Offensive Weapons Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, since our Grand Committee sitting on Monday we have heard from the police that they identify 10,000 children who are being exploited by organised crime to deliver drugs in county lines. This is newish and important information relevant to this debate as an important conduit for children to access knives. On Monday we debated mandatory sentences for children. We are hearing that children are being groomed to deliver drugs and are provided with weapons—not guns, but knives and so on. This may put a very different complexion on our debate. Will the Minister provide the Committee with a note before Report responding to this new information in the context of our discussions on mandatory sentencing for children?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for explaining the trusted trader scheme. I hope to set out the context of the provisions of the Bill. I agree with the Committee that evidence is important to this end.

It is already an offence to sell a knife to somebody under the age of 18, but we know that some sellers are not doing enough to stop children buying knives online. Evidence from online test purchase operations shows that a worrying number of online sellers sampled failed to have effective age-verification procedures in place. Trading standards conducted two online test purchase operations in 2008 and 2009. A test purchase operation commissioned by the Home Office conducted in 2014 showed that 69% of the retailers sampled failed the test. This was a slight improvement on the exercise five years previously but showed that a large majority of online test purchases failed and retailers were breaking the law.

A further test purchase operation was carried out in December 2016. The results showed that 72% of retailers tested failed to verify the age of the purchaser at the point of accepting the order and only 19% went on to require further evidence of age and refuse the sale when the evidence was not produced. Recent test purchases targeting online retailers conducted in late 2018 under the Government’s new prosecution fund show that 42% of the retailers sampled failed the test and sold knives to persons under the age of 18. We have evidence that online retailers are selling to people under the age of 18.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. Young people are being forced to carry knives for protection. We have an awful situation where young people become both victims and perpetrators of knife crime, both in self-defence and, perhaps, more maliciously. I thank him for making that point.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I wonder how the Minister can say that young people are forced to carry knives for their own protection and, at the same time, bring in mandatory prison sentences for children who carry knives. There does not seem to be much consistency in that. I do not expect the Minister to respond but, if children are feeling forced to carry knives in fear for their own safety, how can one introduce mandatory prison sentences—they have already been introduced— for children who carry knives? It seems a bit of a puzzle to me.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The challenge is to get to a situation where children do not feel they need to carry knives for their protection or in order to attack others.

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[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I certainly would. I would be delighted for it to go through the process, because the scheme I have been keen we talk about has come not from me, but from the industry. They want the scheme, so I would be delighted for it to go there, since they are the people who make these niche products and are worried that the Government are putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I wonder how the rest of the world deals with these issues. The Minister may have described that to us at some point. The situation clearly seems to cry out for international co-operation if there are serious issues in other nations with knife crime and corrosive substances. For instance, what does Germany do with regard to these issues? I know that recent circumstances here have changed very rapidly, so it may be an issue just in this country. The United States probably has an even more significant problem with it and may be more resistant to intervene than we would be.

Knife crime is a symptom of many other things, including, as we were hearing yesterday, our issues around drugs. We heard from two police officers, one a retired undercover drugs detective. He was saying that since the introduction of the Misuse of Drugs (Amendment) Regulations 1988, we have seen a soaring in the number of people using drugs. He pointed out that 10% of users take up 50% of the supply of serious drugs; so 10% of chronic heroin users are consuming 50% of the drugs market.

If one addressed the needs of these drug users, as we used to do before the misuse of drugs Acts—if we provide users quickly with methadone and with safe places to take drugs—the demand would disappear and the supply would shrink. These would perhaps be more effective options. Maybe the Minister can write to us about what happens in other nations and how they deal with these issues.

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[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment because it advocates one public health approach, along the lines advocated in the serious violence strategy. The sad fact is, however, that too many of the intervention and preventive measures outlined in the strategy are not sufficiently resourced and may not materialise.

Last week, the drugs, alcohol and justice cross-party group that I co-chair heard about an initiative from Thames Valley Police, about which I immediately wrote to the Home Secretary, encouraging him to take an interest in it. It is a diversion scheme—modelled on the mental health diversion scheme so successfully introduced after the report by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley—requiring those found to be in possession of drugs to attend for voluntary treatment. The interesting thing was that the constables on duty in the Thames Valley streets reported that they found it extremely simple and clear to use.

As many other noble Lords have pointed out, knife carrying is a symptom of wider social issues. Many young people carry them because they fear for their lives. However, in confirmation of my warning that too many of the intervention and preventive measures outlined in the serious violence strategy are not sufficiently resourced, the Institute of Mental Health in Nottingham —I declare an interest as a member of its external advisory board—has found that only 18% of the community commissioning groups recognise that they have any responsibility for funding probation, which includes mental health and drug treatment. This emphasises the need for this significant programme of work—words used by the Home Secretary to describe the strategy—to involve a wide range of government departments, including liaison between the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Health on this issue.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. She referred to cuckooing, which is when a vulnerable adult has someone move in who then uses their home to supply drugs. I have heard of this happening in the past among care leavers. Sometimes a local authority will provide a young person leaving care with a flat but they are vulnerable and feel isolated, so it is very easy for people to take advantage of them and start misusing their premises in that way.

I attended the meeting yesterday with the former undercover detective and a senior detective from the Midlands police force. They were talking about drugs and county lines. I asked them, “Since we are dealing in Committee with knife crime and corrosive agents, do you have any advice relating to your experience on them?”. The detectives’ response was that dealing effectively with drugs would probably be a more effective way of tackling the problem than the legislation we are working on at the moment.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

We have to get the balance right between protecting vulnerable people from becoming further involved in drugs or crime generally and criminalising some of the people who caused them to get into that life in the first place, which may involve drug abuse.

I shall outline some of the things the Government are doing, which go right to the heart of what the noble Baroness is talking about—early prevention, intervention and treatment. Noble Lords will have heard me talking about the Home Secretary’s commitment to a public health approach to drugs, taking into account all the resources that different agencies have at their disposal to tackle such problems. The noble Baroness was talking about the work in Scotland, which is very effective and very good in terms of intervention.

NHS England is rolling out liaison and diversion services across the country. They operate at police stations and courts to identify and assess people with vulnerabilities, substance misuse and mental health problems and criminality, which are quite often interlinked. They refer them into appropriate services and, where appropriate, away from the justice system altogether. If we went back 10 years, the noble Baroness could talk about the police operating aside from the law, but there is much more understanding now that early intervention and diversion are the way forward. The schemes that the NHS is currently running cover around 80% of the population in England, and we are looking to full coverage by 2021.

The Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice are working with NHS England and Public Health England to develop the community sentence treatment requirement protocol. The protocol aims to increase the use of community sentences with drug, alcohol and mental health treatment requirements as an alternative to custody, to improve health outcomes and reduce reoffending. It sets out what is expected from all involved agencies to ensure improved access to mental health and substance misuse treatment for offenders who need it. The Department of Health is currently leading an evaluation of the implementation of the protocol across five test-bed sites to inform further development.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, also talked about funding. I do not know whether he knows, but a youth endowment fund of £200 million is being introduced—quite a substantial amount of money. It will run for 10 years, so it is not a short-term approach. The fund will open shortly, so I hope that alongside some of the things we are doing, it will help us in our endeavours to tackle some of the root causes with early interventions and diversions from that type of activity. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I shall briefly raise a matter I should have raised before. I thank the Minister for her reply, for the tone of what she said and for her recognition of the need to get to the underlying problems. I omitted to develop the concern about children and young people in care and care leavers. As the Minister will know, there is a long-standing concern about the criminalisation of young people in care and care leavers. Very few arrive into care because of criminal activity, but far too many are represented in our prisons, both as children and as adults. My noble friend Lord Laming led an inquiry into reducing the criminalisation of children, and he is concerned to see all agencies working together to keep young people—both those who have left care and those who are in it—out of the criminal justice system. What the Minister and the noble Baroness have said is helpful in this regard. But there is also a new strengthening duty on the corporate parenting responsibilities of all agencies to support young people leaving care. These are important matters to relate to this particular issue, and I thank the noble Baroness for allowing me to make those points.

[Baroness Meacher]

I thank the Minister very much for her thoughtful response, but she did not respond to my reference to Report stage or to whether we could do something to align this Bill with the Government’s thinking on people addicted to drugs who get into these awful situations with gangs. Does the Minister feel able to say something about what we might do between now and Report?