The police need reform as much as the system

Raising the risk of convicting the innocent may ease the thirst for retribution, but it doesn't solve crime

It's hard to be that optimistic about the tone of the coming political argument over what Tony Blair has now unequivocally defined as the central element of the legislative agenda to be unveiled by a beleaguered monarch tomorrow.

For many of its opponents, the Criminal Justice Bill represents a wilfully draconian abandonment of ancient rights designed to ensure that a defendant is innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. For many of its more macho advocates, those same opponents are simply woolly liberals who, wedded to a supposedly obsolete notion that it is more important to prevent the conviction of an innocent person than the acquittal of a guilty one, show themselves more concerned for offenders than victims.

Insofar as the Prime Minister fits either of these caricatures, he's in the latter camp, declaring in a newspaper article on Sunday's that "we will rebalance the system emphatically in favour of the victims of crime" and that justice is currently "weighted towards the criminal". One of the most potent dangers in the coming debate is to ignore easily the most powerful of the Blair points, namely that Labour was right to claim crime as its own issue.

One of the higher lunacies in the first Blair term was the argument, uttered in my presence by at least one otherwise sentient Labour MP, that traditional working class Labour supporters would desert Labour because it was too hawkish on crime. You would not catch, say, Chris Mullin, the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee and a man of impeccably left background and credentials who happens to live among his Sunderland constituents subscribing to such an electorally myopic view. In the cycle of disadvantage, crime figures very high indeed. The middle classes complain loudest when it happens to them; some of the most depressed communities live with the most personally abusive forms of it every day.

Nor should liberal arguments obscure the many merits of the White Paper on which legislation will be based, as it tries to grapple with the manifold inefficiencies in what Blair rightly decries as a "19th-century criminal justice system trying to deal with 21st-century crimes". It is also progressive in its approach to sentencing. Mr Blunkett, commendably, wants prison to rehabilitate as well as punish. And the Home Secretary shows signs of agreeing with the Lord Chief Justice that magistrates are needlessly filling the prisons with too many non-violent offenders.

Critics will argue that this sits uneasily with his provision to double the custodial sentences magistrates are allowed to deliver. But that has more – and the Bill ought to make this plain – to do with extending the scope of offences that can be dealt with at the level of magistrate's courts than with adding to the prison population. The emphasis on restorative justice and greater attention to the victim should be applauded. Incidentally, the White Paper rightly identifies the fact that domestic violence accounts for a quarter of violent crime and that too many people are allowed, scandalously, to escape jury service.

Equally, however, the proponents of the coming Bill should be careful of rubbishing all the objections to it.There is a danger that some of the rhetoric decrying abuse by defence lawyers of the system misses the important point – that the vast majority of offences never get to court at all.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, pointed out shortly after the White Paper's publication in July that of every 100 crimes then recorded by the police, only about 24 were successfully detected. Of the 24 remaining, the police took action in 19. Four out of the 19 were either formally discontinued or written off by the Crown Prosecution Service. Of the remaining 15, five resulted in a caution, 9 resulted in a guilty plea or a conviction after trial, and just one resulted in an acquittal. Which exposes the dangers of creating too high an expectation of "rebalancing" of the court system in favour of the victim as a solution to crime.

Indeed the figures rather suggest that the police – whom politicians are usually more reluctant to take on publicly than lawyers – are playing a rather bigger part in the low proportion of convictions. It's true that Mr Blunkett is trying to introduce police reforms. But Mr Blair talked more in his piece about the use of DNA, new technology and freeing the police from red tape than some of the issues of the detection culture and systems raised in research for the Runciman Royal Commission in the early1990s, and sadly not much revisited since.

The archaic dependence on snouts in shady pubs, glamorised by TV drama, the sheer investigative incompetence of the sort casually exposed by the Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder and the extraordinary fact in an earlier White Paper that there was just one application for the job of detective inspector in one busy London division have stopped being the norm in some police forces. But not in by any means enough.

Which is one reason why Mr Blunkett should listen carefully before rejecting outright all the objections that will no doubt surface, at least in the Lords. Particularly as even the Liberal Democrats look prepared to try to reach a consensus that will protect much of the Bill.

Rightly Mr Blunkett abandoned Lord Justice Auld's recommendation for three levels of courts that would have taken out a whole swathe of jury trial. But there are signs that he is trying to chip away at jury trial by stealth. Not only isn't it clear, given that fraud trials produce an 83 per cent level of convictions, that they are too complex for the common man to hear? And the planned provision that judges can hear cases without juries if they fear nobbling needs at the very least to be tightly drawn so that it happens only where there is evidence, rather than merely a presumption, that intimidation is taking place.

So too, with a careful eye to the Law Commission's recommendations, should the provisions on revealing previous convictions and on double jeopardy. There is every case for codifying the circumstances in which a judge can rule that disclosure of previous convictions would help a proof rather than merely create prejudice. Very little for merely showing that the man in the dock is a bad man, while not necessarily the right bad man.

Similarly, the commission recommended that a second prosecution should only be possible in murder and allied cases; the Government will be on dangerous ground if it extends the scope to other offences, as it intends, and if the Bill is not very tightly drawn to ensure that it is not simply a second chance for the police after an incompetent first prosecution, or an opportunity for the media to clamour for retrials when it suits.

These are only examples. But they illustrate a real problem. Which is that, while increasing the risk that the innocent are convicted may ease the thirst for retribution and perhaps even the fear of crime itself, it does not solve crime itself. Rarely has a government been in a stronger position to acknowledge this without electoral damage than now. Yes, Labour Party liberals shouldn't bleat that every criminal justice reform is a betrayal of socialism. But nor should ministers assume that every expression of disquiet is a sop to the criminal. And both sides should start to think a little more about the deficiencies of the police.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk