BBC NEWS | UK | Pledge to tackle soaring street crime

Mr Blair told students at a Middlesbrough college he was visiting on Friday: ""It's known that in the last few years, overall the figures for crime have come down.

"There's a real worry about street crime and that's what we have been focusing on over the past few months to try and make sure we get more police on the beat and toughen up the criminal justice system.

"Next week we will be publishing a whole series of proposals on that."

Home Secretary David Blunkett, meanwhile, vowed to make the "significant problem" of street crime a "high priority".

It is a pledge which has been welcomed by Daren Leonard who was set on by three men on his way home from work in Bristol.

Mugging should be a rare upset, not a probable occurrence

Steve Saul
Mugging victim
They punched and kicked the 25-year-old systems analyst, before stealing his wallet.

"The statistics don't surprise me," he said.

"The problem is that no-one knows who anyone else is in their community.

"You can't solve the street crime by fire-fighting - you've got to address the 'namelessness' that exists everywhere."

Beat bobbies

Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, called the figures "appalling".

"It is clear that the streets are not going to be safe by September, as the prime minister promised just two months ago," he said.

The key areas where reported crime is on the rise are:

Violent crime up 11% to 812,000 incidents

Murders up 4% to 886 and attempted murders up 21% to 858

Robbery up 28% to more than 121,000 incidents, including a 31% rise in robbery of personal property.

Rapes up 14%

Soliciting up 60%

The figures showed police solved slightly fewer crimes than last year - 1.3 million crimes out of 5.5m were detected, or 23% compared with 24% in the previous 12 months.

However officials said the new way of collating figures also had an effect on this and the overall detection rate was virtually unchanged from last year.

Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin blamed a "muddled" government policy for the rise in street crime.

"No amount of statistical manipulation can conceal what everyone on the estates in our inner cities already knows - that it is the gangs and the drug dealers rather than the forces of law and order that are in charge."

Second survey

The government has published recorded crime figures at the same time as the results of the �2.5m British Crime Survey (BCS), which asked 33,000 people about their experience of crime.

It showed crime was down 22% since 1997 and by 14% over the last two years.

The survey paints a brighter picture regarding some forms of crime including burglary.

It found the chances of being a victim of crime were at about their lowest since the survey began in 1981.

Home Secretary David Blunkett
Blunkett: Burglary and motor crime remain low

Burglary was down 7% and thefts from and of vehicles were down 7%.

The average person had a one in 50 chance of having their home burgled last year.

Home Office Minister John Denham said there was already a range of initiatives in place to tackle crime.

For example, Operation Safer Streets in the Metropolitan Police area was designed to target street robbery, the minister said.

There, the Met says there has been a improvement since February when officers from traffic units were redeployed to tackle robberies in the 15 worst-hit boroughs, and police visited schools to educate youngsters.

The Home Office also stressed the 7% rise in crime has been inflated by a new method of recording crimes, which accounts for about 5% of the increase.

It argues that crime levels are stable and cites as evidence the British Crime Survey - also published on Friday - which shows the number of offences to be slightly down.

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