PM: On the spot

Tony Blair said the battle against crime and anti-social behaviour must begin before school age.

Interviewed on Sky News on Wednesday in front of an audience of East Midlands residents, the prime minister said the government is making progress in tackling the causes of crime.

Challenged as to whether his "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" soundbite was being implemented by ministers, he listed a series of measures that have been introduced.

"There is always going to be a limit to the amount of funding you can put in," Blair said.

"We are actually increasing the funding and trying to roll these programmes out across the country.

"But if you look for example at the Sure Start programme, I think most people would say that is a very good way of trying to help parents and children at an early stage. There is also the expansion in nursery education.

"There is the attempt to make sure, through the New Deal, that we are giving extra help to unemployed people."

"We are trying to expand the whole drug treatment programme, not just putting them in an pushing them out again, because that would be no use. But you need to gear up the entire system for this. It takes time to do it."

Pre-emption

He added that problems need to be pre-empted before children begin school.

"You need to build effectively a completely different infrastructure of treatment and help for people at a very early age," the prime minister said.

"Because what people tell me - and I am not an expert on this -  is that even of the age of four or five, you can start to tell if children have got a disposition towards anti-social behaviour. There are deep-rooted family problems."

As part of his "masochism" strategy of confronting voters directly with their concerns, Blair was harangued over issues including drug treatment, support for victims of crime, and policing levels.

He acknowledged that a woman's wait of three years for counselling after being abused was "too long" while claiming that criminal justice was the thorniest problem he had encountered in Number 10 and had taken up more time than any other issue.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said Blair's "answer to every single question was 'we must look at this, we must do that'".

"One began to wonder who has been in charge for the last eight years," he said.