An impractical idea that suggests Mr Blair is playing us for fools

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Plan to axe child benefits condemned

Bruce Anderson: Let's tame these feral children now

Tony Blair pleaded with his advisers for "eye-catching initiatives" on crime two years ago. Even if his pathetic memo had not been leaked, we would have seen through him by now. The "initiative" in yesterday's newspapers was an insult to the intelligence of the public. Everybody knows how spin works. They recognise that the Prime Minister wants to "send a signal". In this case, the message is that parents should take more responsibility for the misdemeanours of their children and should teach them consideration for others. Everyone agrees with that.

In the old New Labour days, that would have been enough. The practicality of the policy proposal used to convey the message was secondary. It was an added bonus if it turned out to have a grain of good sense in it. In this case, however, the idea of withdrawing child benefit from the parents of delinquent children is so obviously impractical – and, even if it could be done, irrelevant – that Mr Blair and David Blunkett are playing us for fools.

It is time, surely, for some grown-up, joined-up politics. Instead of buying cheap headlines with a proposal which no one has any intention of implementing, why not start by admitting that the causes of crime are a bit complicated? Perhaps unexpectedly, this does not mean that there are no easy, quick or cheap measures which will be effective. The mobile phone makers' plan to disable stolen phones, for example, makes Mr Blair's "eye-catching" promise to get street crime under control by September rather more credible than many of his pledges. But it is much harder to change the social and familial environments in which criminal behaviour arises in the first place. In particular, using the benefits system to try to change people's behaviour is fraught with enough difficulty. Using it to try to get parents to change their children's behaviour is a non-starter.

It is not as if this Government does not have the beginnings of a joined-up policy on the causes of youth crime. The children who are likely to cause trouble in their teens can be identified at an early age: in nursery school or, if the family comes into contact with public agencies, even before that. Much work was done in the early years of Mr Blair's premiership on co-ordinating the work of different government departments dealing with "social exclusion" and on piloting the Surestart programme aimed at precisely such children. The changes to the tax-and-benefit regime – including large increases in child benefit – were designed to make it easier for lone parents to work, which in many cases is in the interests of their children.

More needs to be done in this vein. The trouble, from Mr Blair's point of view, is that it sounds too soft. It is easy to sneer at the idea of parenting classes, yet many inadequate parents can be helped to be better – it is a matter of finding the ways. Quality child care is expensive, but it costs more later on not to deliver it.

Even in the hue and cry for punitive measures after the Damilola case, however, Mr Blair is failing to exploit the progress his Government has already made. The average time between arrest and sentencing for persistent young offenders has been halved to 10 weeks. But that is still too long, and the histories of the defendants in the Damilola case expose the gross inadequacies of the criminal justice system, with the boys arrested and charged many times, but without any agency ever getting to grips with them.

Instead of gimmicks of media management such as this, Mr Blair should, once again, return to some of the pledges on which he was elected five years ago this week.