Thames Valley Police deserve praise for their decision to pay a visit to every person who reports a crime in Oxfordshire.

Following a pilot scheme, that has been running in south Oxfordshire, the plan is to be extended across the whole county by late October or early November.

Before the scheme started, many crime victims would simply have received a bland letter, which is simply not what most people want at a time when they are naturally feeling vulnerable.

Most visits were made to victims of criminal damage, car crime and shed or garage burglaries — crimes where an investigating officer would not have been sent before.

Senior officers have been refreshingly honest about the scheme, which they frankly admit is not about either reducing or solving crime.

They also admitted the promise to get a Police Community Support Officer to visit every victim was "difficult to fulfil".

A survey of crime victims in south Oxfordshire after the pilot scheme was launched last November showed a rise of ten per cent in satisfaction levels with the police to 74 per cent.

At the same time, cases of criminal damage in south Oxfordshire have fallen about 20 per cent — from 819 reports in a six-month period in 2007 to 645 in the same period this year.

That is not obviously not simply because of the decision to visit victims of crime, but it is an interesting statistic nevertheless.

Supt Andy Murray, who will become Oxford's police commander next month, said the idea was worth doing from the neighbourhood policing view as the force was seen to be visibly responding to low-level crime — the sort of crime that bothers most people on a day-to-day basis.

Anything that increases public confidence in the force must be a good thing. The surprise is that the scheme did not happen earlier.