COLUMN: MAKE sure your children are in early tonight or else you could end up getting a letter from the Old Bill. And quite right, too.

The police in Bath have begun taking down the names and addresses of children who insist on hanging around on street corners. Officers will be writing to the parents of loitering children and they may even impose a curfew. It's all part of a get tough policy on youth crime.

It's strange, but there is definitely some sort of in-built loitering tendency in young people under the age of 15. It's something that compels them to hang out in bus shelters when they have absolutely no intention of catching a bus. If it's not bus shelters they're hanging around, it's outside the sheltered accommodation of elderly people.

They're like moths to a candle. I really don't know why they do it. Maybe it's the thrill of getting up the nose of someone who keeps a Zimmer frame in front of their gas fire and a crocheted toilet-roll cover in the loo.

To be fair, most of these kids are harmless, but there are a few persistent little thugs among them. The problem is that they hang around, yapping into the early hours of the morning, as if they haven't got a home to go to.

But these kids aren't street urchins they do have homes to go to. The trouble is, their parents don't care or can't be bothered to get them in off the street at a reasonable hour. And, let's face it, kids do clutter up the house, make a mess and dirty the sofa with their muddy trainers. Why not leave them out in the street where they can annoy some poor old lady trying to live out her twilight years in peace?

Some years ago, I used to know a policeman who was a community officer (they're called beat managers now). He told me horror stories about how he would return young hooligans to their homes, only to be abused by the parents for having the cheek to complain that their offspring had been up to no good.

Of course, there was a golden age when a rosy-cheeked village bobby on his bicycle could give some snotty-nosed little apple scrumper a good cuff round the ear. However, these days it's all "human rights this" and "civil liberties that" as lawyers swarm around aggrieved kids like councillors around an expense form.

For instance, the other day a spokesman for Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, commenting on the plan by Bath police to take names and addresses of loiterers, said: "It's important that the police make it clear that this is voluntary. It can be quite intimidating being approached by a police officer and it is important that young people feel they have a choice."

Have a choice about what? A choice of whether they break the law? A choice of whether they make a thorough nuisance of themselves late at night?

Dixon of Dock Green wouldn't have put up with that nonsense. Indeed, I can remember my one and only brush with Bath's very own version of Jack Warner.

I was riding on the back of my brother's moped without the benefit of a crash helmet when this hairy, 6ft brute in a police uniform stopped us and grabbed me by the collar when I was cheeky. It frightened the living daylights out of me. It was my first encounter with a policewoman and I don't think I've put a foot wrong since. Even after all these years I still slam on my brakes when I see a panda car.

Anyway, I can't stay chatting with you lot. I've got to call the kids in from outside now that Newsnight is over.

Goodnight all.