LOCALLY our police do a superb job and they have my full support. I have worked closely with them in the last four years, both meeting senior officers and regularly going out on the beat

Seeing Kidderminster on a Saturday night from the inside of a police van is the only way to understand how it looks from the police's perspective.

Crime doubled under the last Cons-ervative Government and violent crime went up 182 per cent, but police numbers fell between 1992 and 1997.

Today police numbers are rising and a re-elected Labour Government will recruit an extra 6,000 officers, raising police numbers to their highest level ever.

Overall crime, as measured by the independent surveys of victims' experiences, is falling. Burglary is down 21 per cent and car crime is down by 15 per cent. Locally crime figures have fallen even more steeply with falls of a quarter this year but crime is still far too high and too many offenders are getting away with it.

A re-elected Labour Government will reform our criminal justice system and be tougher on repeat offenders. Drug-related crime is a menace and tough sentences are rightly handed out to those who deal in drugs.

Craving for drugs leads to shoplifting, car crimes and muggings. Drug arrest referral schemes and Drug Treatment and Testing Orders are already having an effect and Labour is pledged to increase spending on drug treatment by 70 per cent over the next three years.

Drug users will have to kick the habit before they are released from prison. We all have an interest in this because fewer addicts means less acquisitive crime, and hence fewer victims.

I took the Criminal Justice and Police Bill through the House of Commons and saw the Tories oppose nearly every measure to give the police the powers they need. They even opposed the Mode of Trial Bill which stopped defendants playing the system by electing a jury trial for a minor shoplifting offence!

A vast proportion of crime is committed by bored, unemployed young men. The New Deal, which has got 270,000 young people off welfare and into work, is an effective anti-crime measure, and yet the Tories want to scrap it.

Under Labour we've had the biggest expansion of CCTV across the country, a proven way to cut town centre crime. Here, despite strong support from the police, traders and me as your MP, the district council's ruling coalition, including Health Concern and Tory councillors, let local people down by failing to apply for government CCTV money.

Getting an effective CCTV system for our town centres is unfinished business which, if re-elected, I will continue to pursue after the election.