Riots Communities and Victims Panel Final Report

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Grand Committee

Asked By

[Baroness Sherlock]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to After the Riots, the final report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am glad to have the chance to debate this issue, and I am most grateful to all noble Lords who are here today. Looking around the Room, I can see a range of expertise and wisdom that far outstrips mine, so I am very grateful indeed and look forward to hearing all the contributions this afternoon.

The riots last August shocked the world. The Riots Communities and Victims Panel, of which I was a member, was set up to explore the causes of the riots and to consider how communities can be made more socially and economically resilient in order to prevent future disorder. At the end of March 2012, we presented our final report to the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition making a series of recommendations that we believe, taken together, could help to prevent a rerun of those five days last August. I confess that I am disappointed that we have not yet had a response from the Government or even a date on which we might expect one. I hope the Minister can tell us more today.

We spent seven months on this process. We were a cross-party group and produced a consensual report even when, on occasion, that was a challenge. Along the way, we gathered a lot of facts, as anyone who has glanced at the report will see. Up to 15,000 individuals actively participated, and there were countless more bystanders. Five thousand crimes were recorded, five people died and the cost is probably up to half a billion pounds. Thinking about it now, in preparation for this debate, it is the people who still haunt me—an older couple we met who had been forced to leave their home in the middle of the night, evacuated into the middle of a riot. When we met them some weeks later, they were still traumatised and homeless. I met a young mother who talked about the fact that months after the riot her son still cried whenever he heard a siren. We met people who had spent 25 years building up their businesses and had just been holding on in the teeth of the recession for whom this was the last straw—not only the damage in the riot but the drop in footfall that followed. I also very clearly remember the young men we met in prison. I think about the one who seemed nonchalant when we went to visit, the one on suicide watch and, probably most of all, the one who said that when he got to prison someone asked him what he wanted to do with his life. It was memorable because nobody had ever done that before and he must have been 19 or 20.

So what do we know of those who took part in the riots? Mostly they were young men, although that is probably an historical truth as well as a current one. Only a quarter were under 18, but almost three-quarters were under 25. Most of these young people had poor academic records. Nine out of 10 were known to the police, and a third had been in prison. Our own analysis found that 70% of those arrested came from the 30% most deprived areas. I must sound a note of caution on the data, particularly in relation to those who were convicted or arrested. Inevitably, people known to the police are caught first, so there are still many cases to be processed and it may well be that those involved were from a much wider background.

Of the children brought before the courts at the time of our interim report two-thirds had special educational needs of some sort. On average, they were missing a day of school a week. They were much more likely than average to live in the 10% poorest areas, to be receiving free school meals and to have been excluded from school at some point. The millionaire’s daughter, beloved of news reports, is atypical. I guess that is why she is news. None of this is to excuse people who took part in the riots. People must take responsibility for their actions, but we need to understand them.

Of course, most people, even from the most deprived areas, did not riot. One of things I found most interesting in going round was when we asked people why they thought the riots happened, of which more later. When they gave us their reasons, I often then said, “But you come from this area and you didn’t riot. Why not?”. Probably the most common answer I got from young people was something along the lines of, “My mum wouldn't let me”. In that is a huge amount of truth and it tells us a lot about the communities that people come from. When we talked to people who did not riot, they often said something about having something to lose: a job, a college place or the respect of family and friends. Sometimes they just had an adult who helped to steer their path.

We visited 22 communities, mostly those that had been very seriously damaged by riots and, for comparison, some that did not riot. We did research into a small number of them. Many of the issues that came up were very similar from one community to another. They top ones that emerged were: a lack of opportunities for young people; poor parenting; a lack of character or resilience in some people; an inability to prevent reoffending; concerns about brands and materialism; and issues relating to confidence in the police.

The report addresses each of them in turn. I cannot go through them all here, but I hope the Minister has read the report and I will be interested in her views. I would like to highlight just a few of our recommendations. Every child should be able to read and write to a minimum standard by the time they leave primary and then secondary school. That should be obvious, but it is depressingly not the case for too many of our young people. We made recommendations about how to achieve that, but I will be open to any suggestions from the Minister about how schools can be encouraged in every case to make sure they address that problem. When they leave school, children should be prepared not just for work but for life in terms of character or resilience as well as skills. Offenders should not be put back into the community on leaving prison, even after short sentences, without some rehabilitation for the sake the community as well as the individual. Young adults should not be parked on the work programme with no realistic prospect of getting a job. We recommended a youth job guarantee scheme to make sure that those who have been unemployed for one year really have a chance of a job. I will be very interested in the Minister’s view on that.

Steps should be taken to address the fact that trust and confidence in the police are far too low, especially among some minority-ethnic groups. Families facing multiple difficulties should be supported by public services working together, not in isolation. We support the Government’s problem families initiative, but that is targeted at the 120,000 most seriously challenged families that are already in crisis. It is essentially crisis intervention. We estimate that around 500,000 forgotten families are being left to bump along the bottom and are not getting the help that they need. It cannot make sense in human or economic terms to wait for them to reach crisis point before we intervene. The principles of the problem families initiative should be applied to them.

We also addressed some of the short-term issues. Noble Lords will be aware that I and other noble Lords have commented in the House more than once about the very slow speed at which compensation has been arranged for those who were making claims under the Riot (Damages) Act. The Government have committed to look at whether the Act needs updating, and it does need updating, for example, to address vehicle cover, but I hope that they will not try to take the chance to abolish the Act. If the state were to cease to offer indemnity in the case of riots, I fear that some areas of our country would simply become uninsurable, with all the consequences for citizens that that would bring. I hope the Government will tell us today whether they will go to a full public consultation before making any changes to the Act.

Beyond all the detailed recommendations were the messages that I heard around the country that stay with me still. When we visited the areas that had serious disturbances, we asked people why they thought the riots happened. Sometimes answers were specific—the problem was parents or the police—but very often they spoke to a more inchoate sense that we have somehow lost our way as a society, that somehow we do not know what matters any more. We are obsessed with stuff not people. We do not look out for each other the way we used to, we do not know right from wrong and yes, politicians’ expenses and bankers’ bonuses came up pretty much everywhere we went. Asking young people usually produced very particular answers. Theirs were voices of anger and sometimes despair. They said to us: you have trebled university fees; taken away our education maintenance allowances; shut down our youth clubs; there are no jobs; no apprenticeships; no opportunities. What is going to happen to us? What is going to become of us?

The first of those issues is a challenge for all of us in politics. But the second, more than anything, is an immediate challenge for the Government. I fear that we are at risk of losing a whole generation of young people. Will the Minister tell the House what the Government will do to help those young people get the jobs and the opportunities they so badly need? Indeed, if there is an overriding point to government, it is surely to order society so as to enable all its people to flourish, to be all that they possibly could be and all they are meant to be. In the end, that was our top message—that everyone needs a stake in society, both because they deserve it and because I really do not want to be asked to serve on a future riots panel.