The government launched a plan to cut street crime last year

An influential think-tank said that in fact the number of robberies in London during the first two months of this year - 7,300 - was just 300 short of the total for the whole of 1980.

The Institute for the Study of Civil Society (Civitas) also said there were 1.7 million recorded crimes in 1972 and 5.8 million last year.

"In 1972 there were 8,900 robberies in the whole of England and Wales," the report said.

"In 2001-2002 there were 6,500 in the London borough of Lambeth alone."

Although Prime Minister Tony Blair's crackdown on street crime has begun to produce results, "muggings are still up by 11% compared with February 2001", it added.

New York lessons

Since Labour came to power, robberies in London have soared 63% from 27,000 to 45,000, it said.

"In 1931 there were three crimes a year for every police officer, in 2001 there were 44," said Civitas.

"Nationally, we have chosen to throw in the towel because the forces of law and order ... have lost control of the situation and spuriously justify the legalisation or decriminalisation of many offences on the grounds that none of them are so bad after all."

Civitas' study, entitled The Failure of Britain's Police, said London can learn lessons from New York's style of policing.

The volume of crime has increased faster than the size of the police force Civitas report

It said New York's robbery rate per capita is 540 compared with London's 620.

Robbery in London grew 105% between 1991 and 2002, while New York's figures fell 73%, it added.

It added police effectiveness also depended on the way officers were deployed and criticised the Metropolitan Police's Lambeth Experiment - where possession of cannabis was dealt with by a warning rather than arrest.

Lambeth experiment

The report said: "Since 1994 New York has adopted the policy of greatly increasing the numbers of police officers and confidently attacking trivial crime and disorder, regarding them as the seedbed of worse things.

"London, as in the Lambeth Experiment, has opted to concentrate its much smaller numbers on serious crimes."

The report comes just three days after new Home Office figures claimed crime fell 7% in the last three months of 2002.

Separately, the British Crime Survey said crime fell 9% during the year.

Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth said on Friday: "Crime is continuing a downward trend and the risk of being a victim remains at its lowest level for 20 years."

The Home Office claimed that the chance of being a crime victim "remains historically low" when it published the previous batch of crime statistics in January.