Sir Iain Duncan Smith

I do not have a Conservative council to criticise, although I would criticise it if it had done that. It was a Labour council that introduced these charges, and they have had a dramatic effect on those who would have come to shops. A small bookshop that has been there for many years is now thinking about calling it a day. That is a real problem, and it is bonkers to add that to the other problems these businesses have. Something that ruins high streets and causes real problems is the inability of local authorities to control the number of adult gaming centres on the high street. I and many others are campaigning to get the Government to allow local authorities to make a decision about that, rather than being overridden. I hope the Government will look at that in due course. The big thing that is affecting our high streets above all else is the crime and shoplifting going on. We have had a huge problem in our main shopping centres. These people go into shops and are violent. They threaten the shopkeepers, who are often pressed to the wall while they take thousands of pounds—this is not £1 or £2; thousands of pounds of goods are robbed from shop shelves. Those who are shopping are also threatened, and it drives people out of the high street. We have tried hard to bring this all together, so that the shops report the crime and the police are there for it, but despite that, this crime is still rising. One of the biggest problems is that when a shoplifter is arrested, they say that they wish to be tried in the Crown court. They know full well that the backlog in the Crown court is so great that they will be out on the street again that afternoon. The Government should consider carefully whether shoplifters should be allowed to do that, and whether magistrates courts, which do not have a backlog, should be doing summary charges on shoplifters in criminal cases—with limits, obviously—which would get them off the street that day, not back on the streets committing crime again.