An offence a day is the New Labour way

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 5th Sep 2008

Welsh Liberal Democrat Social Justice spokesperson Peter Black has hit out at Labour's record of having introduced 3605 new criminal offences since being elected in 1997.

Mr. Black said:

"This huge number of offences amounts to nearly one new criminal offence for each day that Labour have been in government and includes such gems as a maximum 6 month prison sentence for allowing an unlicensed concert in a church hall.

"For too long, policing and criminal justice policy have been decided by what sounds tough, rather than what works.

"Prison, a sentencing arms race between Labour and the Tories, and Labour's control-freak tendencies have been used as a proxy for real action on crime.

"Liberal Democrats have brought forward radical proposals designed to shift the debate away from posturing on penalties and towards catching criminals.

"For instance, both Labour and the Tories have repeatedly ducked the difficult decisions on police reform. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats are committed to a review of outdated working practices in the police."

Ends

Note to Editors

The ideas, outlined in the paper Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing, highlight the urgent need to move the criminal justice debate away from what sounds tough to what actually works, with a shift away from prison towards policing and detection.

The main proposals include:

· Reviewing the police contract including lifetime employment for 30 years, the single point of entry and pay levels

· Annual fitness tests for frontline officers

· Decentralising the force by scrapping counterproductive central targets, introducing the local setting of priorities and budgets and the

direct election of the majority of police authority members

· Creating a National Crime Reduction Agency to assess police and criminal justice policies on evidence and to spread best practice

· Respecting police pay awards from the Police Arbitration Tribunal

· 10,000 extra police on the streets, paid for by scrapping ID cards