Judge says public is put at risk

The public is being put at risk because too few criminals are caught and convicted, Britain's most senior judge has warned.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, admitted that failure runs right through the criminal justice system, from police to prosecutors and courts.

In a snipe at Tony Blair's slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", he said: "We are not being sufficiently tough on the causes of crime."

The attack, in a carefully drafted speech, will add to pressure on Home Secretary David Blunkett and Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer to clamp down on crime.

Lord Woolf said: " Unfortunately it has to be accepted that for many years now, the public have had little confidence in the ability of our criminal justice system to ensure that justice is done. Regrettably each part of the system has appeared to be failing the public."

He pointed to high reoffending rates among released prisoners and prison overcrowding. Experts believe that Britain's prison population, now at a record 75,235, could be on course to rise above 100,000 by the end of the decade. Lord Woolf said there was a "huge gap" between projected-prison capacity and the likely number of prisoners. And in a blast at Home Office drives to lock up more offenders, Lord Woolf warned: " Initiatives which might be justifiable are taken without regard to their knock-on effect on the situation as a whole.

"My concern in painting this sombre picture is not so much with the offenders ... but with those who will be the victims of crime because of our inability to tackle offending behaviour." The comments will fuel a political row over crime levels which has seen Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens write to London mayoral candidates warning them not to misrepresent official statistics on crime. Sir John acted after Tory candidate Steve Norris claimed that the level of crime in London was worse than that of New York.

In his speech, Lord Woolf said that the proportion of criminals whose crimes were detected, and who were brought to court and convicted, was "regrettably low".

Lord Woolf has been a constant critic of the Home Secretary. Relations between them sank to a new low last month when Lord Woolf condemned a plan to curb appeal rights for failed asylum seekers as "a blot on the reputation of the Government".