Baroness Jenkin: The Government should allow Boris Johnson to introduce a compulsory sobriety scheme in London

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords.

In the deluge of proposed amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill currently going through the House of Lords, there are four short proposed clauses which would be easy to overlook but which could prove to be the most useful tool for tackling crime we have had in years - not to mention a great leap forward for localism in the UK.  I refer to the clauses to allow Boris Johnson to pilot a Compulsory Sobriety scheme for drunken criminals in London. 

The link between alcohol abuse and certain crime types is clear. Anecdotally, we all know it. We have all seen our market towns and city centres transformed into violent, ugly places come Friday and Saturday eve, replete with fights and mindless vandalism. We hear it from those on the front line - almost any police officer or A&E doctor will tell you that alcohol abuse is the most significant contributing factor to domestic violence and town centre hooliganism. Ask any judge about their despair at trying to stop the repeat drunk driver.  It is a huge drain on the public services, but it is also a series of personal and family miseries on a national scale. Baroness Helen Newlove, who wrote movingly on this subject for ConservativeHome yesterday, knows only too tragically the price she and her family and friends have paid.

The statistics bear out this sense we have of a drinking culture out of control. One in five 999 calls is due to alcohol.  The Home Office estimates that 60 percent of domestic violence cases have alcohol as a complicating factor. The British Crime Survey estimates that almost a million crimes a year are fuelled by alcohol.

Conservative Friends of International Development: We can be proud of Britain’s role in leading the international fight against extreme poverty

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington is Chair of Conservative Friends of International Development (CFID), Mark Simmonds is MP for Boston and Skegness (Deputy Chair of CFID) and Fiona Hodgson, former president National Convention and a Patron of CFID. Follow CFID on Twitter.

We launched Conservative Friends of International Development last year at a packed event at conference. In the run-up to the 2012 Budget on 21^st March, our hundreds of supporters have been telling us again and again: our Party should maintain its commitment to international development because it is a daily demonstration of our Conservative values.

One of our key purposes as a group is to explain to all voters why, whatever the economic climate, we should aim to ‘encourage enterprise, opportunity and aspiration for every family, no matter where they live.’  To those who question the value of overseas aid, we point out that supporting projects that help the world’s poorest lift themselves out of poverty makes sense, especially in an increasingly interconnected world. It is not only morally the right thing to do - it acts as an investment for our future prosperity.

And international development is about more than our economic and national interest: the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, has made clear this Government’s commitment to transparency and value for money. Foreign aid is a hand up, not a hand out, and an increasing focus of our aid is on enterprise and economic development. It is crucial that not a penny is siphoned off into corrupt pockets, but we can see that international development, properly targeted and properly done, is true to who we are and what we stand for as a Party.