The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
Goodness me! I do not think that the shadow Minister has ever been quite so nice to me across the Dispatch Box, although I am sure that that will not be repeated. I am speechless, but the hon. Lady will be glad to know that I will not be speechless for long.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) on securing this important debate. It could not take place on a previous occasion owing to time restrictions—a number of urgent questions were granted, which ate into the time—and the fact that the hon. Gentleman has initiated it again today demonstrates his perseverance and his determination to draw attention to this issue. His long-standing interest in tackling gangs and youth violence is well known, and I congratulate him.
I also congratulate the other Members who took part in the debate: we have heard some powerful contributions, which featured the in-depth local knowledge that is key to tackling the issue.
Let me begin by assuring the House that tackling gangs and serious youth violence is a priority for the Government. I have met and spent time with victims of such violence, and I am aware of the devastating impact that it can have on families, communities, and young people whose lives were ahead of them, but may not be so any longer. We must all remember that that is the case.
We have heard many references to the Government’s approach. If the House will allow me, I shall spend a few minutes talking about what we have done, and what the future holds.
The Government published their refreshed approach to tackling gangs in a paper—it was only a paper; I shall return to that point shortly—entitled “Ending gang violence and exploitation”. It explains that the Government’s approach is focused on both reducing violence, including knife crime, and preventing the exploitation of vulnerable individuals by gangs. It builds on the ending gang and youth violence programme that we established in 2012, at a time when many people were only just starting to understand the problems caused by gangs in their areas. The EGYV programme dealt with the need to understand those problems, and to build local resilience. It was due to end in March last year, but because we were beginning to see gangs operating in new ways, and, in particular, the exploitation of vulnerable young people, we extended it for a further 12 months so that we could identify where gangs were operating, and could help local areas to build that resilience.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
I am not sure whether this tallies with what the Minister has just said, but the Government announced in January that they would extend the programme to nine new areas, including Great Grimsby. That came as a surprise to me, because I had not known that our area contained gangs of the nature that has been described by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna). A subsequent conversation with my local police and crime commissioner indicated that the programme might be along the lines of what the hon. Member for Yeovil (Marcus Fysh) mentioned earlier, and might be more concerned with serious organised crime. What criteria were used to decide on the towns that were included in the programme?
Karen Bradley
The hon. Lady makes some important points. The original programme’s work, which included the peer review network, is now complete. Local resilience has been built, and local areas have had that peer review. We have now passed the stage of understanding, and need to proceed to delivery, which is the reason for the new programme. The new areas are areas where, as part of the peer review, we identified possible problems. We spoke to local authorities and local police chiefs to find out whether they wanted to be part of the new programme, which is intended to help local areas to understand the problems and the way in which best practice might work, and to give them the support that they need.
Several hon. Members rose—
Karen Bradley
I will give way first to the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who is my Member of Parliament in London.
Karen Bradley
It is for local areas to determine what works best for them, but the Home Office can help them with resources and best practice from the centre.
Mr Umunna
It is good to see the Minister responding on behalf of the Government. May I make two points?
I do not accept that the work of the peer review network is done, because the nature of what is going on is changing. The programme started in 2012, since when the extent to which social media are used by, for example, the groups of young people who are perpetrating these acts has become much greater, and, as I said in my speech, the nature of the groups has changed. My second point is that the peer review network appears to have been replaced by two civil servants manning a mailbox. I really hope that that is not the case, but that is what I have been told by insiders. This is why I am so concerned about its being disbanded.
Karen Bradley
I want to assure the hon. Gentleman that that is not the case. I spoke at an event earlier this week to try to get more involvement in the forum that we are establishing, and I will say more about that in a moment. I would like to extend an invitation to him to meet me, because there are many things that we need to discuss and we simply do not have time to do that today.
Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)
On the important point about liaison with local police forces and local authorities, may I thank the Minister for the work that she and her officials have done in relation to the horrific knife crimes in Chelmsford over the past 18 months, and for the way in which her Department, led by her, has been willing to liaise with Essex police to see what more can be done to overcome this problem in our community?
Karen Bradley
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I know that he wanted to take part in this debate, but he has been involved in an important Bill Committee. I thank him for being here now and for the work that he does in Chelmsford. He is right to suggest that the work of Essex police, supported by the Home Office, has played an important part in tackling the issue of “county lines”, which my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) also raised. [Interruption.] I see the shadow Minister bobbing.
Karen Bradley
I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady and—I am probably going to regret this; my officials will certainly regret it—I extend that offer to any Member who wants to come and talk about what is happening in their local area. I am more than happy to spend time with Members to help them build local resilience. As the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) said, this is about local solutions. This is not top-down; it is not about the Government imposing anything.
Vicky Foxcroft
I thank the Minister for agreeing with me, but part of the problem is about having the funding to enable us to deliver those local solutions.
Karen Bradley
I will come on to funding shortly. I am trying to be non-party political, but I might have to make some comments shortly if I am not allowed to continue in that vein. However, I am trying to be non-partisan and I want to work with hon. Members from across the House. I know that they are facing this problem in their communities and I want to ensure that the Home Office extends whatever support we can in order to get a local solution that is right for their area. That will not be a top-down solution, however, and it will not be one size fits all.
Karen Bradley
I will address that point briefly, but I must make some progress because I am conscious that this debate is to be followed by an extremely important debate on Welsh affairs in which many Members want to take part. On the figures, on which the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) commented, we want to see these crimes recorded. We want the police to know about them and we want to understand what is happening. I recently visited the A&E department at King’s College hospital in the constituency of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). It is absolutely tragic that the first opportunity we get to have a teachable moment with these young people is when they turn up at A&E. They are turning up not in an ambulance—the gangs do not phone an ambulance or any other blue light service—but in private cars and being dumped at A&E, and that is the first opportunity that any agency has to make contact with them.
I want to pay tribute to Redthread, which provides young people’s advocates at A&E departments across London. Those advocates are important in making contact not only with the young person who has been the victim of an attack but with their family when they come to visit. They play an important part in keeping that young person in hospital and getting them to speak to someone they trust. That might be the first opportunity we have to speak to them, and we need to find a way of making that happen sooner. This is about education, about working with schools and about working in vulnerable locations. When I talk about the revised programme, I will mention some of the approaches that we are using in that regard. I want all those hidden crimes that are not being recorded at the moment to be reported and recorded so that we can understand what the problem is. [Interruption.] I sense that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) might want to intervene on me, but this must be the final intervention as I need to make some progress.
Dawn Butler
I am not sure that I entirely understand the Minister’s response, because there are plenty of opportunities to intervene on these young people. Lots of people and organisations in Brent and elsewhere are intervening at an early stage. Poverty is key, but education and early years provision are also key in providing opportunities to intervene. Perhaps she will get to that point later in her speech.
Karen Bradley
I agree that there are many opportunities for intervention. My frustration is that those opportunities are not taken until the young person is found in A&E. I hope the hon. Lady shares that frustration. I pay tribute to her council in Brent. I met her council leader recently and learned about the partnership working that the council is doing to understand the problem. It was a peer review that assisted in understanding the problem, but now this is about local delivery.
The hon. Lady is right to say that this is about poverty. People in Brent talked to me about the housing estates and the work that they are doing in South Kilburn, which neighbours the Paddington recreation ground, with whose football pitches I have to say I am familiar. They are doing incredibly important work on the South Kilburn estate to transform it into a place to live where gangs will not be allowed to flourish. I pay tribute to Brent and to the many other local authorities around the country that are working hard in this regard. I hope that many others will be able to take advantage of this programme through the support that the Home Office provides.
I want to make some progress now, so that we can get on to the important Welsh affairs debate. First, however, I will just mention that although I understand that the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) is concerned about an eight-page Government document, this might be the first time that anyone has ever told me that a Government document is too short. We are usually accused of producing too much with too little substance underneath it. The “Ending gang violence and exploitation” document has been widely welcomed. We worked with many organisations and stakeholders to develop this approach. The paper sets out the high-level approach, but incredible amounts of work have gone on underneath that. It has been welcomed by many organisations including Safer London, the Met police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.
The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) asked why certain areas were involved in the programme. The answer is that those areas have said that they want to be part of it. They want to know what learning is available and to understand the partnership working. For example, they want to learn about working and sharing information with A&E departments. It is vital that we get that information as quickly as possible and share it with different agencies. I also take the point about the definition of a gang. The definition for gang injunction purposes is set out in the Serious Crime Act 2015. That is why there is no separate definition; it is a known definition that has already been set out in legislation.
So, what does our new programme involve? There are six priorities, based on the fact that gangs are operating in different, more covert ways. That is why our first priority is “county lines”, which was mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Yeovil (Marcus Fysh) and for Colchester. The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey)—I think I shall refer to her as my hon. Friend, if she does not mind—also referred to that in her speech. It is important that we help the most vulnerable people in our society who are being exploited by urban street gangs to run drugs and to do many other things, and I am enormously supportive of the missing persons charities and of her work on the all-party parliamentary group on runaway and missing children and adults. That work is vital in helping to find those young people and getting information about what happens to them when they go missing and who is influencing them. She was right to talk about trafficking and modern slavery; this is very much modern slavery and these are trafficking offences. I hope the prosecution services and others will use those modern slavery offences, where appropriate, to get convictions, because I want us to get convictions and stop this happening. If the best and most likely way to get the conviction is by using modern slavery offences, I am all for that and it is what we should do.
The second priority in the programme is protecting vulnerable locations, which again links to the point about missing people and “county lines”. We need to get to the places where vulnerable young people are being targeted—pupil referral units and residential children’s care homes. These are places where young people who are very vulnerable to exploitation find themselves. On the point about young offenders institutes, these are vulnerable locations and, as hon. Members will know, the Ministry of Justice has asked Charlie Taylor to lead a review of this matter. I want to see the results of that review. I also want to make sure that we understand and that those young offenders institutions understand that those vulnerable young people are being exploited, and that they take action to stop that happening.
The third priority is reducing violence, including knife crime. I have listened to many of the contributions about knife crime and I agree that we do not want to see knives on our streets. There are many offences and measures that police, trading standards and local authorities can use, but we are looking carefully at what else we can do to make sure the authorities have all the weapons they need to take knives off our streets. I was at a conference last week hosted by the Metropolitan police at New Scotland Yard with retailers, making sure that they understand their role in a responsible society in ensuring that knives do not hit our streets.
The fourth priority is safeguarding gang-associated women and girls, which has been mentioned by many Members, including the hon. Members for Dulwich and West Norwood and for Streatham, and the right hon. Member for Tottenham. The very idea that girls think that it is acceptable to be exploited in a line-up by various gang members and that this is something they should do is absolutely wrong. I am pleased that the Government—I hope that hon. Members noticed this announcement earlier this week—have committed £400,000 to young people’s advocates to work with all young people, but specifically targeting girls and young women, to try to get that teachable moment. The aim is to get to the young women, educate them and give them the experience and knowledge they need to say no.
Our fifth priority is to promote early intervention, a point raised by many Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester talked about how we have to get in early and educate young people. Finally, our sixth priority is providing meaningful alternatives, and the hon. Member for Streatham made the point on that clearly. We need to show young people alternatives, and he rightly says that that does not just mean a windy church hall. These have to be meaningful alternatives to gangs, so that young people do not feel that gangs are the only place they can go.
I want to touch on some of the specific points that were raised. I am looking forward to discussing the independent commission with the hon. Gentleman. I am not convinced at this stage that a national independent all-party commission is the best way to approach this. We need to get into delivery and make sure that the programme is allowed to deliver. I know that local commissions are being set up. I met the West Midlands police and crime commissioner yesterday, and he is setting up his own local commission. I encourage hon. Members to do that work locally. I hesitate to establish a national commission because, as we have all said, there are different considerations to take into account and different things are going on. The hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford made the point that local young people and local communities need to be part of this. I would encourage local work and local commissions, where appropriate, but I am not convinced that this is the right time for a national commission. I am, however, looking forward to meeting the hon. Gentleman. May I also ask to meet my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport to discuss her interesting suggestion about Fagin orders? Civil orders have been successful. They are used when we do not have enough evidence for a criminal procedure, and I would be very interested in talking to her about that.
There are many more things I could say and many more points I could make, but I am conscious of the time so I will conclude by repeating my thanks and congratulations to the hon. Member for Streatham on securing the debate. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to it. I wish to finish by assuring everyone that the Government and I regard this issue as incredibly important. It is a continuing priority, and we will continue to work with national and local partners to address these issues.
Madam Deputy Speaker
The Chair definitely has no responsibility whatsoever for receptions held outside this House.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Alun Cairns)
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I can advise the House that the Secretary of State has parliamentary business elsewhere and I understand that he has spoken to the promoter of the debate to explain that that is the case. I should also say that the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State hosted a very successful St David’s day reception on St David’s day at No. 10 earlier this week.
Several hon. Members rose—