Violent Crime, Gang Activity and Burglaries

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish I could speak with the same passion as the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I thank my noble friend for introducing this debate: it is very timely.

Recent ONS figures show that police recorded crime data for “violence against the person” offences in the year ending March 2022 showed an 18% increase on the 1.8 million offences recorded in the year ending March 2021, and the similar figure in the pre-coronavirus year ending March 2020. The 710 homicides recorded for the year ending March 2022 was a return to pre-pandemic levels, while knife-enabled crime recorded by the police saw a 10% year-on-year increase to more than 49,000 offences in the same period. There were increases across all knife-enabled violent and sexual offences, with the sole exception of attempted murder. Violence with injury offences increased by 22% to more than 560,000 in the year ending March 2022 compared with the previous year. This was also 5% higher than the levels recorded in the pre-Covid year ending March 2020.

While overall levels of homicides fell during 2021—a decrease that coincided with the pandemic and related restrictions to social contact—it is the case that young people, particularly girls, have been disproportionately affected, as recent terrible headlines have reminded us. In a survey this year, the ONS found that people now feel less safe walking alone, in a park or in an open space. Young people in particular feel unsafe using public transport after dark. We are going backwards rather than improving lives for the better.

Of course, recent statistics on crime levels have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. There are also difficulties around how data is collected, whether it is by crime surveys or as crimes reported to the police. However, there is no escaping the stark truth that, despite more than a decade of tough talking by the Government, we are still facing truly shocking levels of violent crime in this country.

Many of these crimes are driven by drugs and gang activity. Gang involvement with drugs is often, and most destructively, manifested through county lines activities. I saw the impact of this in my housing work, and I will focus my comments on violent crime as it affects young people—specifically county lines drug dealing and the dangers for young people, particularly those in care or in vulnerable families who get caught up in gang violence and knife crime. My noble friend outlined how county lines operate.

The Government have declared that this a priority for the police to tackle. In October 2021, they published their Beating Crime Plan, and money has been spent on dedicated task forces and 18 violence reduction units. They have also set up the youth endowment fund to fund early intervention projects. We have been given the stats to show that this is having some impact. Policing responses have interrupted and closed down some gang activity. In 2019, the National Crime Agency estimated that there were more than 2,000 individual county lines in operation. It revised that in April last year to nearer 600, ascribing the reduction to increased policing and new guidance on tackling this issue.

However, there is no room for complacency. The National Youth Agency warns that the county lines business model is adapting, making offending harder to detect and increasingly resilient to disruption by law enforcement. This is far more deeply embedded than can be resolved by policing alone. The threat of gang-led county lines drug dealing to young people and the risk of violence and exploitation remain at shocking levels. It is estimated that 20% of those involved in county lines are children. The most common age range is 15 to 16, but the NYA notes anecdotal reports of children as young as 7 or 8 being exploited.

It is our most vulnerable children who are most likely to become ensnared. This means those who lack a safe or stable home environment; those who have prior experience of neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse; those who have mental health or substance misuse issues; those who have been excluded from mainstream education or are in care; and those who are homeless, in social housing or in insecure accommodation. They are the most vulnerable to exploitation.

We know the criminal exploitation of children is a common feature of county lines activity, yet we still have no statutory definition of child criminal exploitation. This potentially makes it all the harder for our public services to work together to identify how much support a child needs or, indeed, the level of risk surrounding an exploited child. Can the Minister tell the House when the Government will implement in law a definition of child criminal exploitation?

If we are to tackle the threat from gangs and violence associated with county lines, we must have sufficient youth services and support for young people living in areas of deprivation and disadvantage. Further, they must be trained and upskilled so that they can build capacity and outreach in order to work with vulnerable young people wherever they are. Sadly, along with years of cuts to policing and the courts—this has been mentioned already—we have had years of cuts to funding for youth services. The provision of safe spaces and group activities for young people, with trained youth workers and skilled volunteers, is enormously patchy. This leaves young people vulnerable and prey to gangs. Again, from my work in housing, I have seen where youth workers now have so few resources that they are not able to offer alternatives to keep young people out of gangs and off the street.

The YMCA report Out Of Service noted that, since 2010, more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and more than 750 youth centres closed. In 2010-11, local authorities spent an estimated £1.36 billion in real terms on youth services in England. By 2018-19, the real-terms reduction was £959 million—a 71% cut during that period. The consequences of these cuts during 12 years of this Government are seen in our shocking levels of knife crime, rates of serious violence and the rise of mental health difficulties among young people. Youth services are a lifeline for many young people, but these cuts have left many without local safe spaces or support.

The NYA’s 2021 report, Between the Lines, called for a high-level government strategy—a youth workforce development to recruit, train and deploy 10,000 full-time qualified youth workers. This goal should sit alongside the target of 20,000 more police officers outlined in the Government’s Beating Crime Plan. The NYA is now also calling for revenue investment to recruit a further 20,000 youth support workers and 40,000 trained volunteers. Have the Government listened to the call from the Home Affairs Select Committee last year for a youth service guarantee? How have they responded?

If it is the case that violent crime is disproportionately committed by young people, we need investment to deliver viable alternatives. We must increase support for those initiatives that have proved successful. All this points to the vital importance of the levelling-up agenda and investing in skills development to put people on a more productive path.

The pattern of job-related crimes is changing all the time. Our most disadvantaged communities and our most vulnerable young people continue to live with serious crime and the reality of gang violence. We need to tackle the roots of these problems, but we are running out of time if we are to keep our communities safe.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Snape, for securing this debate and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have participated in it. Tackling crime is a key priority for any Government. As set out in our Beating Crime Plan, we are particularly determined to see reductions in homicide, serious violence and neighbourhood crime. These offences strike at our sense of security in our homes, on our streets and in our country, which is why combating them forms a key part of our Beating Crime Plan.

As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, noted, at the heart of efforts to reduce crime will always be the police. I pay tribute to the work of the many dedicated police officers who do the difficult and sometimes dangerous job of keeping our communities safe, day in and day out. I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Snape, about police morale but, as an ex-policeman myself, joined on the Front Bench today by my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower, another ex-policeman, we can say categorically that morale is affected by many factors, internal and external.

I detected a degree of gang activity on the Opposition Benches when it came to members of the Government. I will not engage with all of it. I am afraid I will not apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I appreciate that the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, was passionately delivered, and I will make sure that the Ministry of Justice is alerted to his contribution in Hansard. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, that I will visit a petrol station after I have given this speech.

We need to make sure the police service is properly supported and resourced. That is why the Government set a target to recruit an additional 20,000 police officers across England and Wales through the police uplift programme by March 2023. These are new posts. We are on track to succeed: as at 30 June 2022, 13,790 additional officers had been recruited. To the right reverend Prelate’s point, we are actually better than half way.

It is worth remembering that, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, pointed out, the nature of crime has changed and moved, as have our times. If this descended into a debate solely about numbers, we would not be taking into account technology, tactics and all the rest of the factors that go into effective policing.

I turn to some of the specific crime types that are referenced in the title of this debate and that noble Lords have discussed in their contributions today. The Government are determined to reduce serious violence and bear down on violent criminal street gangs. We are pursuing a robust twin-track approach that combines tough enforcement with measures to prevent young people becoming involved in the first place. I will talk to this strategy more in a moment, but first I shall outline the data. I accept the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, about data; it can of course be used in many ways. He asked me a number of detailed questions about data. I will write to him on all those, because I simply do not have time to address them all. I hope that is acceptable.

I start with serious youth violence. I remember that behind these numbers and percentages, which are of course very dry, there are real people; I am not forgetting that. Serious youth violence, as measured by hospital admissions among under-25s for assault by a sharp object, is falling. In the year ending June 2022 it had fallen by 11% across England compared with the year ending June 2021. We know that those figures, as with all crime, have been affected by the pandemic, and we are not complacent in our efforts to continue to do all we can to reduce violence.

I noted the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, about the surgeon in Peckham, and I commend his efforts. I am afraid she rather lost me at the PM’s pension; I will not go into that. I also noted and was moved by the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Austin, about Dea-John Reid. Obviously, my thoughts and prayers are with his family. That is an appalling set of circumstances and I will investigate a little more.

To go back to the serious violence and gang situation, the Government have made £130 million available this financial year, 2022-23, building on similar levels of investment in previous years, to tackle serious violence including murder and knife crime. This includes £64 million for our network of 20 violence reduction units, which are delivering a range of early-intervention and prevention programmes to divert people away from a life of crime, and £30 million for Grip, a police programme that—to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker—uses a highly data-driven process to identify violence hotspots, often to individual street level, and target operational activity in those areas.

I shall give the noble Lord one specific example of how this works. In a hotspot policing pilot in Southend-on-Sea in Essex, which has recently adopted Grip, a 30% reduction in serious violence on days when patrols took place compared with days when they did not was noted. As he rightly points out, the activity was not displaced. VRUs and targeted police enforcement programmes have prevented an estimated 49,000 violent offences in their first two years of activity.

The noble Lord, Lord Snape, specifically asked me about the West Midlands. It has had £16 million devoted to this programme since 2019, and £5.9 million this year. Its VRU is projected to support more than 21,000 young people in the region next year. The West Midlands is also very active in Grip.

We are determined to do more and to strengthen our response, including in the prevention space, which is why we have invested £200 million through our 10-year youth endowment fund to test and evaluate what works in reducing violence. Next year we will commence the serious violence duty, which will require specified agencies across England and Wales to work together collaboratively, share data and information, and put in place a strategy to prevent and reduce serious violence within their local area.

We will also pilot serious violence reduction orders, which will provide the police with the power to stop and search adults already convicted of knife or offensive weapons offences. Serious violence, as has been noted across the House, destroys lives, shatters families and plagues our communities. The Government remain wholly committed to confronting these crimes wherever and whenever they occur.

The noble Lords, Lord Snape and Lord Coaker, both referred to the homicide figures. The figures in England have remained relatively stable in recent years. That is not an endorsement, I have to say; I still think they are shockingly high. There were 710 homicides in the year to March 2022, while in the year to March 2020 there were 714. Obviously there was a decrease in homicide in the lockdown year.

I turn to county lines gangs, which were noted, movingly, by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe—I share her opinion on and outrage about child exploitation—and to which the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, also referred. They are driving crime across the country, not just by supplying illicit drugs but by perpetrating violence and exploiting the most vulnerable and, in some cases, the very young. Cracking down on this pernicious, poisonous threat is an obvious priority. The Government have a 10-year drugs strategy to save lives and cut crime. We have committed to investing up to £145 million to bolster our flagship county lines programme. The programme has provided targeted investment in those areas with the greatest county lines threat, with dedicated task forces in four key areas—London, Merseyside, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester—but county lines affect all forces, which is why we also established the National County Lines Coordination Centre to co-ordinate a national law enforcement response.

We are bringing the full force of our law enforcement capability to bear in tackling this issue, but we recognise that a wider system response is needed to support those vulnerable individuals being exploited by these gangs. That is why, through the programme, we are investing up to £5 million over the next three years to provide specialist support to victims of county lines exploitation, and their families. From the start of the programme in 2019 until April this year, the police have closed more than 2,400 lines. That includes 8,000 arrests and more than 9,500 individuals engaged through safeguarding interventions. Since April 2022, the programme has delivered a further 500 line closures, bringing the total line closures since the programme was launched in November 2019 to 2,900. It is a move in the right direction, but these gangs are resilient. We are not, and will not be, complacent, so we will continue to target county lines relentlessly, persistently closing them and putting those responsible behind bars.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans made a very good point when he reiterated how important civil society is. Much of that is down to local authorities and activities in local areas, but the Supporting Families programme has helped thousands of families across England—162,000 this year alone—through a whole-family approach.

Before I get on to the thorny subject of burglary, the noble Lord, Lord Snape, suggested that the Government are blaming the Mayor of London for the state of play in London. Rather than repeating what I said yesterday in answering the Question asked by my noble friend Lord Lexden about the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, I refer him to Hansard where I endeavoured—I am afraid it is quite boring—to describe the split of accountability and responsibility as it exists in London. We can debate whether it is the right split, but it exists.

As many noble Lords have pointed out, burglary is a particularly harmful crime. The feeling that your own home, which should be a place of safety, has been invaded and your possessions rifled through is distressing and disconcerting. The impact on victims and wider communities can be profound. It is therefore right that proper priority is given to tackling burglary. Of course, primary responsibility for this, as it does for any crime, rests with police forces which are accountable to locally elected police and crime commissioners. It is therefore worrying that in a report published only two months ago, the independent His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services noted that when it comes to tackling burglary and robbery

“too often there is a failure to get the basics of investigation and prevention right.”

I know this is something that the leadership of the police service is very concerned about, and we will continue to work with the police to ensure that they do get the basics right. This is a top priority for the Home Secretary.

Providing reassurance to victims and making sure that evidential leads are followed up is a key part of this. We were therefore very pleased when, just two weeks ago, the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the chief executive of the College of Policing confirmed that chief constables and commissioners in England and Wales had collectively agreed that we should have police attendance at all home burglaries. I want to be clear that the Government are playing their part. As well as the police uplift programme, we have invested £120 million over the past three years in our flagship Safer Streets programme, which is supporting a range of crime prevention measures, including practical measures such as improved home security, street lighting and CCTV. According to the most recent statistics covering the year to March 2022—I appreciate what we have been discussing about statistics—burglary, as recorded by the Office for National Statistics’ Crime Survey for England and Wales, has fallen by 23% compared with the year ending December 2019. Of course, that number was recorded during the pandemic and showed a dramatic 27% decline, but I should note that as lockdown restrictions have eased police have recorded residential burglaries starting to increase a little. The figure for December 2021 was 11% higher than the figure for March 2021, but volumes remain substantially lower than pre pandemic.

The focus on preventing crime, including burglaries, sits across government. One core strand of this is our ambitious whole-of-government drugs strategy, which will drive down the burglary committed by those with a dependence on opiates and crack cocaine, who are responsible for almost half of all acquisitive crime, but I take note of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, about alcohol. Evidence shows that drug treatment can have an immediate and sustained impact in reducing offending, which is why the Government have committed to expanding and improving treatment and wider support to tackle drug-related offending, which blights communities across the country.

I have had a go at answering all the questions. This has been a very worthwhile debate, and I reiterate my thanks to all who have participated. There is much that all noble Lords who have spoken have agreed on. Crime has a profound effect on victims and the communities where they live, and it is vital that we do everything we can to tackle it. As I have emphasised, this Government are committed to bringing down crime, and I have set out some of the many measures that we, working with colleagues in the police and across the criminal justice system, are taking to achieve that result. Our message is clear: we will not stand by while decent, law-abiding people suffer at the hands of criminals. We will support and empower the police to fight crime in all its guises, and we will use every available tool and resource to keep the public safe.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, before the Minister sits down, could he address the point I raised about the legal definition of child criminal exploitation?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I am afraid I will have to disappoint the noble Baroness regarding the legal definition, but what I can say is that the data picture for group-based child sexual exploitation is currently poor. However, the Government are improving data quality in policing to support this. We are funding the Tackling Organised Exploitation programme, as well as regional abuse and exploitation analysts in every policing region, to develop enhanced intelligence about all forms of this. I appreciate that that does not answer the noble Baroness’s question, and if I may, I will write to her with a more enhanced answer.