LONDON commuters could soon be able to phone the police to ask directions for a safe way home, the Prime Minister claims.

Gordon Brown used an interview with a women's magazine to float his idea of personalised advice to travellers.

He said it would help when women felt most at risk - walking the final part of the journey home after getting off a Tube or bus.

"We want to extend this so it's like a personal police service," he told Glamour magazine. "So if you're going through an area late at night, you can phone them up and say, what's the safest way of getting home?"

The proposal appeared to be a victory for the Evening Standard's Safer Stations campaign, launched after the death of banker Tom ap Rhys Pryce, who was killed after he left an unmanned station late at night.

It was not immediately clear, however, whether Mr Brown really meant such a service would be freely available to the four million people who commute in London each day by bus, train and Underground. Nor was it clear how it would be funded or staffed within stretched police budgets.

A Home Office spokesman said the idea was "a vision for where neighbourhood policing could go in future rather than a fully developed policy".

"We cannot say when it is going to happen or say what the details would be," the spokesman added.

Scotland Yard said no proposals had been raised with them so far.

Mr Brown also said judges should never accept there were mitigating circumstances for rape - including if the victim had been drinking. And he revealed the Government was gathering a group of young male role models to persuade teenage boys to turn their backs on knife culture. "I've met lots of families of victims of knife crime and they say they want to do everything to persuade people it's a vicious circle."

The interview was another example of No 10 attempting to empathise with women voters by breaking away from the traditional news media. Glamour editor Jo Elvin praised Mr Brown as a "warm, friendly, jokey, relaxed" man with a "charismatic" manner.

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