There is something very flawed about the Government’s response to knife crime. To be fair, none of the political parties has come up with an effective way of tackling the problem.

Shock tactics are no more likely to work than increasing the prospects of being jailed or handing down longer sentences. There is nothing surprising about this. In previous crime epidemics overt and orthodox police resources have been thrown at the problem — to no avail. Drug-related offending, organised crime and terrorism have all followed the same pattern and eventually the same conclusion has been reached: conventional policing methods simply do not work.

Covert policing, on the other hand, has been critical in combating every element of criminal behaviour that is otherwise difficult to detect. The Government already has in its armoury a powerful weapon in the fight against knife crime — juvenile informers. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, or RIPA, provides a legal framework within which the police and intelligence agencies can and do run highly successful stables of informers, or covert human intelligence sources, as the Act rather inelegantly refers to them.

This is the same legislation that local authorities have been using against people who drop litter or allow their dogs to foul pavements, and, in one extraordinary example of misuse, parents suspected of trying to secure a place for their child at a particular school.

RIPA has its origins in the fight against crime and terrorism. It was a direct response to the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights on English law and creates a lawful basis for state surveillance in cases where it is necessary and proportionate and otherwise meets the criteria set out in the Act.

As a piece of legislation it is not at times easy to follow — it has been described by senior members of the judiciary as puzzling and not easy to understand in certain respects (it also governs telephone tapping and other surveillance activities). However, this has rarely been a concern over the use of human sources.

Defining what activity may amount to informing may be an issue at times, but in straightforward cases, for example where the police want someone to tell them what another person is up to (obviously without that person’s knowledge), he or she is likely to be acting as a source and can be quickly and easily be authorised as such.

There ought not to be any real controversy about this proposal. The legislation and codes of practice issued under it clearly envisage the use of juveniles in this way (they even contemplate circumstances where a child may inform against a parent) so any suggestion that it is an offensive notion is likely to have been aired when the Act passed through Parliament eight years ago.

A great deal of caution, however, needs to be exercised in the use of juveniles. There are strict duties of care, and secrecy must be maintained at all costs; but these are all matters with which the police and security service are very familiar and adroit at managing, particularly after intelligence crises such as that associated with the September 11 attacks.

The pool of potential informants is enormous as is the intelligence available, and the motivation for those who wish to inform is unlikely to be different from their adult counterparts: money, advancement, morality or even the glamour of appearing to be contributing to a secret part of the government machine.

The present situation — particularly on, but in no way limited to, the streets of London — is an opportunity to create an intelligence network likely to assist in more than combating knife crime. It is also likely to generate evidence and information about drugs, violence and sex crime.

Taking groups of schoolchildren or young criminals around hospital wards to see the effects of knife crime would not be the most effective use of resources. Better for the police and security service to set up specialist units to recruit and run teenage sources to inform against those who intimidate, brutalise and murder their peers.

At the same time, a piece of legislation that has a critical contribution to make to the prevention and detection of serious crime can be utilised in the way that the Government originally envisaged it would be. This would be acknowledged, it is to be hoped, as considerably more meritorious than the pursuit of irresponsible dog owners.

The author is a solicitor-advocate at Mckay Law in Leedsa, a former legal adviser to MI5 and an expert in covert policing law

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