government ward level.

Speaking from Bournemouth, Henry Vann, Liberal Democrat parliamentary campaigner for Bedford and Kempston said:

"Although overall crime has fallen, the fear of crime remains high, with many people distrusting of crime statistics, it is not helped that as few as one in a hundred crimes leads to a conviction in court."

"With more police on our streets and a reduction of centralised targets in favour of local priorities, not only will people feel safer, but our police will also be able to target the real criminals such as those who are selling knives to under-age children."

Henry added "Prison on its own has been shown not to work, the prison population in the UK has never been higher and is the highest in Europe. A shocking 92 per cent of young men on short-term custodial sentences re-offend within two years, we need to look at other ways of dealing with these offenders and come down hard on them.

"The current situation is a stain on John Howard's name."