It is the social responsibility of all adults to discipline other people’s children, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, said yesterday.

His uncompromising message sparked renewed debate over who should confront errant children and in what circumstances.

The murder of Garry Newlove, kicked to death after he remonstrated with a gang of drunken teenagers outside his home, led to claims that the police had surrendered the streets to violent youths.

Mr Cameron said ordinary citizens should do more, not less, to discipline juveniles. Launching the Tories’ Childhood Review, he said: “We have retreated into our homes. We need to reclaim the streets, to resocialise the streets, the parks, the playgrounds.”

The package, developed in response to a report by Unicef last year, which ranked Britain the least child-friendly of 21 rich nations, contains a series of proposals to improve childhood in Britain. Mr Cameron’s claim that “we need boundaries that are monitored and enforced by all adults” is likely to prove the most controversial.

The Conservative leader said: “Parents cannot and should not be with their children all of the time. We need adults to feel able to exert authority over and show compassion towards other people’s children. This basic social responsibility, in many ways the mark of a civilised society, has been dramatically undermined by a risk-averse health and safety culture which, at times, has poisoned the relationship between adults and children.

“This is a disaster for our society and we have to reverse it. We need boundaries that are monitored and enforced by all adults, not as lone soldiers but as part of the social fabric.”

The Government, however, appeared to suggest that the police were best placed to tackle yobbish behaviour. A Home Office spokesman insisted that the introduction of neighbourhood police teams from April would help local communities to identify children causing trouble.

The NSPCC suggested that adults should confront children only if a child were in danger. “We would only want someone to intervene if they thought a child was at risk in some way,” a spokeswoman said.

Robert Whelan, deputy director of the right-of-centre think-tank Civitas, said that Mr Cameron’s remarks, while welcome in theory, were simply unrealistic: “If you saw a group of yobs ripping up the seats on the bus you would be an idiot to intervene because they would just rip you up too.”

Mr Cameron’s comments suggest that children are now occupying a place in the centre of political debate.

Last December the Government’s Children’s Plan promised to “make England the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up in”. Today Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, will announce plans to make the streets safer for young people.

While the Government has put most of its emphasis on helping parents, Mr Cameron has widened the debate, encouraging society at large to take responsibility for socialising the next generation. It is a move welcomed widely by most children’s organisations and experts.

Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and author of the book Paranoid Parenting, said: “There has been a decline in adult solidarity, where we take responsibility for the socialisation of the next generation and play a role confronting bad behaviour or supporting a children when they are troubled.”

The dangers of intervention

- Garry Newlove, 47, right, died of head injuries last August after confronting a group of youths who were vandalising the family’s car outside their Warrington home

- David Martin, 40, a window cleaner, was stabbed to death last week in South London after asking a neighbour to return his son’s football

- Jack Straw, Justice Secretary, was accused of assault when he helped to make a citizen’s arrest at Oval Underground station. The boy was handed over to police

- Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, 40, was killed after asking 12 youths to be quiet in the stairwell of his block of flats in Hackney, East London, in October 2006

- Tim Eggar, a Tory minister under Margaret Thatcher, allegedly got into a fight in South London after he reprimanded two girls for picking flowers from his garden. One of their fathers visited his flat and said they fought together in the gutter

- Kevin Johnson, 22, was stabbed to death last May after he asked youths outside his Sunderland home to be quiet

- Alan Toogood, 50, died after being attacked by youths who lit a fire in the stairwell of a block of flats near his home in Yeovil, Somerset, in September 2006

- Peter Woodhams, 22, was shot dead at his home in East London in 2006 after confronting youths who had been terrorising his family

Source: Times database

Times Recommends

• Donor organ allowed child’s own heart to heal
• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating