´óÏó´«Ã½

Nick Clegg's use of an inaccurate statistic to attack David Cameron last night has led me to some immigration data which calls into question the rhetoric of all three big Westminster parties on the subject.

According to the most up-to-date figures published, for every eight immigrants arriving into Britain, only one is a worker from outside the EU.

And, far from taking British jobs, the official stats suggest 8,000 more non-EU workers left the UK than came to live here in 2008. However, 46,000 more EU-workers came than left.

The big three Westminster parties have tended to brush to one side the point that lots of our inward migration comes from the EU and none of their policies would do anything about that. Only UKIP and the BNP would withdraw from the European Union, a prerequisite for restricting Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians from coming to work in Britain.

In last night's debate, the LibDem leader ridiculed the Conservative plan for a cap by claiming that eight out of 10 migrants come from the EU. "Can you now tell me, am I right or wrong that 80% of people who come here come from the European Union?" he demanded.

Well, the answer is: he is wrong. The latest official figures are for 2008 and suggest it is about 48% - 258,000 EU and returning British citizens out of a total of 538,000 immigrants.

In trying to explain his error, Mr Clegg's office has since said that the 80% comes from, which is hardly the kind of official source one might have hoped for but is a start.

The article says this: "Workers from outside the EU make up just one-fifth of all immigrants when students (who pay valuable tuition fees) are excluded."

So the Lib Dems are focusing on workers and excluding students. Given that the Conservative cap on immigration only applies to non-EU workers, this might seem reasonable, albeit that the way Mr Clegg expressed himself was misleading.

Let's have a look, then, at what the official stats tell us about people coming to Britain to work. The key table can be found here.

In 2008, out of the 538,000 long-term migrants who came to the UK, 207,000 said they were coming to look for work or because they had a definite job. The data is based on a survey of arrivals at ports and cannot, therefore, tell us what they really did do once in the UK, but it is the best we have got.

Of that 207,000, 41,000 were British citizens returning from overseas, 99,000 were EU citizens and 67,000 were non-EU citizens coming to work in the UK.

In other words, non-EU workers only amounted to 32% of workers coming to Britain and just 12% of all long-term immigration into the UK. Or to put it another way, the Conservative cap would only apply to one in eight immigrants.

The Tories have other policies including "new rules to tighten up the student visa system" and "an English language test for anyone coming here from outside the EU to get married" which would have an effect on total immigration figures. But I suspect few voters realise that the so-called cap on foreign migrants applies to such a relatively small proportion of the total.

Indeed, the tough controls on foreign workers that all three big Westminster parties talk about relate to only an eighth of total immigration.

And if one looks at the net immigration figures for non-EU workers, the difference between those who arrived and those who left, the situation seems even further removed from popular understanding.

These are figures which, I think, put a rather different complexion on the immigration rhetoric.

PS: Following discussions with the Office for National Statistics, the figure of -8,000 for the net outflow of non-EU workers has been revised to a more reliable total of -76,000. See my more recent post for more details.

Update 1 October: A complaint about this blog post was upheld by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Editorial Complaints Unit.

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• - What's this?

isn't a bigot - even the prime minister accepts that. But amid the cringe-making aftermath of , a shaft of light has been thrown on how mainstream politicians still consider the issue of immigration.

Too often over the last 42 years, fair-minded concerns have been dismissed as simple prejudice. I say "42 years" because it was in an upstairs room that the politics of race changed for a generation and more.

Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision of how immigration might transform Britain, the so-called Rivers of Blood speech, achieved the opposite of its intention. It forced the issue of immigration off the political agenda. For decades afterwards, any politician who ventured into this no-go area risked being pilloried for "playing the race card".

Michael Howard's campaign in the 2005 election was accused of "dog-whistling" to racists. When he said "it's not racist to talk about immigration", there were many voices arguing that that's exactly what it is.

Since then, of course, Labour politicians including the prime minister have publicly admitted that they should have done more to deal with public concerns about immigration, particularly among their own white working-class constituencies. "So if people ask me, do I get it?", , "yes, I get it. I have been listening and I understand".

I wrote about this disconnect in a post at around that time, as the government launched a new scheme to help deprived working-class communities.

But I suspect that Gordon Brown's problem is not that he doesn't "get it", but that he may regard public anxiety on immigration as a xenophobic response to a much more complex subject. For him, it is an issue with social, political and economic consequences for which there is no quick fix.

In a report for last night's ´óÏó´«Ã½ News at Ten, I travelled to Reading and Oxford, just a few dozen miles apart in the Thames valley, but exhibiting some of the contradictions in the public mind.

None of the big parties at Westminster has been talking about immigration very much, even though it is one of the issues the voters say they care about most. Their policies are remarkable for their similarity: all deploy the rhetoric of tougher border and visa controls but try to balance it with a recognition that immigration is not a problem if managed correctly.

"Immigration has enriched our nation over the years and we want to attract the brightest and the best people who can make a real difference to our economic growth," begins the Conservative manifesto on the subject.

"Britain has always been an open, welcoming country, and thousands of business, schools and hospitals in many parts of the county rely on people who have come to live here from overseas," is how the Liberal Democrats introduce their policies.

Labour's manifesto, oddly, ties immigration policy in with crime policy and there is not a word about the positive side - perhaps reflecting a party view that voters think the government has been "soft" on foreigners. "We are committed to an immigration system that promotes and protects British values," is the opening line.

But Gordon Brown, , called "on all those in the mainstream of our politics to stand together in the coming weeks and present a united front against those who don't value the diverse and outward-looking Britain that we stand for, and against those who want to end immigration simply because they just don't like migrants".

That is, I believe, what he really thinks. Gordon Brown sees controlled and managed immigration as a welcome part of a "diverse and outward-looking Britain". The unguarded remarks in the back of his Jaguar yesterday also reveal that he assumes voters don't "get it" and, wrongly, thereby suspects bigotry.

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• - What's this?

. It is a common assumption, but it turns out to be very hard to prove.

In response to my article, an Oxford University academic has sent me which try to unravel the truth.

This one neatly sets the stage:

"One of the most surprising empirical results in this literature is the repeated failure to uncover evidence that an increase in the number of police reduces the crime rate. Of the 22 studies surveyed by Samuel Cameron (1988) that attempt to estimate a direct relationship between police and crime using variation across cities, 18 find either no relationship or a positive (ie incorrectly signed) relationship between the two."

The problem is that if crime is rising, law-makers are likely to fund more police. That was the story in Britain from 1960 to 1995 for example. Of course, it doesn't mean that "more police = more crime" but it makes it very difficult to know what impact the extra officers are having.

To answer the question, researchers need a situation where officer numbers increase for a reason other than rising law-breaking. The Levitt paper, published in 1997, claimed to have found a way to "break the simultaneity between police and crime".

The author noticed that police numbers in the United States tend to go up around election time. Politicians in America, as here, believe there are votes in promising more bobbies in the beat.

The conclusion was that, yes, "additional police reduce crime" but later analysis of the paper said that " the results are not statistically significant".

exploited the increased police presence in Buenos Aires after a terrorist attack on the city's Jewish district in 1994. The researchers found that car theft decreased 75% in the small area around a building with a police officer guarding outside. The paper concludes that "a posted and visible police guard exerts a large, negative, local effect on auto theft and little or no effect outside a narrow area".

There was also a problem in that car thieves might have thought twice about nicking a motor if they feared it might have a bomb in it. Anyway, that piece of research was hardly conclusive.

A similar piece of work was conducted in London after the 7/7 attacks with . The research team noted that police deployment increased by over 30% in five London boroughs immediately following the bombings.

"The central finding is that crime fell significantly in these places relative to outer London in the six weeks immediately after the attacks. Furthermore, crime appears to be highly responsive to higher police deployment - we calculate that a 10% increase in police deployment reduces the crime rate by approximately 3%."

The researchers recognise that "the number of potential crime victims might have fallen after the attacks occurred (with fewer people travelling into central London) and this, rather than increased police presence, could have been the key driving factor". But they claim that their results so far "show a significant causal impact of police on crime".

What the research cannot tell us is if vastly more police cuts crime in the longer-term. It is possible that a rational burglar might conduct his break-ins elsewhere for a while if his local patch is swamped with coppers, but return to his home patch later - even if the number of police remains high.

The paper, don't forget, is not arguing that more police catch more criminals. In fact, it shows that a lot more officers identified and recorded a lot less crime.

It would be almost perverse to argue that more police has no effect on crime. But we don't know how much impact they have or how long that impact lasts.

I have also been wondering whether more police = less fear. , the British Crime Survey suggests that adults who have had some form of personal contact with the police "have, on average, lower levels of confidence in policing".

The research argues that "reductions in confidence may not be due to a greater number of police-public encounters, but because more and more of those encounters are found to be unsatisfactory in some way". Other academics have noted that "those who have had no recent contact with the police are more likely to feel they are doing a good job than those who have."

Again, I don't think there is strong evidence that "more police = more fear", but as the politicians consider how to make big cuts to the criminal justice system, it would be helpful to know whether our assumptions on what works to cut crime are well-placed.

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• - What's this?

After all the warnings of a recession-fuelled crime wave, today's figures are evidence that, even in a downturn, England and Wales continue to become increasingly safe places to live.

I have written before about the myth that when economies go down, crime goes up.

The latest data shows, although many people will choose not to believe it, that in almost every category, crime is down or stable.

But there is one area of criminality which is rising and significantly - credit-card fraud. , new statistics show that, last year, 6.4% of plastic-card owners had fallen victim to fraud compared with 4.7% the year before, making it now the most common type of theft.

With far greater use of plastic cards, the percentage figures disguise a big increase in the number of crimes. By my calculations this means that there were 2.4 million card fraud victims in 2009 compared with 1.7 million the year before - a rise of over 40%.

One area the researchers wanted to investigate was whether victims were being defrauded when using cards online. But, given that people may not know when or where the crime occurred, the question was not put and the best they could do was look for a correlation between fraud and internet use.

The link seems clear enough but, as the paper concedes, it is not apparent "whether the pattern of victimisation by internet usage suggests that the internet is a less safe environment for plastic card use, or that those who use the internet more frequently are also more likely to generally use plastic cards more frequently in other locations, such as shops, bars, restaurants and petrol stations".

Another finding is that card fraud, unlike most other crimes, hits the rich more than the poor. Those households with incomes in excess of £50,000 a year were almost twice as likely to be victims than the average card user.

Just over half of those who fell victim to card fraud said they suffered no monetary loss, although 25% were more than £150 out of pocket.

Plastic card fraud is not included in the BCS count because, when the survey was started in 1981, plastic-card ownership was low and there was little evidence of related fraud. The researchers argue that there remains a case for not including it because the BCS is a "victim-based survey" and "the cost of the crime is often borne by commercial organisations".

However, the sharp rise in card fraud may reopen the argument that the system cited as our best measure of crime trends should do more to reflect the changing nature of crime.

Update 1829: An earlier version of this post said that households with incomes in excess of £50,000 a year were more than twice as likely to be victims than the average card user; this should of course have read "almost twice as likely". Apologies for the error, which is corrected above.

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• - What's this?

New figures released today have thrown an incendiary into the election debate on violent crime.

Analysis of hospital data for England and Wales, by academics at Cardiff University [191KB PDF], shows there were 64,000 fewer violence-related attendances in emergency departments last year than in 2001 - a fall of just over 15%.

This contrasts with Conservative claims that violent crime has increased by 44% since 2002. It also appears to contradict Liberal Democrat analysis that hospital admissions for assault are rising.

The figures from the Cardiff study neatly track the downward trend in violence identified by the British Crime Survey (BCS), adding new weight to the argument that, for most people, England and Wales are less violent places than they were a decade ago.

The BCS, which identifies more than twice as many crimes as the recorded statistics, asks more than 40,000 people each year about their experiences of violence and is regarded as the best measure of crime trends. It suggests the number of victims of violence has halved since 1995.

Police records of violence are thought more unreliable because they are affected by people's willingness to report crimes, police activity and changes to methodology.

However, today's report does also refer to a recent decline in recorded violence.

"Violence recorded by the police; 'violence against the person', fell six per cent between 2007/08 and 2008/09, to the lowest figure since 2002/03.9 Violence against the person with and without injury both fell between 2007/08 and 2008/09 to their lowest levels since 2002/03. It is recognised however, that police records are an unreliable measure of violence."

The Cardiff data is more encouraging news that, whatever many people may imagine, the risk of being a victim of violence has declined for most people and is currently stable.

The research, based on a study of 44 Emergency Departments (ED), suggests that "an estimated 350,010 people attended EDs in England and Wales for treatment following violence in 2009; 1,500 fewer than in 2008". The figure for 2001 was in excess of 410,000.

The Conservatives claim that violent crime has risen substantially is extrapolated from a into the impact of changes to the recording system on police figures.

The research document has only looked at the effect for one year and tells readers that "no estimate has been made of the effect on the number of crimes recorded in subsequent years as changes continued to be bedded in".

This may help to explain why this piece of work contradicts the fall in violent crime identified by the BCS.

On yesterday's Daily Politics Election Debate programme, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said this:

"If you look at the individual figures coming out of the NHS Accident and Emergency Departments, they are actually showing an increase in the number of people admitted for woundings and that's something that's hard to explain away."

The Liberal Democrats have done their own analysis of NHS data to claim that hospital admissions for violence have increased "more than 3%" between 2007/08 and 2008/09. .

This may reflect the slight rise in violent incidents identified in the Cardiff graph for that period, but it misses the downward trend over the longer term.

Violent crime remains a significant problem in Britain - almost 1,000 people on an average day attending hospital following a violent incident is much too high. But the study shows that violence varies significantly across the week.

There's more than twice the violence on a Saturday compared with a Wednesday which suggests that alcohol plays a big part in the problem.

One population group has seen in increase in violent injury in the past year but it is not, as one might imagine, young men. It is small children - perhaps reflecting an aspect of the violent crime debate which is not much discussed.

"Violence affecting those aged 0 to 10 years increased by 8% compared to 2008", today's report finds, suggesting that child abuse is a factor.

However the fact that overall violence is on the decline should not detract our society from the need to do everything we can to reduce it still further.

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• - What's this?

Would it be better for Britain for house prices to rise or to fall? It is a straightforward question but one to which politicians haven't got a straightforward answer.

You can see how the housing representatives from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties reacted below.

Although the question is difficult, it is one any government needs to resolve if it is going to have a coherent policy on what is one of the most critical issues facing modern Britain.

The country is in the midst of what is arguably the worst housing crisis since we picked through the rubble of what was left of our cities after World War II. Millions are on waiting lists for social housing. Millions more are trapped in the private rented sector desperate to get a toe on the property ladder.

Housing may not be a major issue in the national election campaign, but it is a huge one on the doorstep. I was reading a piece in London's Evening Standard newspaper on what the candidates in the East End constituency of Poplar and Limehouse think voters care about most. The number one issue was housing.

A recent poll suggested that almost one in five voters think that housing is an issue senior politicians should be discussing more. That concern is driven by the fact that, for a great many, houses in Britain are much too expensive.

But for millions more who are lucky enough to own their own home, a property is often both a nest and a nest-egg. It offers financial security but, if things were to go the "wrong" way, their potential financial ruin.

Rapidly rising house prices in the past 15 years, driven by cheap and easy lending, has trapped us all; half the country is desperate for house prices to become more affordable, the other half is desperate that they increase in value.

It is a generational divide: the average age of a first-time buyer is now 37, which means that those younger or older than that will generally have a different answer to the question at the top of this post.

In response, the politicians stress the need for "stability" and "an end to the boom and bust" of the housing sector. Fair enough, but what general direction should the market take? No answer.

All talk of the need for more affordable homes, but none is candid enough to admit that that is another way of saying house prices generally are too high.

The relationship between average house prices and average incomes has changed radically since the mid-1990s. Then the relationship was about 2:1. Now it is more than 4:1 and in parts of the country double that.

Increasing supply of cheaper properties, introducing measures to help first-time buyers, expanding the social housing sector - these ideas would, to a greater or lesser extent, reduce demand and bring average prices down closer to incomes. But the politicians won't put it like that because, as one of them put it to me, "that would be political suicide".

If asked, voters often say they just want politicians to be honest and straight with them. When it comes to housing, politicians think it better to dodge the question and keep their heads down.

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• - What's this?

3D is popular again. And maybe not just at the cinema.

in a formation that suggested an end to the traditional two-dimensional, left-right, Punch-and-Judy politics that has defined Westminster for generations.

Whatever people think of Liberal Democrat policies, the mere presence of Nick Clegg . The "equality of esteem" granted to the party leader who normally finds himself drowned out by baying Tory and Labour backbenches in the Commons may have sowed a seed in the minds of the electorate.

The fury of voters at a Westminster system that could be encouraging some to consider a different style of national politics. Recent polls have suggested increasing public support for a hung Parliament. The idea that politicians might be forced to work together - to compromise - appears not to hold the same fears it once did; in part, perhaps, because people have seen coalition politics operating in Scotland and Wales without the sky falling in.

If public attitudes are changing, it would appear that those hoping for a place in the next House of Commons are still busy promoting a two-dimensional world. stressing how, in the constituency he hopes to represent, "It's a two-horse race here".

The graph, incidentally, merits more than a cursory glance if you wish to appreciate quite how dodgy it is.

Where I live in London, three of my local candidates have been trying to convince me that it is a straight fight between two parties with the "others" nowhere.

The Labour leaflet uses figures from the elections for the Greater London Assembly to claim that Islington South and Finsbury is a fight between themselves and the Tories. They have extracted ward data from the results for the North East London seat on the GLA to make their point.

The Liberal Democrat leaflet prefers to use votes from the 2005 general election where the party came within a few hundred votes of beating Labour. Again, there is nothing "proportional" about the "representation" of the graph.

The Conservatives, like Labour, have dived into the detail of the GLA elections to suggest they are battling Labour for the seat. The leaflet claims "only... Conservatives can beat Labour in Islington". This graph, too, would make any statistics teacher weep.

In a first-past-the-post context, of course, it makes sense for a candidate to present himself or herself as a runner in a two-horse race. But such local leaflets risk looking increasingly odd as each televised debate presents an idea of our national politics embracing a 3D age.

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• - What's this?

One of the weaknesses of democracy is that it may reflect not only the will of the people, but also the people's prejudices and innocence.

The principle that says "because an idea is widely held to be true, it should inform policy" would have had the world governed on the basis that it was flat long after science had demonstrated it was a sphere.

Those who write the parties' manifestos know they must appeal to "public opinion" while not locking themselves into actions which prove to be based on ignorance.

Nowhere is this balancing act more apparent than with the rhetoric on crime.

includes a section entitled 'Using Technology to Cut Crime' in which they promise to "make full use of CCTV... to strengthen our fight against crime". The document then goes on to make this assertion:

But does it?

Well, according to a survey in called Assessing the Impact of CCTV:

This may be because people who worry about crime notice cameras more, but it is an interesting hypothesis that a neighbourhood studded with intimidating cameras might make people feel more fearful rather than less.

The key question, of course, is: does CCTV actually reduce crime? Again, the Home Office's own data is hardly encouraging:

Thirteen CCTV systems; in only one might the technology have cut crime. Cameras worked best in car parks and hospitals. In town centres and residential areas, the results were mixed "with crime going down in some areas and up in others".

A Labour party adviser stresses to me that "our current policy position, as the manifesto makes clear, is not to expand CCTV in a blanket way, but to give people the right to ask for more - or less - if they want it".

Meanwhile, the crime section of begins with this claim:

The "zero-tolerance miracle" of New York policing is often cited by politicians who want to suggest a simple and popular fix for cutting serious crime. Just before being elected in 1997, Tony Blair was asked whether he agreed with the Big Apple's approach, to which he replied "yes, I do".

Jack Straw, the incoming Home Secretary, had visited New York to look at the scheme and said "I support zero tolerance not because it's trendy, but because I know that all over the country people are crying out for it".

More than a decade later and the Conservatives are now using New York as shorthand for being tough on petty offences and anti-social behaviour. But in that time, the claim that clamping down hard on minor crimes reduces serious crimes has become hotly disputed.

compared US cities which had introduced the so-called with those that had not. They found:

Supporters of the New York model point to dramatic falls in the murder rate in the city. That homicides fell dramatically during the 1990s is indisputable - from a peak of 2,262 in 1990 to 767 in 1997. But a closer look at the data reveals that murder cases were plummeting before the architect of zero-tolerance, William Bratton, became Commissioner in 1994.

The explanations for the fall suggested by the criminologist Professor Benjamin Bowling in his paper are more to do with the contraction of crack-cocaine markets than they are to do with broken windows.

Both "zero-tolerance" and visible anti-crime measures like CCTV appeal to politicians because they go down well with voters and, initially at least, had some sort of evidence base. But as time has gone by, the science has become distinctly less enthusiastic in linking cause and effect, even if public support remains high.

According to David Thacher, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, .

He argues that:

"the objectivity of social science makes it very attractive in policy arguments because it holds out the hope of resolving intractable controversies through neutral methods of rational inquiry. But if we use causal analyses to bypass those controversies and the causal analyses come undone, we end up in a difficult position."

The danger is that we continue to expend money and resources on what we imagine are quick and easy fixes to cut crime when the evidence would suggest they may be the opposite.

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• - What's this?

Over the past 12 years, the government has spent billions on tackling problem drug use. Has it been money well spent? The official answer, we learn today, is "haven't the foggiest".

Today an influential all-party Commons committee said it was "unacceptable" that the government has never bothered to evaluate the measures on which huge sums have been lavished as part of its drugs strategy for England and Wales (see ).

In a short but pithy report, the MPs simply state that the Home Office "does not know how to most effectively tackle problem drug use".

The report concludes that:

"The Government spends £1.2 billion a year on measures aimed at tackling problem drug use, yet does not know what overall effect this spending is having."

Why? The Treasury demands that value for money audits are conducted on almost every aspect of public spending - except, it seems, when dealing with the "evil" of drugs. On this, it would seem, ministers have preferred to rely on instinct.

Twelve years after launching the first drugs strategy, the Home Office has now agreed "to produce an overall framework to evaluate and report on the value for money achieved from the strategy, with initial results from late 2011".

What will be interesting is whether the demand for evidence in this area will prompt ministers to consider ideas which, in Britain at least, are regarded as politically off-limits.

The billions which have been spent on the government "strategy" are based on the belief that the way to reduce drug-related crime is to get problem users into treatment. But the Home Office has been forced to admit that the theory is no more than that - an unproven theory.

"The Department said that it did not know whether the strategy had reduced the £13.9 billion cost of crimes committed by problem drug users and it could not prove a causal link between the measures in the strategy and the levels of offending by problem drug users."

This is a far cry from the mantra which for years underpinned the entire drugs strategy (see ):

"Every £1 spent on treatment saves at least £9.50 in crime and health costs."

It was a no-brainer for ministers desperate for an answer to the drugs crisis and the phrase popped up all over the place.

But even while home secretaries were using the line to justify massive investment in the drug treatment programme, internal government documents admitted the claim was "out of date".

Many would argue that drug treatment is clearly better than no drug treatment and, for many people in crisis with their addiction, the support and help offered under the NTA scheme can be a life-saver.

It must also be true that, if someone is committing crime to fund a drug habit, an intervention which reduces or eradicates that addiction will probably reduce their crime.

But are we spending the money on the right kind of treatment for the right people? And, perhaps more importantly, is the answer to almost £14bn worth of drug-related crime simply more treatment or something more radical?

The National Treatment Agency (NTA), which runs the treatment programme for drug users in England and Wales, was asked whether their work cut crime.

NTA Chief Executive Paul Hayes replied that it had produced "very significant reductions in crime, and that is what has justified the huge increase in investment in drug treatment we have seen since 2001".

However Sir David Normington, the top civil servant at the Home Office, was asked for proof that recent falls in acquisitive crime could be attributed to treating addicts. "I cannot prove an absolute causal link but it is a fair bet", he replied.

When pressed, the NTA acknowledged that "over one-quarter of problem drug users showed a sharp increase in the volume of offending after entering treatment through the Drugs Intervention Programme".

Interestingly, for this group of largely heroin addicts, the Commons committee latched on to the idea of giving them free heroin. Here is the exchange between committee member Ian Davidson MP and Sir David:

Mr Davidson: "Have you considered giving them free drugs as a means of cutting crime in order to make everybody else's lives better?"

Sir David Normington: "There are those who think that should happen. That, of course, is absolutely not the Government's policy. I think it is a sort of counsel of despair because it does not take you anywhere. It means that you leave these people on drugs forever."

Mr Davidson: "It is not a counsel of despair for the people who are living beside them, whose houses are getting broken into, with respect."

The report also asserts that "measures to reduce problem drug use by young people have had limited impact".

The most recent strategy published in 2008, the MPs note, "reported that the prevalence of Class A drug use by young people has stayed relatively unchanged since the first strategy in 1998".

Another example of how hard it has proved to reduce drug harms is the recent rise in the number of people who die from illegal substances.

"The number of deaths among problem drug users has increased over the last five years to 1,620 in 2008-09", the report's authors point out, although the NTA suggested to them that "there would have been 2,500 drug related deaths in that year if drug treatment had not been increased over this time."

We are not to know what would have happened if the strategy had not existed, of course, but this is yet another report which questions whether our approach to drugs is actually the best way forward.

It is a vital debate for Britain and yet, as I suggested here yesterday, I doubt it will be discussed with any vigour during the election campaign.

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• - What's this?

There was a moment during the final of University Challenge broadcast on ´óÏó´«Ã½2 last night when pondered a question. You could almost see Alexander Guttenplan's enormous brain whirring behind those bespectacled eyes as he considered a host of possible answers and rejected each one in turn. Finally, the Emmanuel College captain looked at Jeremy Paxman and gave the best response he could: "I don't know".

Perhaps because it was the one of the few answers that accorded with my own, I warmed to the Cambridge student at that point. There is no crime in not knowing the answer to something, but it is clearly wrong-headed simply to ignore the tricky questions or to respond by answering a different but simpler conundrum.

As we embark on the election trail, there must be a fear that the really difficult issues will be dodged. Britain faces some hugely challenging questions over the next five years and this is the people's opportunity to decide which of the parties has the best ideas to guide our country through the challenges.

But it is possible that the campaign will be fought almost exclusively in a small shared comfort zone which ignores the issues which require unpopular solutions.

Let me give you an example.

I recently sent this question to Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties: Would it be better for Britain for house prices to rise or fall?

It won't surprise you to know that none of the party election teams answered the question. And, one suspects, it is because they dare not answer that central question that they are unlikely to press their housing policies during the campaign - even though Britain arguably faces the biggest housing crisis since the Luftwaffe left many of our cities and towns in rubble at the end of World War II.

Here's another one. How are we going to pay for the care of our elderly? It is a fundamental question economically and socially for our country. We may get some options, but no party is offering an answer because all solutions will be unpopular with a sizeable number of voters.

What about this biggie? Where will the spending cuts axe fall? They almost certainly won't tell us the details of where they plan (and one rather hopes they do have plans) to cut public services because, that too, would be electoral suicide. So voters' opportunity to judge which party has the right priorities in managing the deficit is effectively denied them.

On crime, I recently attended a seminar in the House of Lords attended by peers and experts affiliated to a range of political parties and none. The room was packed with former Home Office ministers, former police officers, probation experts, lawyers and businesspeople.

Having listened to some opening remarks, this is how an official report on the proceedings summed up the view of the gathering: "There was broad agreement during the discussion that followed that the criminal justice system was fundamentally broken."

However, the meeting, generally, feared that "the arms race in which the political parties were locked, competing to be toughest on crime with rather less attention paid to the causes of crime" would mean a vital debate would not be heard during the election.

Tomorrow, a Commons committee is expected to say it is "unacceptable" that we don't know whether the billions spent on dealing with drug abuse is actually having any significant effect. It seems unlikely that we will see the difficult questions about Britain's drugs strategy raised during the campaign.

Perhaps I will be proved wrong and this election will see frank discussion of the tough choices facing Britain over the next five years, the decisions that require painful solutions. Maybe, like Alexander Guttenplan, the politicians will offer us clear answers rather than obfuscatory flannel. It would be refreshing, too, if sometimes - just sometimes - they responded to a difficult question with a simple "I don't know."

We shall see.

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Yesterday, I spoke to David Cameron about for the evening news. I thought you might be interested to see the full version of the interview.

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