Elderly and disabled victims of crime should be automatically eligible to give evidence anonymously as part of wider efforts to boost public confidence in the criminal justice system, according to a report published today.

Criminals given community punishments should be made to do more rigorous tasks which would be known as Community Payback, so that local people know offenders are putting something back into the local area. A Crime Commissioner should also be appointed to champion public's concern about crime and justice within Government.

Louise Casey, former head of Tony Blair's task force tackling anti social behaviour, makes 32 recommendations in a wide-ranging report commissioned by Gordon Brown after he became Prime Minister last year.

Ms Casey said: “The public are sick of hearing about people breaking the law, they want to hear what happens to people who break our laws.”

The report on how local communities can help in fighting crime concludes that despite falling crime and record numbers of police officers, the public do not believe offending has fallen and think the justice system is stacked in favour of the rights of criminals.

"Too often, the public don't believe that their voice is heard, don't believe wrongdoers face adequate consequences for the crimes they commit, don't believe they are told enough about what happens in the system and, perhaps, because of this, they don't believe that crime has fallen when they are told so," Ms Casey's introduction to the review says.

It adds, controversially: "Too often, the system leaves the public feeling its principal concern is to process the law breakers rather than meet the needs of the victim or the ordinary law abiding citizen."

Her report, in which she heard from 13,000 members of the public, says regardless of whether people think crime has fallen or risen, virtually all see it as a priority that must be addressed more forcefully than at present.

The report calls for offenders given community punishment to wear high visibility 'tabards' so the public can see they are criminals being punished by doing work on tough projects in the community.

Instead of being named unpaid work, they would be renamed community payback and run by private companies and other organisations rather than the Probation Service.

Unemployed offenders should work five days a week and those in work should be made to work in the evenings and at weekends, the report says.

Many probation services already put offenders in coloured 'bibs' but Ms Casey's review found that passers by assumed they were council workers or contractors or volunteers doing maintenance work rather than criminals being punished.

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