Strong Communities

Labour is proud of our country: our communities are getting stronger.

Throughout the country, in every neighbourhood, people are giving their time and energy to help others and improve their communities: half of all people volunteer every month; almost four in five give money to charity every month; almost half have done something to develop strong and empowered local communities. So we are optimistic about the future. We are not the broken society the Conservatives claim. There is nothing wrong in Britain today that cannot be put right by what is good about our country.

There is no easy way to meet these new challenges. Solutions depend on hard choices being made about funding, about how to strike the balance between liberty, the founding value of our country, and security, and about how best to develop new answers. Pretending, in the interest of short-term political manoeuvring, these hard choices do not have to be made, betrays all those who depend on government to protect them - and that is nearly all of us.

It is the fundamental duty of government to provide security for all its citizens. The challenges we face in doing so have changed radically over the last ten years. New issues have emerged in our communities and they are particularly damaging to families and the most vulnerable members of our society.

There are some issues we must address about acceptable public behaviour and the culture in which children and young adults grow up. So we will tackle problems such as pervasive gambling, binge drinking in our town centres, and growth in lap-dancing clubs, all of which take place in our shared public spaces.

People care deeply about their local area, the local environment, and the quality of local services. They want their communities to be in control and, for all the talk of globalisation, perhaps more than ever, their sense of pride is rooted in their neighbourhoods. Communities want more power and to play their part in what goes on around them.

We also know that there is an important role for government in supporting local communities. Labour does not believe in an absentee state that allows communities just to sink or swim, or one that just hands problems over to voluntary sector groups. Instead a strong community and a strong civil society depend upon energetic but flexible state action.

So we will work with local communities:
> to develop neighbourhood policing to improve people’s perception of community safety;
> to develop Sure Start Children’s centres to build pride in communities;
> to help local areas which have faced rapid population change not just to cope, but to flourish on the back of increased immigration;
> and to help continue the regeneration of once run-down inner cities.

Crime
Crime has fallen dramatically under Labour: a third down overall since 1997. But as well as being ambitious to reduce it further, we recognise that these falls are not reflected in people’s perceptions. Moreover, some areas have developed new problems such as knife crime, young people joining gangs, drug use, anti-social behaviour, and binge drinking. Often these are linked to deeper social causes: young people who get into serious trouble often come from dysfunctional families, or neighbourhoods where the culture of work is weak. Though these challenges need to be kept in perspective, Labour must continue to be unrelenting in both punishing and preventing crime.

Labour has introduced neighbourhood policing and set out a clear neighbourhood pledge for every community. Where Neighbourhood Police teams have been in place for some time, they have become hugely popular. But now that we have a basic infrastructure in place which is more focused on local people’s concerns, we need to think about how we can go further.

So we will cut red tape to free the police to spend more time on the beat, tackling crime and reassuring communities. We will press on with our targeted campaign against knife crime, focusing on the ten areas where it is a serious problem - including more searches, tougher penalties for those caught, closer cooperation between police and schools and hospitals and local councils, and a range of measures to tackle the causes of youth crime, including more youth activity on Friday and Saturday nights. We will bring in a set of clear national standards for what you can expect from your local police team. And with local meetings, new elected police representatives, and online crime mapping, people will have more information and more influence over what their local team is focused on.

We are committed to doing more to prevent domestic violence and to increase the conviction rate for rape. We are continuing to support The Survivors’ Trust and rape crisis centres, and investing in more Sexual Assault Referral Centres for victims.

Global migration is bringing a great new wealth to our culture and our economy but also dangers from organised criminals who traffic people and drugs into our country. So we will ratify the European Council convention against human trafficking by the end of the year and we will continue to work with the Poppy scheme which supports women who have been trafficked into Britain.

There is also a new threat from international terrorism, which is different in scale and intent from previous decades, involving global networks willing to inflict mass casualties with no warning.

Our National Security Strategy published in March, showed how we are working to respond in a more joined-up way to these new challenges, to safeguard the country, its citizens, our prosperity, and our way of life. We will be hard-headed about the risks, and about our capabilities. We will continue to meet security challenges early and at source by tackling the causes of extremism, at home and abroad, and by putting measures in place to target threats like illegal immigration or drugs before they reach our shores. We have led the way internationally, delivering a treaty to ban cluster munitions. We must push forward our work on arms control and countering nuclear proliferation, and on defusing conflicts before they emerge, as well as contributing to international efforts to stabilise them if they do occur.

Everyone playing by the rules
In this new world, it is not just crime that can make people feel insecure. In such times of rapid and profound changes, people need to feel order in their world and that the rules which underpin it are fair.

That is why we are putting victims’ rights more centrally at the heart of the criminal justice system. We are introducing tougher new rules on community payback.

Welfare rules need to be fair to taxpayers, hence our new welfare reforms designed to ensure that those who can work, do work. We are creating a more demanding system for all benefits recipients who are capable of work. All claimants will receive support. But in return claimants, including the vast majority on incapacity benefits, are also expected to seek or actively prepare themselves for work, for example through training, or face a cut in their benefits. We have shifted the system to support people to find work that they can actually do, rather than focussing on what they cannot do. And for drug addicts we are moving to making receipt of benefits conditional on both taking up treatment and making efforts to move back to work.

Fair rules must apply to all: so while we call for public sector pay restraint to combat inflation, so too must we call for restraint and responsibility in the boardroom.

The great waves of migration around the world that have accompanied the globalisation of national economies and helped generate global prosperity have also unsettled many communities. There has been a significant change also in the pattern of migration, with many migrants only coming for short periods of time rather than settling for longer periods, as they have always done in the past.

In this new world, people need to know that the rules for immigration are fair and that coming to Britain is a privilege, not a right. That is why Labour has introduced the Australian-style points based system for immigration, reducing overall numbers of migrants but more importantly ensuring we attract those with the skills our economy needs. It is a system which is tough, selective, fair to applicants and flexible to the needs of business. That is why for the first time we are regulating all employers who hire migrants, with big fines for those who break the rules. And that is why for the first time newcomers won’t get the right to stay, simply based on settling here for a certain number of years, but will be required to learn English and play by the rules - supporting themselves, working and paying taxes, and obeying the law - if they want to become permanent residents or full British citizens.

Only Labour can deliver security for everyone in this new world because only Labour has the determination to make the hard choices that are needed - whether it is international cooperation to defeat terrorism and nuclear proliferation, ID cards for foreign nationals, or powers for the police to detain terrorist suspects whilst complex investigations are underway.