Sir Iain Duncan Smith

It is always a pleasure to serve with you and under you, Ms Butler; I welcome you to your role. As we have only two minutes, I will make one point: antisocial behaviour is arguably the most serious crime the public see. Most of the time, they do not see all the details of murders and things like that because those are not on their streets. The thing that is on their streets is the behaviour of others that wrecks their quality of life. Shoplifting, for example, has to be taken far more seriously by police because it disrupts and destroys the lives of pretty much all those who want to go on to the streets. It destroys the likelihood of us keeping high streets and being able to give a proper service to the public. We had a problem with shoplifting in Chingford and Woodford Green, but there are things that can be done. We all blame the police for not being there, the troubles they have and the bigger policies, but I want to centre on what happens locally. In my constituency, we focused on the main high street, Station Road, which has been torn apart by shoplifters. These individuals are not turning up ad hoc because they are short of a bit of cash; many of these incidents are gang related—they are organised crime. Boots, for example, gets raided endlessly because shoplifters can get thousands of pounds-worth of goods off the shelves and walk out with nobody interrupting them. We called together all the bigger stores that bring people on to the high street and discovered that they were not reporting the crime to the police, who said they did not know it was going on, so we forced the stores to do just that. We then said that the deal was that the police must be on the street and arrest people immediately they commit this crime. Crime began to fall on the high street because we played a part by getting cameras up and doing facial recognition. I say to all Members here today that there is more we can do to put pressure on the police, the shops and others to do more about antisocial behaviour. It is a terrible crime that destroys lives and people’s hopes. We must put pressure on Government to rectify that.