Immigration: Pausing the Hostile Environment

John Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) deserves the praise and has the admiration of the whole House for how he has championed the Windrush generation, and he is of course right that this was an outrage. However, does the Minister appreciate that that generation, who came here believing this to be, in the words of the shadow Home Secretary, their “mother country” and who are proud patriots, take just as dim a view as any of the rest of us of those who behave illegally or improperly? The point is that the Windrush generation were not illegal or improper and that they do not condone illegality. In doing right by the Windrush generation and being unrelenting in their defence, will the Minister be equally unrelenting in dealing with people who abuse the system and try to cheat them and us?

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. He and the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) have been right to pay tribute to the immigrants who have come to this country and contributed so much to our society and way of life, giving us the multicultural Britain that we enjoy today. However, my right hon. Friend is right to point out that this Government continue to be determined to take action against people who are here illegally, and the suite of measures that enables us to do that remains in place.

Offensive Weapons Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Wednesday 27th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My right hon. Friend makes the point that our response must be proportionate, and we must ensure that banning firearms leads to the right outcome. He has alluded to his own experience in this regard, and I hope he is reassured by my indication that I am happy to talk to colleagues about the issue. He has also mentioned the need for control and proper possession of any type of weapon that could be used in the wrong way. The Bill contains clear measures based on the evidence that has been brought to us thus far, but I am happy to listen to what others have to say.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) referred to the pervasive nature of the culture that is leading to violent crime. Will my right hon. Friend work with other Departments on some of the drivers of that culture? Some people are driven by the internet and social media, but there may be other malevolent sources of information that lead people into the business of crime. This will require a great deal of lateral thinking, and I know my former apprentice is capable of that.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that important point. He speaks with experience of the Home Office, and my predecessor as Home Secretary established the Serious Violence Taskforce for precisely this reason. I have already held my own first meeting of the taskforce. Each meeting leads to action, and, as I mentioned earlier, the last one led to action on social mobility and online activity. However, there are also roles for the Department for Education, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and other Departments. They will need to do their bit, because, as my right hon. Friend says, this will require cross-governmental action.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend.

[Mr John Hayes]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I will give way briefly to my right hon. Friend and then I will make some progress because I know that other people wish to speak.

[Mr Hayes]

In the same spirit as my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), I say that the key thing is that the criminal justice system must be retributive. This is not about treating people who are sick, but about punishing people who are guilty. Until we send out that signal from this place, the general public will believe, with cause, that we do not understand what they know to be happening in their communities.

[Philip Davies]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We hear very little in this place about people being punished for committing crimes, but there is nothing wrong with it. Again, on these kinds of issue, this House is completely out of touch with the general public in their views on law and order, sentencing and the criminal justice system, but my right hon. Friend, as usual, is not.

I think that there is a quite an important drafting mistake in the Bill, and the House of Commons Library seems to agree with me. Clause 26 amends the two Acts dealing with the offence of threatening with a knife and changes the test regarding the level of physical harm likely to result from the knife. I welcome that. I certainly welcome the thrust of what this clause seeks to do. As the clause is worded, it will still leave in law the definition of violence as being the original higher test. This is what the Library says on this point, and hopefully the Minister will take note of it.

“Section 139AA (4) and section 1A (2) both define the term ‘serious physical harm’, which forms part of the current wording of the offences set out in section 139AA and section 1A. However, the term ‘serious physical harm’ is not used in the proposed new wording for the offence as set out in clause 26, and would instead be replaced by the term ‘physical harm’. Clause 26 does not set out any particular definition for the term ‘physical harm’, nor does it amend or remove the existing definition of ‘serious physical harm’ in sections 139AA (4) and section 1A (2).”

I do not know what the Government’s intention is here. If they want to define the new term “physical harm”, the existing wording in sections 1139AA (4) and 1A (2) would need to be amended to set out a suitable definition. If they want to leave the new term undefined for the courts to interpret, the existing wording in those measures that I mentioned should be removed altogether.

I hope that the Minister will go away and look at this, because I think that there has been a genuine mistake. I think I know what the Government are trying to do, and they have half done it, but they have not squared the circle.

I want to see a rare outbreak of common sense with regard to criminal justice legislation. Clause 27 will extend the “threatening with a knife” offence to further educational establishments. Although that is a welcome step, it does not go nearly far enough as far as I am concerned. I will be tabling amendments to replace this clause to make it an offence to threaten somebody with a knife anywhere.

I cannot for the life of me see why someone who threatens somebody with a knife should not be prosecuted for this offence, regardless of where the offence takes place. Currently, it has to be in a public place or on school premises, and the Bill will extend that to further education premises. But why should it not apply to all premises? Why is threatening somebody with a knife an offence only if it is in a public place, school premises or a further education establishment? Threatening somebody with a knife should be an offence wherever it happens—surely that is common sense—but the law is not being extended in that way.

I am afraid that I am firmly of the belief that the Ministry of Justice has needlessly tied itself in knots over this issue for years. When the offence of threatening with a knife was introduced, it included a defence of lawful possession of the knife. This was clearly ludicrous and would have seriously affected convictions. Would anyone at the Ministry of Justice listen? No. How can the possession of a knife be a defence for threatening somebody with that knife? But the Ministry of Justice would not listen. I am not a lawyer—I say that with some pride—yet, even with a House full of legal eagles, the Bill would have gone through with this glaring drafting error, which seems to have arisen because the legislation on possession of a knife has simply been copied and pasted, with the “threatening” bit added instead. Clearly, lawfully carrying the knife is a defence in the case of possession, but it should never have been a defence for threatening with that knife.

In desperation, I went to see the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. It was only when he agreed, weighed in and overruled the Ministry of Justice that the Bill was thankfully changed before it was too late. People can check the record; it is absolutely true. That is why I have a very keen interest in this particular area of legislation.

The other glaring omission, which is quite possibly a throwback to the same original bad drafting, is that the offence is not committed in private premises. Possessing a knife in the home is clearly perfectly fine and legal—naturally. But why should it not be an offence to threaten with a knife in a domestic context? In a written question last November, I asked the then Secretary of State for the Home Department

“if she will extend the offence of threatening with a knife to incidents taking place on private property.”

The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who is in her place today, responded:

“It is already an offence to threaten someone with a knife whether in public or on private property.”

Well, if we read this provision literally, it clearly is not.

I followed up with a letter. As the Government seemed to think that that was already an offence, I hoped that when they realised that it was not, they would be keen to make it one. Alas, it was not so simple. The latest line seems to be to say that there are other offences that can be charged. Well, I know that. Thanks to the Public Order Act 1986 there are actually more offences that can be charged in a public place. Yet this was not a reason to stop the offence of threatening with a knife in a public place becoming law, so why should it stop the offence of threatening somebody with a knife in a private place becoming law?

The trouble is that the various departmental bubbles do not always appreciate the real world. I know of real-life, actual cases where people should have been charged with threatening with a knife, but they could not be charged because it did not happen in a public place. The alternative charges to which we are referred do not attract the same sentence as threatening with a knife, and therefore do not reflect the seriousness of the offence.

Just one example was of a man in a hostel who threatened a female member of staff with a knife and had to be dealt with by an armed response unit. That must have been particularly terrifying, given that the member of staff concerned knew only too well of the man’s previous violent record, as the hostel was housing him on release from a prison sentence for violence. As the hostel was not a public place or a school, the offence of threatening with a knife could not be used by the Crown Prosecution Service. I understand that this was specifically confirmed by the prosecutor when the case came to court. An offence with a six-month maximum penalty was substituted and, with the man’s guilty plea, the maximum sentence available to the court was four months. This would have been avoided if the law had applied to all places equally, as it quite clearly should.

I really hope that I will get some cross-party support for this amendment so that we can make a positive change to the Bill. I am not, perhaps, always known as someone who unites the House—at least, not with me, but sometimes against me—but on this occasion there is not actually a great deal for people to disagree about. There may be some resistance from civil servants, who do not like any ideas other than the ones that they have come up with themselves, but I would like to hear, in the real world, just one good argument for not taking this opportunity to change the Bill in this small way, but in a way that would make the law much better and safer for many of our constituents.

Threatening somebody with a knife is a serious offence that we should crack down on. It should not make any difference where the act of threatening with a knife takes place, so I hope that my amendment will be accepted in due course.

The Minister and I have spoken. I very much appreciate the time that she has spent with me on this issue, but I would welcome a commitment on the Floor of the House that she will look seriously at this again. I hope that she will think twice before peddling a civil service standard reply, which I am sure that she would never do, but which I am sure the civil servants would always encourage her to do. She must look at this matter herself. If she does, I am sure that she will see that this is a very sensible amendment, which would make a big difference to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

I rise to support the Bill and its proposed legislative changes. I shall focus particularly on knife crime and preventive measures, notwithstanding the concerns raised by colleagues about the possible unintended consequences of some of the firearms measures. I am particularly pleased that action is being taken on zombie knives and corrosive substances. I pay tribute to the work of the Express & Star newspaper in the west midlands, which has been relentless in its campaign for action on knife crime, and particularly on zombie knives.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), I am also especially pleased about the Government’s proposals in clause 26 which, as he outlined, change the definition of what we mean by the threat posed by somebody with an offensive weapon. I proposed such a measure at Prime Minister’s questions almost five years ago following the killing of a schoolgirl on the No. 9 bus coming out of Birmingham to a school in my constituency. In principle, tightening up that definition, notwithstanding some of the concerns that my hon. Friend raised about the wording of the clause, is a significant change that will help to ensure that people are properly sentenced for threatening behaviour while using offensive weapons like knives. I very much welcome the insertion of clause 26 and the changes that that makes to the Prevention of Crime Act 1953.

The Bill has emerged out of the Government’s serious violence strategy, which was published in April. That is a very interesting document, because it sets out that the Government are clear that the violent crime that we see in certain parts of our communities will not be solved just by law enforcement. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, I am an advocate of tough sentencing and people being punished for their crimes. However, I think all Members would agree that that will not solve the underlying problems in some of our communities. That approach is necessary, but it is not sufficient to deal with this problem.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. As I said earlier, the drivers—the causes—of crime are complex, as he suggests, but the way in which we deal with and respond to crime is not incompatible with taking the kind of lines that he has recommended. Both need to be addressed—the causes and the response.

[James Morris]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I totally agree—those things are not incompatible.

What we are seeing in some of our communities is not confined just to London. My constituency is just on the fringe of Birmingham, and we have seen examples of the increasing use of offensive weapons in Birmingham and other areas throughout the country. We need to be careful about exaggerating the problem. The issue has certainly arisen, but we must not exaggerate its consequences. However, we must ask some difficult questions about what leads young people, in particular, towards gangs, and what I would call the fetishisation of weapons. What is leading to that, and to this outbreak of serious violent crime, in certain parts of our communities? The Government’s serious violence strategy is quite clear that one of the drivers is drugs. It says, in particular, that increases in the dealing of crack cocaine and its supply chains are leading to gang violence. We need to be serious about addressing some of the issues of organised drug crime.

The reason why young people are turning to weapons and violence is a complex picture, and we need to face up to that complexity, notwithstanding the need for stronger sentencing. We need to look at issues around unstable family backgrounds. A lot of the kids who end up being part of gangs come from extremely unstable backgrounds.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Morris]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. There is a balance to be struck. As I said at the beginning of my speech, we need a very tough law enforcement framework in this area. The evidence from the police is that they want that, because it provides a deterrent. However, he is exactly right that the balancing item in the argument, as expressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), is that we need to understand the underlying drivers. That is why, as the Government recognise in their strategy, we need to focus on prevention and diversion strategies that take young people away from the criminal justice system. One weakness of the criminal justice system, for historical reasons, is that it can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle whereby young people get trapped in the system and cannot escape it.

[Mr John Hayes]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way a second time. This dilemma has bedevilled youth justice in particular since the 1960s. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 which, broadly speaking, took a treatmentist approach to juvenile criminals, led to all kinds of favourable treatment for them, with intermediate treatment orders being the classic example. That essentially meant that victims were devalued in the system, and we emphasised the individual criminal, rather than the event—the crime. The victim of a violent crime is more interested in what has been done to them than who has done it.

[James Morris]

My right hon. Friend makes some fair points, but we have to get the balance right in our approach because, as he will recognise, there are a lot of complex drivers.

I am conscious that other Members want to speak and I have taken a number of interventions, so I will draw my remarks to a conclusion. I support the measures in the Bill to tighten up the law enforcement regime for offensive weapons. However, we must reflect on the Government’s serious violence strategy, which recognises that the only way we will solve this problem is by taking a multifaceted approach. Law enforcement, in and of itself, is not going to solve the problem. Too many young people are dying in this country, and that is a waste of potential and human life. We have to take the right measures to get to the bottom of why this is happening, and do it soon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Will Quince]

I broadly agree with my right hon. Friend. When we criminalise a child at a young age, the problem is that their life chances are impaired to such an extent that a life continuing along the route of criminality is sadly almost inevitable. We should break that cycle when we have the opportunity to intervene—such opportunities are often rare—and ensure that we put them back on the right path. One way to do that is to ensure that a criminal record does not stay with a child forever. For example, someone might commit an offence at a young age after they have been groomed or forced into that action due to violence and intimidation. They could then completely turn their lives around and think, 10 years later, “I want to contribute by becoming a police officer and serving my community.” Currently—I stand to be corrected by the Minister—that would not be possible, because their criminal record continues. I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend.

I welcome the Bill and will support its Second Reading. It has huge merits but, as a number of right hon. and hon. Members have said, it is not without issue. By its nature, it is reactive legislation that deals with weapons that gangs and criminals have moved on to. Some of those weapons—knives and corrosives—can probably never truly be banned, as we all know that they are available in households across the country. I could probably find several in my kitchen. We need to ensure that we have a multifaceted approach to tackling this issue, and the serious violence strategy has a significant role to play.

First, we need to make sure that our legislation gives the police the powers they need to deal with offenders, which is one thing that the Bill does. Secondly, we need to make sure that, when we intervene, we do so as early as possible. We need to turn children away from gangs and, indeed, when they are the victims of gangs or grooming, we need to give them the protection and support they need.

As I have said previously in the Chamber, we need education in schools to ensure that children know the dangers of carrying a weapon. There are some fantastic charities across the country—many have been set up by parents who have lost a child to knife crime—that go into schools to educate children about the danger of carrying knives. The charities teach children that they are far more likely to be the victim of a knife attack if they carry a knife themselves, and they show them in a graphic way the devastation caused by a knife attack. They show the awful wounds, and they also show what it feels like to be a family member whose child is in hospital or, even worse, has been fatally wounded or murdered.

Thirdly, judges need a full range of sentencing powers so that a person who is repeatedly caught carrying a knife, or who is caught harming an individual, can be given a custodial sentence. I agree with Members who have said that we need to come down very hard on those who are repeatedly caught carrying a knife or weapon, and on those who harm another individual, but there need to be other solutions, such as educational and non-custodial approaches, so that we do not fill our prisons with young people who have lost their future.

At the moment, an individual who is caught carrying a knife may get just a caution. In my view, they should also be sent on a weapons awareness course. A person who is caught speeding, for example—I am not conflating carrying a knife and speeding but, to some extent, it is a useful comparison—has the option of paying a fine or going on a course. It should be mandatory that a person who is given a caution for any kind of weapon-related offence is sent on a course. They should have to see the devastation caused by such weapons, which hopefully would go some way towards breaking their attitude towards carrying a weapon and knife crime. That would not work for everyone, but for some individuals, especially those who are particularly young and have made a mistake—for many first-time offenders it will be just a mistake—it might just break the cycle, and at very small cost. Such courses are, in many cases, run by charities across the country.

Fourthly, we need to identify and address the root causes of this criminality. Why do people carry weapons? How has our society got to this position? It could be social breakdown, regional inequality, family breakdown, absent father figures or a lack of male role models. It could be school exclusion, which has been mentioned, or social isolation—gang culture can provide a sense of belonging. It could be county line activity or prostitution. It could actually be education and the messaging we send out about drugs and drug use.

I find it bizarre that we have middle-class people in this country who drive around in their electric vehicles, drinking their Rainforest Alliance coffee and eating their Fairtrade chocolate, but who have no qualms whatsoever about going out at the weekend and having a few lines of coke, because that does not harm anyone, does it? If only those people saw the devastation that that causes both in the country where the cocaine is sourced from and through the county line activity in this country that takes the drugs from the point of entry to the point at which they are sold. If only they saw, in so many cases, the children whose lives have been devastated as a result. We need to send a clear message that drug taking is not acceptable and that, through the damage it does, it is not a victimless crime.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point that deserves amplification. The gated-lived, middle-class liberals who take drugs have little or no care because they have little or no contact with the kind of people he describes. It is the people on the frontline who suffer, and they deserve to be treated as a priority.

[Will Quince]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. It is important to note, though, that although in the past people have thought, “This isn’t a problem for us—this isn’t something that our children would be involved in,” the reality is that it is now quite the opposite. These grooming gangs are looking for people who are not stereotypical. They are looking for children who are particularly vulnerable, and that is not just children from socially deprived backgrounds or from council housing estates—the people one would perhaps automatically associate with being easy prey for some of these grooming gangs—but the young people who are easiest to groom and are less likely to be stopped and searched by a police officer. The enemy is at the gate, and to think that our own children and the children of middle-class families are not as affected as anybody else is a myth. It is a dangerous assumption not to think that every single part of our society and every town in our country is affected, and even rural areas. We should absolutely send out the message loud and clear that this affects everybody’s children, not just somebody else’s.

On root causes, we need to take a much tougher stance on antisocial behaviour. If we do not take a tougher stance on very low-level crime, it will be easier for people to think that other crimes are acceptable. A policing focus on drugs would be particularly helpful. To tackle the issues, we really need to understand the root causes. The strategy goes some way towards achieving that, but there is more work to do.

Let me turn to the specifics of the Bill. There is no reason whatsoever for under-18s to be able to buy these weapons, nor for them to carry them in public, so I very much welcome the Government’s position. There is also no reason to possess certain weapons in private properties. There is no justification for having zombie knives, knuckle dusters and death stars, even in private possession.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

It is a prevalent liberal misassumption that things can only get better. Their mindset is that progress is inevitable and that whatever we do, society will advance. It is true that, as Disraeli said:

“Change is inevitable…change is constant”,

but things can simultaneously deteriorate as well as improve. In my lifetime, there is no question but that that is exactly what has happened.

In the 60 years of my life—I know you are thinking, Mr Deputy Speaker, “How can that possibly be true? How can that callow youth standing before me possibly have been born in 1958?”, but it is true—civil society has been weakened, respect for authority has dwindled and many of the once routine civilities and courtesies that mitigate the inevitable pitfalls of human existence have been derided, eroded or abandoned. Consequently, life is less gentle than it was when I was a boy. Many have been brutalised and some are brutal. It is very difficult for the liberal establishment to come to terms with that, because the unhappy reality of increasing disorder and criminality contrasts with the myth of progress. It is therefore either disguised or ignored by those who cannot bear to face the facts.

I thought I would offer the Chamber some of those facts this afternoon. They are so extraordinary that when I researched them, I could barely believe them, but they are based on information available from the Library. In the year of my birth, 1958, the total number of violent criminal incidents was 31,522. At the end of 2014—a year for which the figures are available—the total number of violent incidents was 1,245,000. This is an extraordinary change. Even allowing for the change in population, which is significant, and for the changes in the definition of crime, which are not irrelevant, the truth is that there has been an explosion in the amount of serious and violent crime in our country. Most Members in this Chamber will know someone in their circle, family or beyond who has been a victim of some kind of serious or violent crime. Of course, we know that our constituents have been, but many of us will have encountered it in a much more familiar way than that.

[Will Quince]

Notwithstanding my right hon. Friend’s point, does he accept that it has become a lot easier—in fact, has never been easier—to report a crime?

[Mr Hayes]

It is true that in criminal statistics there is the well-established principle of the dark figure—the number of crimes never discovered because they are never reported—and that this also needs to be taken into account in any comparative analysis, which is why I qualified mine heavily before I offered it.

None the less, in the year of my birth there were 1,194 recorded robberies; the number now, extraordinarily enough, is 74,130. We have had roughly a seventyfold increase in the number of robberies during the 60 years of my life. This is indeed an extraordinary change. As parliamentarians, our recognition and acceptance of this is an important part of reconnecting ourselves with the lives and assumptions of the people who suffer these kinds of crimes. The more we detach ourselves from this reality and bury our heads in the sand, the more people believe we either do not know or, worse, do not care. I know that people across the Chamber do care, but denial is not good enough.

That is why I welcome the Bill. It is an important acceptance that action is needed, that further measures are required. It is not, of course, the whole solution—the Government would not claim it was, as right hon. and hon. Members have said—but it is a step in the right direction, although it will need to be refined in Committee. I will not go into why and how, because that has been amply rehearsed already, but it is important to consider some of the issues the Bill deals with: the availability of weapons; how easy or difficult it is for the police to deal with prosecutions; and the culture associated with this increase in violence, particularly among the young and in urban areas.

Our preoccupation with the here and now does not help. We have a culture dominated by the immediate at the expense of measured contemplation. We no longer think about what was or might be; we think of now, and we do not want people to feel that now is worse than it once was. Yet, having that long-term view and more contemplative approach to public policy is an important way to deal with some of the things I have described.

The idea that things are not getting better is unpalatable, which is why the Bill is pertinent and welcome. Crime has many causes, and some have been rehearsed in the debate. They include communal disintegration, family breakdown and the absence of opportunity, but fundamentally criminal behaviour is about the absence of values—values that the law-abiding take as read: care for others, personal responsibility, respect for the rule of law. In the absence of those values, the gulf is filled by altogether less desirable things—greed, anger, sloth, lust, gluttony, envy, pride. They are not, after all, new sins; they have been common to the human condition since man was made—and the results can be deadly.

Crime is not an illness to be treated, and the perpetrators of crime are not patients. Crime is the product of choices that people make. Those choices might have been affected by their circumstances, but it is pretty insulting to working-class people of the kind I was brought up among to tell them they are more likely to be criminals because they live on a council estate, work in a factory or never had a formal education of the kind I and many here enjoyed. Let us be clear: we have to identify malevolent behaviour and deal with it appropriately in the interests of public respect for the fairness of the justice system. Every time we do not, we undermine the regard for the rule of law among less well-off people—those hard-working decent people who do the right thing and do not choose the course of crime but go about their lives in a peaceable, decent and honourable way.

Let us now think about what more needs to be done. Certainly we need to tackle some of the “drivers” of crime, as they have been described by other Members. I have mentioned a few, in the context of health and the life of civil society, but I think that the internet is, or can be, a malevolent influence in this regard. We need to get tough with the social media platforms that glamorise violence, and, in particular, glamorise the use of the weapons of violence.

As I suggested earlier to the Home Secretary, we also need to adopt a cross-departmental approach to deal with support for the family and support for communities. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh)—who I thought spoke extremely well, as I told her privately—mentioned early intervention. Early intervention does matter, and there is no better early intervention than a strong and stable family. My early intervention was my mum and dad, who taught me the difference between what was right and what was wrong. You can fudge these things, and you can have a high-flown debate in fancy terms about sociology, but in the end it comes back to that: people having a very fundamental sense of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and what is good and what is bad behaviour. Families really matter in that respect.

We know that there is an association—if I may get sociological for a moment—between certain kinds of young people and crime. They tend to be young people whose families have broken down, and who have not had the role model of a strong father. We need to take a lateral approach in considering some of those causal factors.

Finally—

[Eddie Hughes]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Hayes]

No, because I want to conclude my remarks.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Mr Hughes, you are very close to the top of the list. I am sure you do not want to go down the list. I know that Mr Hayes is about to finish his speech. Come on, Mr Hayes.

[Mr Hayes]

As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, generosity is not merely my middle name; it is my every name. None the less, my dear friend will have to wait, because I am about to conclude my remarks.

The real risk with the Bill is not going too far, but not going far enough; not taking more steps than are necessary, but not taking the necessary steps. I will leave the House with Proust. Proust said, “You must never be afraid to go too far, because the truth lies beyond.” There is no Minister in this Government more committed to the pursuit of the truth than the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who will sum up the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

I am grateful to all hon. and right hon. Members across the House for their contributions to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) said that this had been a constructive and thoughtful debate—that is sadly too rare in this House—and I agree with him. Colleagues have made considered contributions, and it is clear that there is much common ground between us. The fact is that we all want this violent crime to stop, and the Bill is a tool with which the Government, and I hope Members across the House, are trying to tackle this serious issue.

It is apparent that everyone is committed to tackling violent crime head on, and rightly so. Recorded knife and gun crimes are on the increase, and hon. Members will know the devastating impact that those crimes have on communities across the country, not just in London. Before I go on to deal with the Bill, it is worth reflecting on why the legislation is necessary. From the teenage son stabbed to death outside a shop in Camden and the 15-year-old killed in Romford at the weekend to the man in Liverpool whose arm was severed by a machete in a county lines punishment and the fatal stabbings in Wolverhampton, and Sheffield—all those crimes and many more in every part of the country have left behind them grieving families and devastated communities. I consider meeting the victims and the grieving families of these terrible crimes to be one of the most important parts of my role. It is an essential part of my job, and that is why, when I stand here at the Dispatch Box, I speak not just from my notes but from the heart. It is for those people that I am helping the Government to take this legislation through.

We are clear that this is just a part of our strategy to tackle serious violence. We published the serious violence strategy in April, and its emphasis is on the themes that we have heard so much about today. It is about early intervention, about prevention and about the community drawing together and relying on local partners, as my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said. It is about us working together and seeing this not just as a law enforcement issue, important though that is, but as a societal issue as well. The measures in the Bill will strengthen the powers available to the police to deal with such crimes. When a family has suffered a terrible crime, they want to feel that the police have the powers they need to bring the offenders to justice. The measures will not solve all crimes involving knives, guns and corrosives, but they are important. We must pursue and prosecute those who commit violent crimes. The Bill gives the police and others the powers they need to do so.

The corrosives measures in the Bill will help to stop young people getting hold of dangerous corrosives and are supported by interested businesses. They build on the voluntary arrangements already in place and will close down the sale of acids to under-18s, both online and offline. The Bill also creates an offence of possession of a corrosive in a public place so that police can take additional action to prevent acid attacks. We know that gang members decant corrosive substances into water bottles to evade detection. This measure gives the police the powers they need.

Other measures will help to stop young people getting hold of knives online. That is a major concern of the communities and charities we have worked with in drawing together the serious violence strategy. We know that such sales have led to knives being used in crime. I have seen some of the knives on sale online. As colleagues on both sides of the House have said, they have no practical use; they are clearly designed to glamorise violence and encourage criminality, and are promoted as such.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right about the sale on the internet of those weapons, but the internet has other malevolent influences on young people. Several hon. Members raised the issue of social media and its glamorisation of violence. Will she work with others to clamp down on those people who allow those images and messages to be broadcast to vulnerable young people?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, not just for the concise and clear points he made in his contribution but for the poetry that he always brings to our debates.

My hon. Friends the Members for Solihull and for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) also made the point about social media. That is why the Home Office serious violence strategy is funding the social media hub pilot, which will give the Metropolitan police the powers they need to work with social media companies to bring those videos down. I have seen drill videos; they are horrific and they need to stop.

The measures on the possession of offensive weapons give the police the powers they need to act when people have flick knives, zombie knives and other offensive weapons that have absolutely no place in our homes.

A number of colleagues mentioned clause 28, which is on high-energy rifles. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said at the start of the debate that we will listen to colleagues’ concerns. I reiterate that this is not an attack on rural sports; it is a response to the threat assessment of the National Crime Agency and the police.

Given the strong concerns expressed, I will take a moment to explain how clause 28 came into being. For those who are not familiar with such weapons, they are very large and heavy firearms that can shoot very large distances. One example I have been given is that they can shoot the distance between London Bridge and Trafalgar Square—some 3,500 metres. I can share with the House the fact that there has been a recent increase in seizures at the United Kingdom border of higher-powered weaponry and ordnance. The assessment is that those weapons were destined for the criminal marketplace, and that the criminal marketplace is showing a growing demand for more powerful weaponry.

Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 11th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

In 2017, as the House has heard, the UK was subject to five terrorist attacks, which killed 36 people, injured many more and terrified millions. Furthermore, this year there was the shocking assassination attempt on Sergei and Yulia Skripal. So it is reasonable that the Government should review, and if necessary update, counter-terrorism legislation and arrangements for border security.

First, I want to pay tribute to the survivors and the bereaved of the terrorist atrocities in London and Manchester last year. The young girls at the Manchester Arena who came to see their favourite singer saw sights that children of that age should never have to see. I also want to pay tribute to all the brave women and men of the emergency services, who often run into danger and step forward in dreadful times. We should not forget the NHS workers—together with support from Porton Down—who were confronted with circumstances that they could never have dreamed of, but who saved the lives of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

I turn to the Bill before us. Let me begin by saying that I agreed with the Home Secretary when he said recently that there is no binary choice between security and liberty. What makes us free is often what makes us safe. It is certainly what makes ours a country and a way of life worth serving and defending. I am not saying that just as a member of Her Majesty’s Opposition—I fought infringements of our civil liberties, together with some of his Cabinet colleagues, when a Labour Government tried to introduce them, notably ID cards and 90 days’ detention without trial. I defend civil liberties without fear or favour.

The question that arises is whether the Bill is necessary, appropriate and proportionate. Although we support the Bill overall, a careful examination will show that it does not necessarily meet all those criteria. That is why we will seek to amend clauses of the Bill in Committee.

The Home Secretary will be aware that the Home Affairs Committee said in 2001:

“This country has more anti-terrorist legislation on its statute books than almost any other developed democracy.”

In 2008, Lord Lloyd of Berwick told the other place:

“No other country in the world…has had anything like the same plethora of”

anti-terrorism

“legislation that we have had.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 July 2008; Vol. 703, c. 700.]

More recently, Max Hill QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said last year that Britain

“has the laws we need. We should review them and ensure they ensure remain fit for purpose, but we should have faith in our legal structures, rather than trying to create some kind of new situation where the ordinary rules are thrown out.”

To the extent that the Bill does not throw out the ordinary rules, it has our broad support.

Finally in relation to expert opinion, I turn to the review by Dave Anderson, QC, of the terrorist incidents last year in Manchester and London. He made a series of recommendations, ranging from multi-agency working to greater intelligence sharing and more consistent handling of intelligence, but there was not a single recommendation of new laws or powers.

Nevertheless, we have the Bill before us, and the Opposition broadly support it. I will now set out our reservations. First, it will update offences in a way that will potentially criminalise information seeking, playing of videos and expressions of opinion. In relation to the playing of videos, the Home Secretary will have heard the opinion of my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) about three clicks being a significant number. We will seek to clarify the point in Committee.

On the question of expressing opinion, the Home Office says in its note on the Bill that it is

“not making it unlawful to hold a private view in support of a terrorist organisation”.

The Home Office also says:

“Operational experience has shown that there is a gap around individuals who make statements expressing their own support for terrorist organisations...but who stop short of expressly inviting others to do so”.

The Home Secretary will expect that we will press that point in Committee, because we would say that gap between having an opinion and inciting others to unlawful acts is not an anomaly but an important principle in protecting freedom of speech. We are in danger in the Bill of confusing bad thoughts with bad deeds. We hope to clarify this issue as the Bill makes progress.

Another concern about the Bill is the extent to which it allows the retention of biometric data on anyone arrested, including DNA and fingerprints, even if they are mistakenly or even unlawfully arrested. There are already abuses of the national police database, which the Government have failed to correct. The state has no business keeping records on people who are not criminals. It is an essential part of our liberty that we can go about our day-to-day lives unhindered by state agencies. That is not the case if the state can retain data on all of us. It is an even greater breach of our civil liberties if the retention is done without our knowledge.

A further concern about the Bill is what it has to say about the Prevent strategy. It proposes extending the Prevent strategy by allowing local authorities, as well as the police, to refer people to the Prevent programme. Let me be clear that there will always be a need for a programme that does what Prevent purports to do. I have met Commissioner Neil Basu and other Metropolitan police leads on Prevent, and I visited Prevent-funded programmes in Birmingham and elsewhere. I have no doubt that there is some good work being done in the name of Prevent, but Prevent as a whole is a tainted brand, particularly among sections of the Muslim community. From a recent study by the Behavioural Insights Team, commissioned by the Home Office itself, we also know that more than 95% of deradicalisation programmes are ineffective. I suggest that those two facts—that Prevent is a tainted brand and that so many of the deradicalisation programmes are ineffective—are not unrelated.

Labour is committed to a thorough review of the Prevent programme, which we believe is currently not fit for purpose. In the interests of transparency and accurate evidence-based policy making, I call on the Home Secretary today to publish the research by the Behavioural Insights Team, which has been so widely reported and seems to run counter to the claims made for the success of these programmes.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I did not intend to intervene—I will speak at length later—but is the right hon. Lady aware that about 75% of people referred to Prevent are, having been through the programme, of no further interest to the police or security services? That sounds like success to me.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Just to advise Members who may want to speak at length later, they will have up to 15 minutes and no more.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Terrorism blights lives and in some cases, of course, it takes lives. We have already heard from Members on both sides of the House about the appalling events of the last year, and they will be in all our minds as we debate these measures. The right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) was right to focus on the events in Manchester, not because any terrorist event is greater or less than any other, but because of the chilling image of those children, which she rightly focused on in her remarks.

Terrorism is not just about the people whose lives are lost. All of us are affected by it, including those who are related to the people who died, those in their communities, those in the wider network of people who came into contact with these events—the emergency services have been mentioned—and others. All of us are a little diminished, are we not, when these things happen in our country? Fear is spread. Doubt is fuelled. That is part of the terrorists’ aim, of course: to intimidate us, change us and frighten us. It is right to say that in our response, we must be mindful of the need to retain the freedoms that terrorists seek to extinguish. Nevertheless, it is equally true that we must ensure that we are well equipped to deal with terrorists as they change their modus operandi.

There are two things that have altered most about terrorism in recent times. The first is the terrorists’ ability to communicate their message using modern methods—to proselytise, to convert, to recruit. They do that by messages and images, and modern media is such that it can be done much more easily than in years gone by. They are ruthless and merciless in the way they go about that business. When I was the Home Office Minister responsible for security, I was well aware of the good work that is done in Government to deal with that, but it is a constant challenge. Every day images are put up, and every day they are countered or we aim to get them taken off the internet. They only have to be there for a very short time to have their effect, or their possible effect, as they are digested by vulnerable people.

The right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington also talked about the young people who are referred to the Prevent strategy, and I want to return to that in a moment. Young people, in particular, are at the greatest risk. They are impressionable and vulnerable. They may simply be lonely and in need, and the terrorist acts much like any other kind of social or cultural predator. They recruit by corrupting. They seek to own that young person, and once they own them, they direct them with wicked purpose. There are parallels with other kinds of corruption. People are recruited in the same way by sexual predators: they are groomed. We know this from evidence that has been brought before the House, from the work of Select Committees and from the Home Office.

The Secretary of State is absolutely right to say that it is both our responsibility and our duty to ensure that all those missions to keep young people and others safe are best equipped to do so not only by their training and skills, but also by the legislation that underpins their work. Successive Governments have recognised that over time. Indeed, it is a sad strength of this country that we have more experience of dealing with terrorism than most others, because of the events in Northern Ireland. That knowledge and understanding of terrorism has allowed us to develop skills that other countries do not always have—as I said, it is a matter of sadness that we should have had to do so. None the less, those skills have to be updated and refined over time, for the other principal change in terrorism is that terrorists have become more flexible.

Countering terrorism is largely about trying to anticipate events. The Contest strategy is about prevention—it is about anticipation as well as response—and anticipating events is, in essence, rooted in the idea that patterns of behaviour and likely courses of action can be measured. When terrorists become less predictable, they are harder to counter, and they have become less predictable over time as the more recent terror events show. For example, let us take the use of vehicles as a weapon—it sounds pretty straightforward, does it not? It is horrible, of course, in its effect. Vehicles are routine things that can be obtained without too much fuss or bother, and once someone knows that they merely need a vehicle rather than a bomb, they know that they can go about their deadly business, as we saw in Westminster and elsewhere. That additional flexibility—that new approach by the terrorists—requires laws that are fit for purpose and which allow us to respond to the changing character of terrorism. That is what has been brought before the House today.

I was pleased as a Minister to bring the Investigatory Powers Bill—now the Investigatory Powers Act 2016—to the House. It was very challenging because, of course, questions were asked about it. The right hon. Lady spoke about scrutiny and the role of the Opposition. She knows that the Opposition and I worked very closely together on that Bill. The Government made key changes as the Bill made its way through the House, because we recognised that part of the Opposition’s role is to challenge and oblige Government to question themselves about the appropriateness of various aspects of what they are proposing. We ended up with a good piece of legislation, which has further enabled the security services and police to go about their business in respect not just of terrorism, but of serious organised crime. This Bill is very much in the same spirit. It updates the legislative basis on which our security services and the police can do their work by recognising the changes in the pattern of behaviour of those we face.

The Secretary of State went through the details of the legislation—I have it all here, but to do so again would both be tedious and, I suspect, would test your patience, Mr Deputy Speaker, given the overture at the beginning of the debate that many wanted to speak and none should do so for too long.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My right hon. Friend has talked about terrorist methods continually changing. Did not the situation in Northern Ireland tell us that we needed constantly to update our legislation, often by emergency legislation, to keep one step ahead of the terrorists?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

Yes, that did happen, but I would go as far as to say—reflecting what Andrew Parker said—that the scale of what we now face and its character is unprecedented in modern times. I am cautious about being too definitive about these things, because it is never wise to be so, but I defer to the man who runs MI5, who is closest to these matters. I think that we are facing new challenges of the kind that we have never really seen before. To go back to my earlier remarks, when we think of Irish terrorism, there was, for the most part, a degree of predictability, and the key difference with terrorism then was that most of the terrorists did not want to risk their own lives. They wanted to save the lives of the operatives. That is a fundamental difference from the sort of terrorism that we have seen in more recent years. There are also differences in the command structure of terrorism in Ireland compared with what we now face. Many of the terrorists that we seek to counter, and which this legislation addresses, are people who have been radicalised in their own home. They are inspired by rather than part of an organised network. Given what I said about the availability of weapons, in that a vehicle can be a weapon, one can imagine the damage that an inspired terrorist, possibly unknown to the security services and police until they commit the act, might do.

[Simon Hoare]

Does my right hon. Friend also agree that one acute difference between Irish terrorism and the threat today is that in the Irish situation an agreed code word was usually used to alert the security services that something was about to kick off? We do not have that today, which is why this very flexible, proactive approach to regulations required to try to keep us safe—we will not manage it in all circumstances, but we will do our damnedest—is pivotal.

[Mr Hayes]

The Irish people endured the horror of terrorism for a very long time, and we should not be complacent about any part of our kingdom, but there are differences with what we face now, which I have already mentioned and others will no doubt elaborate upon during the debate.

Before coming to the end of this brief speech—certainly brief by my standards—I want to deal with Prevent. I worked with Prevent and I will mention two things that the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said with which I fully agree and then I will deal with the things I did not agree with, as that is the polite thing to do. She is absolutely right about radicalisation in prisons. No Government have got this right. In a previous incarnation, I was the Minister responsible for prison education, would you believe? It is not an easy job, I can tell you, and I was never really satisfied that we got it right. I do not think the previous Government got it right either. This is not about party politics. We probably need to look at it afresh. I agree with her about that.

It is, in my view, a good thing, by and large, to keep people who do dreadful things in prison for longer, but the right hon. Lady is quite right that if we are keeping them in prison ever longer, and given the serious chance that they will be radicalised accordingly, there is a risk that they might do a degree in being radicalised, rather than just an A-level. I am inclined to her view that we need to look at that with even greater determination than in the past. With this Home Secretary and this Security Minister, we have the best chance ever of bringing fresh eyes to this. Proust, I think, said that there was no such thing as “new landscapes”, only “new eyes” to see them. Perhaps, in a Proustian fashion, they will look at the right hon. Lady’s suggestion.

The second thing I agree with the right hon. Lady about is the need to ensure that there is proper oversight of Prevent and that we measure its effect properly. When I was Minister, I revitalised the oversight board in the Home Office—I am sure that my successor has added even greater value than I could have hoped to add in that respect—and I was also determined to measure the effect of Prevent more routinely and more transparently.

None the less, I disagree with her about Prevent as a concept. The work of our Prevent co-ordinators, at the very frontline of radicalisation, is heroic. I met them time and again all over country. I went around the country to see the Channel operation and the Channel panels. The people who contribute to Channel and who co-ordinate and run Prevent are doing immensely good work in very difficult circumstances. I do not say that they always get it right—perhaps they do not—but I do say that without them the circumstances we face would be altogether worse. They are making a huge difference in towns and cities across the country day by day. I celebrate their achievements while never being uncritical, as in my comments on measurement and oversight.

[Sir Edward Davey]

Did the right hon. Gentleman meet any representatives from Muslim communities who perceived it to be a flawed scheme?

[Mr Hayes]

There is an argument about how Prevent is perceived and how communities in which the co-ordinators operate understand it, and, consequently, there is an argument for promoting it more effectively—I will meet the right hon. Gentleman halfway—but do not forget that some of the critics of Prevent are people who do not want it to work. Some of its critics are critics because they do not believe in what we are trying to achieve. We have to start from the perspective that not everyone is a balanced and reasoned critic, and perceptions are, to some extent, coloured by that. I introduced the Prevent duty when I was the Minister so that local authorities, health authorities, schools, colleges and others could add value to Prevent by identifying those most at risk. Let us be clear: these are people at risk of being groomed to do wicked things.

With that and to give others a chance to speak far more persuasively than I could ever hope to do, I end by saying that our will to combat terrorism must never falter, our resolve never waver. This House must have the same kind of certain confidence as our security services and police have in their certain determination—their mission—to defeat terrorism.

Rural Crime and Public Services

John Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

What I am grateful for is the fact that the hon. Gentleman has completely contradicted his Scottish Tory pals, who seem to be away enjoying the sunshine at the moment, but who tell us almost every day of the week that the Scottish Government’s performance on broadband is useless and the UK Government’s is great. One of the things I have learnt today is that even Tory Back Benchers think that the Government are making a complete hash of providing broadband in rural areas. I look forward to hearing the hon. Gentleman contradict his Scottish pals the next time they raise that particular myth, both when it is relevant to the debate and, more often, when it is completely irrelevant.

Let me return to the comment made by the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock). According to the latest figures from NFU Mutual, in some parts of the United Kingdom, there have been staggering increases in rural crime levels over a fairly short period. I take that to mean that organised gangs have been targeting an area until it gets too hot for them, and then moving on. That is why co-operation and the sharing of intelligence between police forces, and between the police and other agencies, are so vital.

In 2015 the Scottish Government helped to set up the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime—a partnership between the Government, Police Scotland, NFU Scotland, NFU Mutual, which, obviously, provides much of the insurance cover for rural businesses, and other key stakeholders. In its first full year of operation, recorded rural crime in Scotland fell by 21%. I said earlier that recorded crime figures came with a lot of caveats, but during roughly the same period, NFU Mutual reported a 32% reduction in a single year. This is perhaps not the place to go into detail about what might be done well in Scotland that could be copied or examined in other parts of the United Kingdom, but I simply read those figures to indicate that although people living in rural areas and rural businesses, as the Minister referred to—

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

I will just finish this point. There is no doubt that, when a rural business has a piece of plant stolen that cost it a quarter of a million pounds, it is a massive blow to it, but there are ways—by sharing information and working across constabulary borders and national borders, if possible—in which, if everybody who wants to stop crime co-ordinates themselves as effectively as the criminals sometimes do, we can start to see an end to this, or at least a significant improvement in crime figures, both rural and urban.

[Mr John Hayes]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech—it is like a poorly signposted ramble through the Trossachs—but if he is right that much crime is under-reported, does he acknowledge that what may be happening in rural areas is this? Because tolerance of petty disorder and petty crime has risen, many crimes take place irrespective of the effect on their victims, because the victims know that nothing will be done about them so they do not bother to report them.

[Peter Grant]

I cannot comment on that. Scotland is regularly surveyed on public attitudes to policing, and generally speaking, the public have a high degree of confidence in the police and their ability to deal with crime and clear it up. It is not enough—there is not 100% confidence yet, and that has to be the target. From my first days as a councillor 25 years ago, what I have always recommended to my constituents is that there is no such thing as a crime that is too minor to report, because a lot of policing is intelligence-based and trend-based. In the policing model that is used in Scotland, it may be that a similar incident that is reported five or six times will not get a heavy response, but it will eventually trigger a very significant response of the kind that puts a large police presence into the area very quickly. It would be nice if we could get a blue-light response every time somebody phones the police, but that is simply not realistic.

I want to make a few comments on some of the exchanges that I listened to with great interest about the way in which the police service in England and Wales is set up, the way it is managed nationally and locally and the way it is funded. With all due respect, it seems to me that it is a complete and utter mess. I am not convinced that people in any part of England or Wales understand what they are paying for the police force, why they are paying that amount and not a wee bit more or a wee bit less, what they do if they want to pay a bit more to get a better service, or how they can influence the provision of their service.

I cannot understand why people who are sitting in here should take the majority of decisions about how much police funding is needed in Lincolnshire, Cornwall or Lancashire. Surely the people there know their needs better than any of us down here, with the possible exceptions of the hon. Members who represent those particular counties. Since I was elected, I have been struck by the fact that, for its size and diversity, England is a ridiculously centralised place as far as government is concerned. I do not say that meaning to be offensive or to insult anybody. I simply cannot see how local services can be effectively delivered across such a big and diverse country as England when decisions are so centralised in one place. It is bound to mean that a lot of time is spent by MPs from different parts of the country fighting about who gets a bigger share of the cake, when the problem is that the cake is far too wee to begin with.

At the end of the day, it does not benefit any of us if we move some resources from one county to another and a reduction in crime in one part of England is matched by an increase in crime in another. It is much better if we can find ways to resource the police properly, if it is quite clear that they are not properly resourced, and to make sure that crime levels can be driven down across the whole country.

I found the early part of the debate very interesting. It has been an eye-opener to me to hear about the way that local services—particularly the police service—are being delivered in a country that, in so many ways, is an example to the rest of the world. Is it fit for purpose? That is not for me to say, and not because I do not believe in politicians from one country telling other people how to run their country. But I invite Members who represent constituencies in England and Wales to ask themselves the hard question: is the way the police service is set up fit for the 21st century? If not, potentially, there are difficult decisions to be taken.

I will be happy after the debate to give more details about how the police service is set up in Scotland. It is not perfect. There are problems. The new national service has some teething problems and there are things people do not like as much as what they had before, but the fact is that, by almost any measure, public confidence in the police remains high. People’s feeling of being safe is as high as it has been for a great number of years. Three quarters of people in Scotland feel safe walking home alone after dark. It would be nicer if it were 100%, but I was surprised that it is as high as 75%.

There are ways that our respective national Governments can learn from each other about the way we manage and provide public services. I sincerely suggest that Members here with responsibility for policing look at some of the changes that have happened north of the border over the last few years. They were not always easy or popular, but some of what has happened there might give an indication as to changes that could be implemented for the benefit of the 50 million-plus people—there are another 3 million or 4 million people in Wales—who deserve the best police service that can possibly be provided for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right to say that police numbers are not the sole determinant of a rise or fall in crime, but they must be a determinant. In Lincolnshire, fundamental flaws in the funding formula have left us short of funds, and that makes it very difficult for my excellent local police force to respond to crimes of the kind that he has just described.

[James Cartlidge]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The way I would put it—which is kind of what he is saying—is that the fall in numbers does not, of itself, drive the social behaviours that cause a change in crime, but clearly, in an ideal world, we would have more officers to deal with it. It is a question of how we respond to the situation.

In terms of the primary causal factors, lots of hon. Members have talked about the county lines crime phenomenon, which was on the front page of The Sunday Times as recently as 6 May. It is a real problem not only in Suffolk but right across the country. The statistics show that 85% of police forces across England and Wales are dealing with county lines, and that 80% of those cases involve children. This is a serious crime phenomenon, and the growth in county lines, which involves increasing violence, leads to the spread of drug crime, knife crime and other associated crime.

There is another factor, which I find potentially the most interesting. I was at the Suffolk show recently, and I was talking to the chief constable. I asked him why he thought there had been this change in behaviour, and he said that social media were a really important factor because the videos and other media that are shared by the young people in gangs are being used to goad them. The gangs are goading each other into more violent behaviour in a competitive fashion. That is the type of behaviour that we see in the very worst crime areas such as Mexico, which has a terrible murder rate. The reason that crime escalates in such areas is that more violence is used to mark out and defend territory. We are seeing gang violence worsening here because the gangs are becoming competitive, and social media drive that competition because the videos—which, according to my chief constable, are often of very high quality—are being used to brag and to goad.

I do not pretend to have the answer on the social media issue, but I believe that the companies providing the media—they are private companies—have a social responsibility to involve themselves in this. I fundamentally believe that the primary responsibility of the Government is the defence of the realm, at home and abroad, and if the media companies will not get involved, we will have to start talking about the defence of the virtual realm. We cannot have any no-go areas in crime; we do not want them in a physical sense, and we cannot have them in a virtual sense either. I for one would support more powers to ensure that social media companies took action on these kinds of videos to ensure that they are not shown, not displayed and do not incite greater gang violence.

I also want to talk about funding. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) said, police numbers may not directly cause the changes in crime rates, but we need the officers in place if we are to resource our forces to deal with the changing patterns of crime. There are two elements involved: national funding and local funding. On national funding, I recently tabled a written question to the Home Secretary asking him what assessment he had made of the different costs involved in policing rural and urban areas. The answer from the Home Office was that it had made no such study and that there was no such information. I believe that rural MPs should be engaging with local stakeholders such as the National Farmers Union and possibly the Country Land and Business Association to look into the hard stats and the evidence. If we want to go to a Government Department and ask for a change in the spending formula to favour our local area—or rural areas more broadly—we have to have the evidence to show that we need that extra funding. A study of the cost of rurality in policing would be very welcome, and I would certainly support one.

My last key point is about local funding. I disagree with Opposition Members on this point. I strongly support the use of the precept to fund the police, for the simple reason that it is a guarantee that the money will be spent in our county. If we increase the precept to fund the police in Suffolk, it might cost more than an increase in central taxation that people would not necessarily notice, but every pound will be spent in the county on the Suffolk constabulary. I want to see more of that, and I would go further. I would like to see more of what I call parish policing, where parishes—or perhaps groups of parishes in electoral wards—would have the opportunity to fund their own police community support officers. This is where we must be realistic about rural crime. When the police in Suffolk deal with a major incident, such as the stabbing we had in Ipswich, or when we have the threat of terrorism, it is unrealistic to expect the force to prioritise shed theft or the theft of tractors at the same time, no matter how many officers we have. If our villages and rural communities want the added value of an extra visible police presence, they should be prepared to see something on top of the precept and get direct policing as a result—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) wants to intervene—she is obviously very interested in what I am saying—I will be more than happy to take an intervention, because she completely failed to answer the question about police stations earlier. In fact, when I asked her whether she would reopen closed police stations, she confirmed that Labour would not, and I do not understand why on earth an Opposition would criticise something that they are not going to reverse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Johnson]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come on to discuss that shortly.

The crime of hare coursing also involves a fear of violence, because when farmers catch these people many of them threaten the farmer with violence then and there. Sometimes when the crime is reported to the police the farmer is threatened with having their sheds burned down. In some cases pets or livestock have been injured deliberately to try to frighten farmers into not reporting the crime or not pursuing a prosecution for it. Once prosecution occurs, we encounter an issue with sentencing, as it does not reflect the severity of this crime, with an average fine of £250.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is making a vigorous and effective case on hare coursing in Lincolnshire. She knows that our PCC, Marc Jones, and our chief constable, Will Skelly, have done pioneering work to counter this activity, with good effect. Will she join me in asking those on the Treasury Bench to examine the whole matter of sentencing, as there is a good case for having a specific offence related to hare coursing, so that once the police do their job, the courts will back them up and encourage them to do still more?

[Dr Johnson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that important intervention. He rightly says that the fines are not proportionate, and indeed our next all-party group meeting will be with the Solicitor General to discuss the impacts of sentencing on rural crime. The dogs themselves can be worth very much more than £250 and some of the bets are for £10,000 or more. My right hon. Friend makes reference to Operation Galileo, a Lincolnshire police initiative masterminded by Bill Skelly and Marc Jones, our Conservative PCC. It has had great success in Lincolnshire, with the number of incidents having gone down from 2,000 to 1,400. The police credit that 600 fall to two initiatives, the first of which is the institution of criminal behaviour orders, whereby people convicted of hare coursing are no longer allowed to be in a vehicle and in possession of a lurcher-style dog, or in the company of others with such an animal, in Lincolnshire. However, Lincolnshire police can catch these people but they can then go to Cambridgeshire or North Yorkshire to do the same thing. I therefore ask the Minister to consider the possibility of allowing courts to impose such an order covering a wider geographical area, so that the Cambridgeshire police do not then have to catch these people, then the North Yorkshire police have to do the same, and so on. These orders could apply in other areas as soon as someone has been caught once.

The main initiative that has brought about the success is the seizing of dogs, because, as I say, the dog is what is valuable to these criminals. Taking the dog from them means they are not able to pursue their crime; these dogs are trained to do what they are doing. Tackling the crime is expensive; we have seen the crime fall in Lincolnshire, but I understand from our PCC that dog kennelling fees have cost £46,000 this year. There is currently no provision in law to reclaim that money from the criminal once they have been prosecuted, so I ask the Minister to consider whether he can add a clause into law that would allow the kennelling fees to be reclaimed from the criminal after their conviction. That would be only fair and reasonable.

In her opening speech, the Minister mentioned that there was no definition of rural crime, but police tell me that intelligence and evidence-based policing is hampered by the fact that they do not have some of the data that they need. I therefore ask her to consider better and more detailed recording of crime—heating oil theft and hare coursing are not always specifically recorded—so that we can identify where these crimes are taking place and target them much more effectively.

The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) mentioned fear. Nobody should experience fear in their own home. People have a right to feel safe as well as to be safe. In an isolated setting, however, it is perhaps understandable that people do not always feel that way. If a person is attacked in their flat, or if someone comes into their home, or they feel unsafe, they can scream, run outside and seek help relatively quickly. If someone is in an isolated rural farmhouse, more than a mile from the nearest property, it is understandable that the response time from the police and from any member of the public will be much slower. That would leave them feeling much more isolated.

I have great admiration for the work of Lincolnshire police, especially the way that they police a large geographical area, with 6,000 miles of road and a widely dispersed population. It is a credit to them that our crime level is among the lowest in the entire country, but money is an issue. Lincolnshire police has one of the lowest levels of funding in the country. I understand the point that there is only so much money and that it has to be shared out somehow, but we receive the least amount of funding for a service that is more difficult and more expensive to deliver because of the area that the police have to cover. Moreover, a particularly high proportion of our money is funded locally. I agree with my hon. Friends who have said that it is reasonable for some of the money to come from local sources as it is directed back locally, and for some of it to come from central Government grant. However, at the moment, there are areas of the country, particularly urban areas, where the local population is being asked to contribute around 25% of the money that is used for the overall policing budget in their area, and yet in Lincolnshire, it is 43%, and I understand that in North Yorkshire it is closer to 50%. We need greater fairness. I welcome the fact that the Government are looking into how we can make police funding much fairer in the future, and I will be happy to support them in doing so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Clarke]

That is the height of economic illiteracy. It fails to distinguish between the debt and the deficit. We inherited an enormous deficit, so of course the debt continued to grow while there was a deficit. We have now virtually closed that deficit on current spending, and all that we now borrow is for investment. That is an absolute calumny in terms of economics, and it is frightening that the hon. Lady believes it.

[Mr John Hayes]

With respect to my hon. Friend, to return to the issue of policing, it is also true that the problem with the funding of rural policing goes back a long way. I first campaigned on this when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, I took a petition on it to Downing Street when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and I continued to campaign on it during the coalition Government. We have a fundamental problem across politics of getting the funding for rural policing right, and now we have the opportunity to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; I might even try to take less time, in the spirit of charity.

As attested to not least by the number of Lincolnshire MPs in the Chamber today, the Lincolnshire police force is a remarkable force. Lincolnshire is a vast rural county—the second biggest in the country, after Yorkshire—yet, although the average level of funding per head in the UK is £104.50, it gets by on £77.90 per head. That is a huge difference. I say gently to the Opposition that it is surprising that their contention is that it costs more to police a rural area than a metropolitan area in some ways. Lincolnshire does not want to take money away from metropolitan areas, but I think we all realise that a fairer share of the cake is important. In that context, though, I think we all also realise that the Metropolitan police’s work on counter-terrorism has a nationwide benefit and that rural police forces benefit from the integrated way in which modern police forces work.

[Mr John Hayes]

Let me say two things on that matter. First, Lincolnshire is not only rural but sparse, and the sparse nature of the population creates real problems in terms of the police responding to events of the kind that have been described. Secondly, the Metropolitan police’s reach, which my hon. Friend describes, does not mean that Lincolnshire police do not have to be alive to those kind of threats and trained to prepare for them, which is costly, too.

[Matt Warman]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for summarising the rest of my speech. He is absolutely right that, although we of course benefit from money that goes to the Metropolitan police and to other police forces, in a county that is a vast place in terms of travelling time as much as distance, the nature of policing is fundamentally different.

We have talked about hare coursing at some length and I do not wish to add much to the excellent contributions we have heard, but let me say two things. First, this is absolutely about the sense of safety that people feel in their own homes and properties. It is a profoundly serious crime that has never had the attention that it deserves in terms of sentencing in the courts. Its victims have struggled to articulate quite how damaging and limiting for their lives it has been not to feel safe in their own homes, knowing how distant they are from anyone else. If nothing else, this debate has been an important contribution on that issue.

Secondly, when I have raised hare coursing in this House and elsewhere, one of my frustrations has been that even people in urban areas in my constituency often accuse those who seek to better fund action on rural crime and hare coursing of not focusing on what they would say are more important urban crimes. We have a job of work to do to explain the damage done by rural crime and hare coursing in particular, not only to our colleagues in the House but even to those who live in market towns just a few miles from where it happens. I absolutely commend the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) and the all-party group on rural crime, particularly on hare coursing, but there is plenty more to do on that front.

Next, I wish to talk about the roads, and particularly the cost to Lincolnshire police of the investigation of accidents and collisions. According to Lincolnshire police, on average, it costs £2 million overall to investigate a collision and £1.84 million per casualty. It is of course a tragedy when anyone dies on our roads, but it is also a huge amount of money for our public services, so we are right to consider what we can do to get the incidence of road fatalities down, not solely for the sake of the families of those in our constituencies but for all taxpayers.

Thankfully, Lincolnshire has seen a significant reduction in the number of road deaths and collisions compared with 10 or 15 years ago, but there is still a huge amount of work to do. We have to bear in mind that the work of special constables in particular has been a very practical way for Lincolnshire to deal with the number of crimes and the number of road safety partnership schemes has increased. That should be commended and it is just one example of Lincolnshire police being creative with that £77.90 per head of population, which, as I said earlier, is some £25 per head below the average for the country.

The police force has worked with the private sector. Lincolnshire colleagues will no doubt be familiar with the imperfection of G4S, shall we say, when it comes to its relationship with the police force, but I would argue that ultimately it has done far more good than harm in terms of value for the taxpayer. When it works, it works very well, so I commend it.

I also commend the use of WhatsApp groups to deal with hare coursing, the use of drones and a whole host of schemes. I commend the work of the police with North Sea Camp prison on fly-tipping, allowing inmates to return, to some extent, to the world of work through the genuine public service of helping to deal with fly-tipping, which in our vast rural county is a real struggle and hard to deal with. It is also the right thing to do for the future life chances of criminals in a category D, so-called open, prison, where it is important they adjust to the future world of work.

I will talk briefly about the issues that have come to the urban areas of my constituency, thanks to the many benefits of being a rural area. Large numbers of people have come to Boston in particular thanks to our agricultural economy and the availability of work. That has, however, caused some social tensions and a number of issues around translation for the police, which cost a great deal of money. Dealing with new communities within a rural constituency often falls to the police. Lincolnshire police do a remarkable job in very challenging circumstances. I commend the work of Marc Jones, the police and crime commissioner, and Bill Skelly.

More than anything, what we have seen from all my Lincolnshire colleagues—and from the Minister on the Front Bench—is an argument that a fairer share of the funding cake is only right for rural constituencies. I hope that the next time we debate the police funding formula, those on the Labour Benches will acknowledge that it would be in all our interests to slice that funding cake, however big it is, more fairly than it is at the moment.

BAME Communities: Stop and Search

John Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effect of police stop and search powers on BAME communities.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. Stop-and-search is often referred to as the litmus test of police-community relations, and it is one of the first encounters that young people from ethnic minority backgrounds have with the police. Those early interactions can shape how young people view the police for the rest of their lives, especially when they, their family or their friends are searched repeatedly. Members from all parties will undoubtedly have heard accounts from their constituents of deeply negative experiences of stop-and-searches and other types of police-initiated stops, such as detentions at ports and airports under counter-terrorism legislation, and stops under road and traffic legislation.

Unfortunately, we have debated stop-and-search time and again due to the way that it has been misused since the 1960s. Recently, the Government initiated a series of reforms backed by cross-party consensus, which I will refer to. However, numerous inspections by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary—in 2013, 2015 and 2016—found that many chief officers are frustrating that process because they are

“failing to understand the impact of stop and search”

on people’s lives. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government seek to carry on reforming these powers and prevent the backsliding that we have seen in the last couple of years.

I stress that stop-and-search can be a useful tool to detect crime, but only when it is used in a very targeted way. Claims are often made about how useful stop-and-search is, but they are not backed by scientific research and, in fact, often contradict the evidence base. Stop-and-search is neither the solution to crime problems nor a substitute for intelligence from good relationships with communities. Evidence shows that stop-and-search is a blunt tool for the prevention and detection of crime, and has a profoundly negative impact on police-community relations.

Home Office research in 2000 showed that stop-and-search had only a marginal role in combating crime, because its use was not linked to patterns of crime, and that searches for drugs were fuelling unproductive searches of ethnic minorities, particularly young black men. Ten years later, the Equality and Human Rights Commission reached the same conclusion. Threatening legal action against the five forces that it felt had the worst ethnic disproportionality at the time, it managed to reduce their volume of searches and that disproportionality—importantly, without reversing the long-term fall in crime. Last year, the College of Policing published analysis on the effect of stop-and-search on various crimes. It, too, found that stop-and-search had a weak role in reducing only certain types of crime, while having no measurable impact on most others.

Those studies show just how ineffective stop-and-search is as a general tactic. Even within a similar family of forces, stop-and-search use, outcomes and ethnic disproportionality differ so drastically that, as some of the research concludes, they are determined more by the culture set by chief officers than by local crime trends.

On the ground, the ease with which police officers can use their discretionary powers, together with their widely divergent views about what constitutes reasonable suspicion, mean that stop-and-search has become the go-to power for social control, and one that is influenced by unconscious biases or outright racial prejudices. For example, “smell of cannabis” and “fits a suspect description” are routinely used to justify searching people of colour. There are, of course, other powers that do not even require reasonable suspicion. Members will not be surprised to hear that those produce even worse ethnic disproportionality.

Given the national debate about the apparent increase in knife and violent crime, what are the Government doing to resist the urge to increase stop-and-searches in the false view that that will solve the problem? When the Prime Minister was Home Secretary, she rightly called that

“a knee-jerk reaction on the back of a false link.”

In fact, the police’s own data show that most searches are for drugs, rather than knives, guns or other weapons, and that the proportion of searches for drugs is actually increasing. For most forces, that figure is consistently more than 50%, and in a number of cases it is even above 70%. Will the Minister outline what the Government are doing to ensure that stop-and-search is actually targeted at violent crime?

Ironically, that increase has occurred at a time when police forces have signed up to the Best Use of Stop and Search scheme, the main purpose of which is to increase trust and confidence in policing by addressing the disproportionate impact of stop-and-search on ethnic minorities and by giving communities a stronger role in scrutinising those powers. Although that has delivered a welcome 44% reduction in the use of stop-and-search and has improved detection rates, if we probe behind the headlines we find that little else has changed.

After initially declining, disproportionality has shot to new heights in the past two years. Estimates for last year show that black people were searched at more than eight times the rate of white people, and people from mixed, Asian and other ethnic backgrounds were searched at around double the rate. Under the “suspicionless” powers in section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, black people were searched at 14 times the rate of whites, mixed people were searched at twice the rate, and people from Asian or other backgrounds were searched at a slightly higher rate than whites.

Clearly, the benefits of scaling back excess searches of people who would not otherwise have been searched have not filtered through to ethnic minority groups. As with the Government reforms following the Brixton riots in the 1980s and the Macpherson report on the mishandling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, we are at risk of giving up too soon and allowing stop-and-search to regress to unacceptably high levels of disproportionality and grief.

In her final months as Home Secretary, the Prime Minister argued that

“there is still a long way to go.”

That is partly because numerous HMIC inspections have shown that most chief officers are failing to show leadership in addressing stop-and-search. At one point, the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, declared:

“The Conservatives have become the party of equality.”

So can the Minister explain why the current Prime Minister has allowed disproportionality to increase and reform to grind to a halt under her premiership?

Communities have been left wondering whether the Government remain committed to reform of stop-and-search, particularly because the previous Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), did not give it the attention it deserves, despite it having been so central to her predecessor’s race equality agenda. The Prime Minister has also failed to live up to her promises to introduce monitoring of traffic stops and remove individual officers’ ability to use stop-and-search where they are found to be routinely misusing it. Will the Minister affirm that the Government are still committed to those proposals and say when we are likely to see them?

The powerlessness of ethnic minority communities to scrutinise and shape police policies and practice is a crucial issue that remains unaddressed. The true test of a democracy is the way it treats its vulnerable and minority groups.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The hon. Lady will know that a hugely disproportionate number of black young men are victims of knife crime. Will she agree to survey victims’ families—those who are most closely affected—to see whether they agree with her? I strongly suggest that they want tougher sentences for knife crime, they want tougher sentences for the criminals who are convicted and they want more stop-and-search.

[Naz Shah]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that, and I will address some of those issues. I am not sure that conviction rates support what he suggests, but I will look into that further.

Police and crime commissioners were elected to democratise policing, but few have prioritised issues facing ethnic minorities. The best stop-and-search schemes give the public opportunities to accompany officers out on patrol, but they place most of their emphasis on scrutiny of stop-and-search records and data at police consultation groups.

The University of Warwick recently conducted the most comprehensive study of how members of the public in five police force areas try to provide input into police practice. It showed that police-public consultative groups have become the main forum through which the police make themselves accountable to the public, although those groups lack representatives from ethnic minorities and young people, who are most affected by policing. It concluded that these groups have become talking shops and are viewed as merely rubber-stamp committees by frustrated members of the community who want to make a difference. That is because there is no obligation on police officers to amend their policies or practice in the light of recommendations from the public. Even more concerningly, some senior officers responsible for organising these groups are either misleading the public about their use of stop-and-search or withholding even the most basic information, which would allow communities to hold them adequately to account. If we are serious about empowering communities, we need to ensure that members of the public can make recommendations and receive a written response from their chief officers on what those officers will do with that feedback. Will the Minister make that a statutory requirement?

The importance of getting stop-and-search right is made clear by academic literature on procedural justice, which suggests that the way people are treated by the police has an impact on their trust and confidence in the police and, by extension, on their perception of the state’s legitimacy, which determines their willingness to co-operate with the police and obey the law. It is therefore no surprise that anti-police riots have been fuelled by experiences of stop-and-search. All of that makes it even more important that we get stop-and-search right, no matter how long it takes.

One type of encounter that tends to be ignored and that is shrouded in secrecy is stops under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000, which are the most draconian of all police stops. The schedule provides powers to detain the travelling public for up to six hours, which could mean they miss their flights, without the right to compensation. They are separated from their family and friends to be questioned, searched and potentially strip-searched. They have their biometric data taken, irrespective of the outcome of the stop, and have data from their mobile phones and laptops downloaded without their knowledge or consent. This has a deeply negative psychological impact on British Muslims and on those mistaken for Muslims, such as Sikhs and men with beards. This power does not require there to be suspicion that individuals are involved in terrorism, so British Muslims are left wondering why they have been detained, other than by virtue of their faith.

Young Muslims have had the bizarre experience of being asked if they personally know where international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden are hiding. These law-abiding citizens are made to feel humiliated, distressed and fearful, as well as alien to the country they know and love. That has created a sense that British Muslims have become the new suspect community. What will the Government do to eliminate religious and racial profiling at ports?

There is more data and research on police stops than ever before. It shows a consensus that these powers are ineffective in anything other than highly individual scenarios and that they continue to impact negatively on innocent people’s lives. Now is not the time to rest on our laurels and assume that the job is done, simply because the overall numbers are down. I look forward to hearing from the Minister what the Government are doing to empower communities to hold their police to account, to deliver on promises of reform and to tackle the false notion that knife crime is linked to stop-and-search.

I will finish on this:

“nobody wins when stop-and-search is misapplied. It is a waste of police time. It is unfair, especially to young, black men. It is bad for public confidence in the police.”—[Official Report, 30 April 2014; Vol. 579, c. 833.]

Those are the words of our current Prime Minister when she was the Home Secretary. This year marks 20 years since the Macpherson inquiry started, and last month was 25 years since the stabbing of Stephen Lawrence. The Macpherson report in 1999 noted on stop-and-search that there remained

“a clear core conclusion of racist stereotyping”.

In 2009, the Home Affairs Committee, of which I am a member, reported on progress since the Lawrence inquiry. It noted that minority ethnic people remain

“over-policed and under-protected within our criminal justice system.”

It may be easy, from a position of privilege, to view this as a fad, but for many in our black and minority ethnic communities, racial profiling and discriminatory policing are real. They are corrosive, and they are undermining trust in public institutions. If we have learned anything from the Macpherson report, it is this: institutional racism needs to be dismantled if we are to build a society based on values of procedural justice and public accountability.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will come on to address those points in my remarks, but the implication of what the hon. Lady says is that drug offences are not serious offences and therefore the police should be turning a blind eye to them. That is not a premise I accept. Drugs are a blight on our society and cause misery for a lot of families, and it is absolutely right that the police try to crack down on drug offences. I do not take the view that drug offences are something that the police should not focus on.

[Mr Hayes]

The association is more intimate than that, is it not? Very often, these crimes are the result of gang activity, and those gangs are involved in both the drug trade and the violence that leads to knife and gun crime and ultimately fatalities.

[Philip Davies]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point; it is difficult to disaggregate drugs from some of the violence we see. The two often go hand in hand, and he puts that point particularly well.

I do not have time today to go into as much detail as I would like on this subject. I know that one of the reasons for stop-and-search relates to drugs. The 2016 statistics on race in the criminal justice system show that 34% of black offenders, and only 15% of white offenders, were convicted of drug offences, making that the largest offence group for black offenders. It seems to me perfectly obvious that black people are therefore more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs than white people, because more people are convicted of those crimes. That seems to me to be partly obvious. Drug offences were also the largest offence group for the Asian ethnic group, accounting for 28% of its offenders.

One of the other purposes of stop-and-search is to check for weapons. According to the Ministry of Justice’s figures, black suspects had the highest proportion of stop-and-searches for offensive weapons, at 20%. As far as I am concerned, it is irrelevant how many people from each background are being stopped and searched. What is relevant is how many of those who are stopped and searched are guilty of those crimes.

If those from certain communities were being stopped and searched and were consistently found to have done nothing wrong, I would be the first to say, “This is completely unacceptable.” In fact, that was one of the reasons why I started to do my own research on this subject, because I was constantly being told that people from ethnic minorities were much more likely to be stopped and searched but to have done nothing wrong, and therefore they were simply being stopped and searched because of the colour of their skin. If that were the case, it would be unacceptable, but that is absolutely not the case.

I asked a parliamentary question about this in 2016. I was told that the following were the percentages of searches that resulted in an arrest. For white people who were stopped and searched, 13% were arrested as a result. For black people it was 20%, for Asian people 14% and for mixed race people 17%. The evidence shows that the community that is much more likely to be stopped and searched and yet found to have done nothing wrong is white people. Those are the facts. They might be inconvenient facts for people who have a particular agenda, but they are nevertheless the facts.

Serious Violence Strategy

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

It might be useful for me to begin with the genesis of the debate. I draw attention to it not merely to emphasise my role, but to illustrate that the request for this debate sprang not from one part of the House, but from across the House. When I raised the matter at business questions on 19 April, I was quickly followed by several colleagues, including the hon. Members for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer), for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) and others, who were determined to ensure that we had time and space to debate the issue. We did so exactly in the spirit that was mentioned earlier: not out of a desire to make party political points, but a proper and responsible desire to talk about both the causes of and potential responses to the problem.

I was encouraged, perhaps even inspired, to begin that process—although I share the credit entirely and equally with all my colleagues—by a wireless programme that I heard on Radio 4, on which the mothers of victims of knife crime were interviewed. It was extremely poignant, as one might imagine, and we have all seen or heard similar interviews, I am sure. Those mothers not only described the tragedy of their loss—of course they were going to speak about that, which would have been sad enough—but, chillingly, claimed that people in positions of power did not know enough and, more than that, did not really care. Without bitterness—just as a bold fact—one of the ladies said, “Well of course they do not care, because it is not their children at risk.” When I heard that as I drove to come here, I thought to myself, “I know many people in this House—some better than others, but I know people across the House extremely well—and there is not a single Member of this House who does not care.” We needed this debate and the chance to speak out not just because the matter deserves airing, but because we need to broadcast from this Chamber not only that we care, but that we are prepared to do something about the things about which we care. That was the genesis of this debate.

I had no idea—

[Chuka Umunna]

rose—

[Mr Hayes]

I will give way to somebody whom I know well and like a lot, but only after I have finished this point.

I had no idea that the hon. Member for Gedling in Nottinghamshire, where I spent the first part of my adult life, or the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford in south-east London, where I spent my childhood, were going to follow me at business questions. It was not staged, but it might as well have been, because it was highly effective. The Government responded to our call, and I am grateful to Ministers and, as I said last week, to the Leader of the House for doing so.

[Chuka Umunna]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I am glad that he recalls the audio that he heard on the radio. Just to contextualise the comment made by the shadow Home Secretary about the sense that people in this House do not care, I have certainly heard, in my constituency, what the right hon. Gentleman heard on the radio, and we must face up to that. Too often, we focus attention on the matter when we see the numbers jump, as they have recently, and the perception is that we forget about it afterwards.

As someone who served in government for some time, the right hon. Gentleman may have noted something that I find disappointing. It is good to see the two Home Office Ministers here, but Ministers from all the other Departments affected should be here, because the only way that we are really going to grip the issue and show that we really care and will do something about it is if there is join up. Where is the Minister for Skills? Where is somebody from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government? That is vital.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is of course absolutely right. As has already become clear from what has been said so far this afternoon, the issue touches so many aspects of life that it is bound also to touch many aspects of Government. We have heard about youth services, education, employment and everything that is associated with what sustainable communities are and how they are built. That affects the work of all kinds of Departments, and the work of all kinds of Departments affects those communities. He is right that we require a lateral approach.

The hon. Gentleman will also know, as I do having served in many Departments, that one of the weakest parts of our system of government is its ability to combine the efforts of Departments effectively. It does happen. Sometimes, an initiative, campaign or effort can span Departments, but the nature of how Governments are constructed, with ministerial responsibilities essentially following a vertical pattern, means that it is hard to get Departments to be as effective as they need to be in combining. That is not an excuse, and certainly not a justification, but it is perhaps a reason for why successive Governments have not done as well as they might have done in bringing people together. Perhaps today marks an opportunity to do so. [Interruption.] I see the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) on the edge of his seat—I first met him when he was a Home Office Minister, and he was a very good one indeed.

[David Hanson]

I was just moving slightly following what the right hon. Gentleman said, but when Labour was in government and I was the Home Office Minister responsible for policing and security and my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) and Baroness Hughes of Stretford, the former Member for Stretford and Urmston, were Education Ministers, I assure him that we met every week for a year as part of a knife crime action plan to try to bring the figure down when the spike mentioned by the Minister occurred. That co-operation between Departments drove a reduction in knife crime.

[Mr Hayes]

Yes, I did not want to suggest—and I did not, actually —that it does not happen at all. What I said was that we did not do as well as we might. That is not to say that efforts are not made. I was involved in all kinds of cross-departmental work in various Government Departments, including when I did the same job as the Security Minister, who opened this debate. However, we do need to work more at having that kind of cross-fertilisation, application and collaboration. If the right hon. Gentleman can point to a precedent that could be followed, so be it. Governments should learn from their predecessors, regardless of party. All Governments do some things well and some things badly. All Governments have their moments in the sun and their periods in the darkness, do they not? All Governments have their brightly shining stars, although far be it from me to claim such a mantle. The right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) is smiling because, of course, we worked together so effectively in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and he knows well the approach that I took there.

This is a real opportunity. It may be an opportunity to stimulate just the kind of work I just mentioned. It is an opportunity for the Government to sit back and consider what they are getting right and what they are not, and what more can be done. It is also an opportunity for us to critique the effectiveness of the current policy, and to articulate some new ideas and thoughts about what we could achieve as time goes on.

This debate is a salient one. The hon. Members for Lewisham, Deptford and for Leyton and Wanstead, myself and my hon. Friends the Members for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) and others called for this debate because, although violent crime, knife crime and gun crime are not new, there is a qualitative and quantitative difference now. There has been a step change in volume and a change in the character of the events that lead to the appalling crimes with the consequences that have already been described by others Members.

I want to speak today not really on my own behalf. By definition, I always speak on behalf of my constituents, but I also want to speak for all those who have been affected and are being damaged by these tragic events not just in London—as the Minister and the shadow Secretary of State said—although urban places have of course suffered most, but in places across the country. We have heard already that nearly 40 people have died this year as a result of knife crime and that more than 65 people have lost their lives in London since the beginning of the year due to violent crime. Yesterday, of course, saw a murder on a high street in broad daylight.

It needs to be said that this crime disproportionately affects particular communities. Despite making up less than 2%—about 1.4%—of the whole population, young black men represent a third of the victims of these crimes. We must do something about the disproportionate effect of violence in those communities. We owe all our people a duty; and when we look after all our communities, this House can feel truly proud. But by the same token, if we are not taking action and if any group of the population feels neglected, as the mothers of those victims clearly did, it is a cause not merely of disappointment, but of shame. I do not want to be shamed by a failure to act and I know that Ministers do not either, so let us be clear: we all want to make a difference. We are here because we care about this issue. I know both Ministers on the Front Bench, and I know that they care about getting this right as much as anyone in this Chamber.

Let us now talk about cause and effect, because so far in this debate there has been some meandering between the two. I want to be clear that we cannot just deal with the effects; we have to deal with the causes and we have to be honest about them. Yes, gang violence is a part of it. Yes, gang culture is a part of it. Yes, it is fed in part by social media. It is certainly affected by the character of the communities in which these people live. When people’s lives are stripped of purpose, they lose pride. When people lose a sense of place, pride and purpose, hopelessness prevails, and hopelessness leads to all kinds of malign and malevolent outcomes, including violence. If people have nothing to belong to, when there is nothing that give their lives shape and meaning apart from the membership of a gang, they are very likely to join one.

[Chuka Umunna]

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point about gangs, but does he agree that we must actually be very careful about the way in which we use the term “gang”? It is unhelpful to put people, particularly young people, into that bracket because they are not gangsters. In some senses, using the term reinforces the notion that they are. There is also the problem that, if we put the issue into that bracket, we condition agencies and public sector bodies to think, “Oh well, that’s how those young people act.” There is then almost an expectation that that is how it is, and that we should just put people in that box. Does the right hon. Gentleman share my hesitation about that, not least because—due to social media, as was mentioned earlier—people are no longer acting in big groups, and the situation is much more localised and parochial than it was before?

[Mr Hayes]

It would be myopic—even misguided—to isolate the reality of violent crime, particularly knife and gun crime, from social and civil decline. We have to look at the character of community and the nature of civil society in order to get to the root of why this is happening at the scale and in the way in which it is. If this is the qualitative and quantitative change that I have described, we have to be straightforward, but also thoughtful, about the cause, and I think that part of that cause is the decline of traditional structures.

I spoke at the beginning of this debate about growing up on a council estate in south-east London. I had an idyllic childhood in a stable, loving family in a strong, responsible community in a place that I was proud to call home. Now, I do not for a moment claim that my family or the others that we lived among were wealthy. We certainly were not wealthy. By that stage, of course, people had a reasonable standard of living. We had enough food to eat, a well-furnished home, a seaside holiday for a fortnight a year—usually in Kent—as well as a polished second-hand car outside the door and a clipped privet hedge. This was not like the background that my father endured of abject poverty before the war; my childhood was not wealthy, but neither was it uncomfortable.

The key thing about that time was that the values that prevailed in that community were the kind of values that encouraged a sense of responsibility and purpose, which delivered the pride that I mentioned earlier. When people are purposeful and proud, they are much less likely to behave in a way that is socially unacceptable and they are certainly less likely to get involved in crime and violence. That is not to say that there was not crime then—of course, there has always been crime—but the character of those communities has absolutely changed from the time when I was growing up. I am sure that that is about family breakdown and the values that prevailed then that are no longer routine. It is also about all the civilities and courtesies that once informed daily life. I do think that some of that civil and social decline—that communal deterioration—is associated with the way in which individuals behave, and the way in which that behaviour sometimes spills over into crime and violence.

I agree with the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) that of course it is not all about gangs. The point I was making was that, in the absence of a positive social structure, alternative social structures will sometimes fill the void, and they are not all desirable. Some are fundamentally undesirable—indeed, they are malevolent in both intent and character. In essence, that is a very longhand way of saying that I broadly agree with him.

What are some of these social changes? I have spoken of some of them by way of illustration from my own life. We know from endless research that young people who grow up in broken or disjointed families are much more likely to be involved in antisocial behaviour, crime and drugs. We know that, when some of the other ties of community break down, both individual wellbeing and the common good are detrimentally affected. I spoke of having a loving family. There is no better element of civil society than strong, supportive families.

Our popular culture, however, celebrates success over respect, ego over reflection, opinion over knowledge, and desire and feeling over virtually everything else. Social media’s role in this is that it may have provided a platform to celebrate some of the things that I have described. Social media perpetuates a very egotistical perspective on the world as it celebrates all kinds of characteristics that are not necessarily those which build strong civil society. Knife crime is a devastating consequence of social and cultural malaise. Crime feeds on excess, irresponsibility and selfishness. From the desolation that flows from the kind of doctrine that places individual interest above communal obligations, and individual will above all else, first lawlessness and ultimately violence springs.

It may be convenient for the wealthy white City worker to believe that recreational drugs are his own private business. He may well assume that, as the godfather of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, would put it, his actions are doing no harm. Yet the boom in the middle-class market for cocaine is the root cause of the recent gang wars over county lines that have resulted in so many young lives being lost. Selfish individualism may indeed benefit those who spend their days safely ensconced in guarded office blocks, in the back seat of an Uber, or in gated communities exclusively for the wealthy, but for others it has resulted in desolation and life stripped of meaning and purpose. We cannot hope to find a successful cure for the wave of violence unless we accept the proper diagnosis.

It is not good enough for Governments to say that they can do nothing about drugs and the drug culture. We need a serious clampdown on middle-class drug use and an examination of how that drug use relates to the kind of violence that we are debating, because the lines of supply and demand are closely associated with gangs, with crime, with violence and with murder. I do not say this because they are my Government, or even my Ministers, if I might put it that way; I would say it about any responsible Government. The reasons for society’s failure to do that thus far are ironically, perhaps even paradoxically, the same as the reasons for the growth in the problems we face.

It is a disastrous consequence of the liberal consensus that stop-and-search was seen as part of the problem. I fundamentally disagree with the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) about this. [Interruption.] No, no. Although we are, I hope, having a good-humoured and positive debate, as it should be—there are contributions from all parts of the Chamber that I will hear and certainly value, and I know that that will also add value to the considerations of Government—I do think that there is also a proper place for disagreement. I am going to talk a bit more about this, but I want to start by being very clear: freedom from being searched is really not more important than freedom from knife crime. Where is the freedom in living in fear of gangs, as so many young people in London do? Where is the freedom for young children drawn into a life of violence and crime as the runners for county line drug networks, or increasingly as drug peddlers in small towns and rural communities, as the right hon. Lady described?

The spike in knife crime must be a spur to action, not just for us to toughen our approach, which is urgent and necessary, but also for deeper measures to restore purpose and pride for people in places that are stripped of both. But first, we must restore the safety and security of our communities. That must mean extensive use of stop-and-search. Moreover, the police must be a visible part of those communities. People would be much less antagonistic towards the police—and towards stop-and-search, by the way—if they did not feel that these are the only times that they ever see them. When policemen were a regular feature of local life—when they were seen in circumstances that were not adversarial and were just there as part of the community—they enjoyed a different relationship with those communities. If policemen are seen to be there only when there is trouble, they will be defined by trouble, and that will change the relationship between the law-abiding public and the police.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

On the police’s relationship with the public, about a fortnight ago, on a Saturday morning, hundreds of members of the public turned out in the Willenhall area of Coventry because they were concerned about a lack of police numbers at the same time as an increase in crimes such as burglaries and assaults. That gives an idea of the level of public concern, certainly in Coventry and different parts of the west midlands, regarding the question of policing.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is always a well-informed and intelligent contributor to these debates, and, not for the first time, I both recognise and respect his view, but I suppose that what I am speaking about is the culture of policing rather than just the extent of it. I was describing a kind of policing that was once taken as read—routine. Policemen understood that their role was largely non-adversarial, with the policeman coming to one’s school, popping into the shop to pick up local information, or seen as a friendly face in the town, village, suburb, shopping parade or estate like the one I once lived in.

I am a great supporter of the police, as my local chief constable will testify, and an admirer of all that they do. I do think, however, that a sensible conversation at the Home Office and more widely in Parliament about the kind of police service that we want to grow, and the culture that prevails in it, is timely. People would be much more comfortable with the idea of police engagement if they perceived the police in the way that they once did.

Therefore, I do not think it is entirely about numbers. I am not saying that this is unrelated to them, but I think the Minister was right when he pointed out—as, to be fair, did the shadow Home Secretary—that it is not wholly about numbers. It may be about resources, but it is not wholly and probably not even mainly about them.

[Sir Edward Davey]

I suggest the right hon. Gentleman reads the serious violence strategy, which says on page 24:

“Some have questioned whether the reduction in the use of stop and search is driving the increase. The data do not support such a conclusion.”

[Mr Hayes]

I am coming to that now. Although stop-and-search has become more targeted, with 17% of police stops leading to an arrest in 2017 compared with 9% in 2010, we cannot ignore the fact that, in 2010, there were 13,833 weapons-related arrests, compared with 7,794 in 2017. Fewer people are being found with weapons, and fewer people are being arrested for having or carrying weapons with intent. It is all very well speaking about a more targeted approach, but in terms of the numbers—

[Sir Edward Davey]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Hayes]

I have already said that this debate stretches well beyond party politics. I know that it is always difficult for Liberal Democrats to step outside party politics, but I implore the right hon. Gentleman to raise his game and do so. I do not mean to be unkind; I am simply trying to be helpful.

The important thing is that fewer people are being arrested, and fewer people are therefore being convicted. Because of that, inevitably, more people feel they can get away with carrying a knife or a gun.

[Sarah Jones]

Ten years ago, only one in 10 stop-and-searches resulted in finding anything, and now it is something like one in three. The way that the police stop and search now is much more effective because it is much more targeted and intelligence-based. Surely that is the right approach, rather than a blanket approach of saying, “We’re going to stop and search anybody who looks a bit dodgy,” which is what was potentially happening in the past. It is much better for it to be completely targeted and based on intelligence, to ensure that those we stop are much more likely to have weapons or drugs.

[Mr Hayes]

There is of course a series of bases on which people are stopped and searched. The police are missioned to behave proportionately and, as the hon. Lady will know, there is a protocol associated with stop-and-search. Policemen must make it clear who they are and what they are doing and justify why they are doing it. She is right, of course, that it should not be used permissively. I am simply pointing out the fact that more people are carrying knives and guns and fewer are being arrested for doing so. I know that that will be of concern to the Government, and they will want to respond accordingly.

I also want to say a word about sentencing before I conclude. At the moment, as Members will know, there is a maximum four-year sentence for carrying a knife. In practice, as the Ministry of Justice reported recently, the average amount of time that people serve is just over six months. People are serving just over six months for being convicted of carrying a knife, and that is just not long enough. In Scotland, those convicted spend on average a year behind bars, and there is a lower rate of knife crime in Scotland than in England and Wales. Immediate action needs to be taken to address the issue of inadequate sentences.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that there is a vast number of reasons beyond sentence length for the reduction in knife crime in Scotland? It would be wholly false to give the impression that the reduction in knife crime in Scotland is down to sentencing, because there is a lot more to it, as the shadow Home Secretary said.

[Mr Hayes]

I have already pointed out that the reasons and causes of knife crime and all violent crimes are complex. It seems to me that, if the Scots believe that people should spend longer in prison once they have been convicted of carrying a knife, there may be some lesson to be learned from that. The lesson we might learn is that, if someone thinks there will be a longer sentence if they are convicted for carrying a knife with intent, they might be less likely to do so.

We need to tackle the alienation that has developed between those who grow up and live in the inner city and the highly privileged who often make the policies that affect them. The liberal consensus that has prevailed and that has failed to recognise the decline in the quality of life for many of the people who are most affected by these problems and who live on the frontline of violence is in part responsible for the failure of Governments to take the necessary action. There is a simple correlation, which is a meaningful one, between opportunity and purpose. Many of the communities worst affected by both the threat and the reality of this kind of violence are disadvantaged—the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington made that point. One of their key disadvantages is the lack of opportunity to gain and keep a job or to acquire the skills necessary to do so.

We have a big opportunity to improve the opportunities people enjoy to acquire a skill and then to get a job in which to use that skill. The first Crossrail project allowed us to do that with the development of the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy in east London. If we look at the kind of people who trained and did apprenticeships there, we will see that they were not drawn from the predictable, normal group. There were far more women apprentices and far more people drawn from the communities where the academy is based. As Crossrail 2 develops, it is vital that we reach out still further and give more of the people who might be drawn into lives that lead to crime, violence and drugs the opportunity to gain a skill and a job.

This comes back to the point made earlier about cross-governmental work. We need the Department for Education, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Home Office to work together to develop policies that provide the kind of opportunity that feeds hope. We must make sure that Crossrail 2 emulates and improves on what Crossrail 1 achieved for skills and training.

In conclusion, I repeat that I know the whole House cares about social and civil decline and about the quality of life available to the people most likely to be affected by violence, particularly knife crime and gun crime. I know that the Minister who will wind up the debate will want to respond to the heartfelt concerns expressed by Members on both sides of the House, and I know that she does not have a closed mind about what the Government can do or about whether they can do more. I am delighted that the Government have agreed to hold this debate and that, as it has continued, the spirit has been one of collaboration and co-operation. However, this will require a really thorough and robust look at both the causes of crime and its effects and what we do about them. It is no longer enough for us to continue with business as usual. I think the Government and the Minister know that. We must relentlessly address the systemic causes of these problems and be robust in our response with respect to deterrence and punishment. To paraphrase a Labour politician who was once in fashion, we need to be tough on the reasons for violence and tough on its effect.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Joanna Cherry]

Displaying to those who carry a knife the evidence of the awful results of carrying a knife has worked in Scotland. As I said a moment ago, gang members were brought in to a court setting and they heard evidence from the mothers and girlfriends of young men who had been killed by knives. That kind of education really helps. When I worked as a prosecutor, I became aware that a lot of young men—it is mainly young men—simply have no idea of the potential consequences of wielding a knife. They think they can stab somebody and inflict a minor injury as a warning. So often, however, a stabbing leads to death. It is very important to get that message across. The violence reduction unit has worked in Scotland because it is not just a police initiative but has worked with the health service, schools and social workers to bring in young men who are tempted to carry a knife and to educate them out of the desire to do so.

The approach of the violence reduction unit fits very well with what is called a whole-system approach to crime, which was introduced by Scotland’s first SNP Government back in 2008, after their election in 2007. The whole system approach is designed significantly to change justice policy and focus on prevention rather than punishment. It is also focused on inclusion, making people feel invested and included in the society around them so they will not have the same desire to lash out at it.

The whole-system approach marks a shift away from previous policies that were very much designed to criminalise, label and stigmatise young people. Rather than do that, in Scotland we sought to provide early and effective interventions that kept young people out of formalised justice settings. That does not mean jettisoning a proper approach to criminal justice. If the crimes are committed and they are serious enough, they must be dealt with appropriately, but the whole-system approach focuses on collaboration with schools, social work, the police, the prosecution service and the third sector to stop the offending behaviour from happening at all and to reduce the rates of offending behaviour.

In addition to the violence reduction unit and the whole-system approach, the Scottish Government set up the Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice at Strathclyde University. It is dedicated to supporting improvements in youth justice, and works to provide knowledge exchange, practice development for professionals working with young people, and research on youth justice issues. These approaches together have led to a vastly improved situation in Scotland. It is simply not true to say that heavy sentences in Scotland have led to that improved situation. What led to the improved situation in Scotland was the violence reduction unit and the whole-system approach. I recommend those to the House as worthy of study given the current crisis, particularly in London.

The facts speak for themselves. Crime in Scotland is now at its lowest level in 43 years. The crime of handling an offensive weapon decreased by 64% between 2007 and 2017—that is a huge achievement. The number of under-18s in custody has reduced by 77% and there has been an 82% reduction in children referred to a children’s hearing on offence grounds. The children’s hearings system in Scotland is unique; it seeks to cater for children and young people away from the court system.

[Mr John Hayes]

Will the hon. and learned Lady give way?

[Joanna Cherry]

I will make some progress, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind. We are not complacent in Scotland. The problem has not gone away, so tackling violent crime must remain a key priority. That is why my colleagues in Edinburgh, in the Scottish Government, have invested over £14 million in violence reduction programmes for young people since the SNP came to power in 2007.

I pay tribute to one of the programmes that they have invested in—the No knives, better lives youth engagement programme. It has received more than £3.4 million in funding since 2009 and 24 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities are now involved. This national initiative works with local organisations to provide information and support. I was asked earlier about advertisements highlighting the dangers of carrying a knife. The No knives, better lives strategy goes much further: it aims to raise awareness of the consequences of carrying a knife and provides information and educational materials for use in schools and by other professionals, as well as health advertising campaigns and information on local activities and opportunities for young people to try to get them away from a culture of gangs and casual violence and into participating in and putting something back into their community. Research suggests that this educational work has been particularly effective in making a difference.

[Mr John Hayes]

Will the hon. and learned Lady give way?

[Joanna Cherry]

I am very conscious of your strictures on not taking too long, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I am going to wind up now, and I will not take any more interventions.

This is one area where Scotland and the Scottish Government really do have a good news story to tell. Until about 10 years ago, Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, were notorious for violent crime. That is now a historical reputation—not a current reputation—not as a result of some heavy-handed law-and-order approach but because a whole-system approach was used. We need to remember that the young men who carry knives need our help. Some of them are only children. Of course, if they go on to commit a serious crime, they must be dealt with appropriately, but prevention is far, far better than cure.

I am very pleased that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, has recognised this and has visited Glasgow and the violence reduction unit to see what lessons can be learned for London and beyond. I was also absolutely delighted that the Solicitor General recently accepted my invitation to come to Scotland to hear more about the whole-system approach from the perspective of the prosecution service, and to discuss moving away from prosecution and towards our early and effective intervention model. I and my Scottish Government colleagues are very much looking forward to welcoming the Solicitor General to Scotland, and I am sure that the Ministers here today would be very welcome to accompany him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

The hon. Lady is right from the point of view that the world has in recent decades become a very small place, and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) eloquently pointed out—as did my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Economic Crime—there are places from which people can send things through the post right to somebody else’s door; they no longer need a long distribution chain with items changing hands. The Prime Minister has been clear about this country and its exit from the EU and about wanting to maintain that information-sharing, working with other countries in the EU and beyond. Although we are leaving the EU, we are still very much part of Europe and we want to continue to work with our European partners to ensure that we support and assist each other in reducing the amount of crime.

[Mr John Hayes]

In the absence of the Security Minister, and speaking as the ex-Security Minister, I can tell my hon. Friend that that co-operation is very much part and parcel of how this Government and all Governments operate. Much of it is international, and it is not limited by the European Union. The Five Eyes community is an example of such co-operation. The chances of that co-operation stopping are very slim indeed, because of the mutual interests that lie at its heart.

[Mr Jones]

I understand what my right hon. Friend says. He has considerable knowledge in this area of policy, and he is absolutely right to say that the will is there to ensure that, on leaving the EU, this country will continue to be a partner of other countries within the EU in tackling the challenges that we all want to deal with.

I welcome the early intervention youth fund that the Government have announced. Our police and crime commissioners, being embedded in their communities across the country, are ideally placed to use that funding to work with local authorities and other partners, whether in the not-for-profit sector or the private sector, to deliver programmes to engage young people and pull them away from gang culture and from communities where they might be vulnerable. I certainly welcome that.

I also welcome the strategy that has been put forward today. This debate has given me the opportunity to put on record a number of my concerns about keeping my constituents safe, and I hope that, through today’s debate, through the work that the Government will do on the strategy, and through the additional measures that the Home Office is taking, particularly in its work with the Treasury, we will be able to tackle some of the underlying issues that have been bubbling under the surface. As I have said, we really must get under the surface to tackle them.

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I want to begin by thanking the Minister for finally providing the time to debate this extremely important issue. It might interest the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) to know that I have been requesting this debate since 22 March, and I am grateful to everyone in the Chamber who also requested such a debate on 19 April. The Government’s strategy was published on 9 April and finally, on 22 May, we have a chance to debate it. Since I first called for this debate, we have lost 20 people to violent murders in London alone.

Before I begin, I want to urge the Minister to listen and genuinely take on board the comments that have been made by Members across the House today. This is not an issue that we can afford to play politics with. We know that the rise in youth violence has not just happened overnight, and we must realise that developing the right solutions will not happen overnight either. We will not fix violence with a few years’ worth of funding in a single parliamentary term. This will require cross-party working on a generational scale. We need a long-term strategy that Government after Government—I hope one of them will be a Labour Government—will continue to implement, no matter who is in power. We owe this to every person who has lost their life to violence, to every family that has lost a loved one and to every community still traumatised by violence.

Many Members will know that I am keen for us genuinely to address this issue, and that that has been driven by what I see locally. Since I was first elected, we have lost seven young lives: Shaquan Fearon, 17; Naseem Galleze, 17; Kabba Kamara, 23; Jamar Walker, 15; Myron Yarde, 17; Rukevwe Tadafe, 21; and Leoandro Osemeke, 16. In one school year, Lewisham Deptford has lost seven young people to violent deaths. Many teenagers in my constituency know someone who has been stabbed or murdered, and this breaks my heart. Those young people were part of our local community. They had families and friends, and those people are now grieving and hurting. Nobody quite understands why those lives were taken so needlessly and so senselessly. If this happened in a football stadium or in a workplace, we would rightly be crying out for a public inquiry.

In London we have had more than 60 murders since the start of this year, so we all know the Government need to act. We all need to act, and we need to do something different. We need to get in there and understand the root causes. What early interventions can we make to ensure that no young person carries a knife, and certainly never uses one? Prevention and early intervention are what it must be about. No young person is born carrying a knife. Something happens that leads them to feel they need to carry one, be it fears about their safety or a desire to fit in. Thankfully, we all now recognise that prevention and early intervention are better than cure.

I compliment the Government on this strategy, which rightly states that the only way truly to tackle violence is with early intervention and prevention. The strategy talks about using teachable moments to engage with young people, but I do not believe that teachable moment is when a kid turns up at A&E having been stabbed—that is not good enough. Why only then do they have a youth worker to work with them? I want us to be far more ambitious.

We need to start far, far earlier, working with families from birth by providing support such as Sure Start, which works with a child and their family from a pre-school age. Let us have that as the teachable moment, or does it not provide a good enough photo opportunity? The media and the Government, when talking about this issue, always seem to glamorise it: the media, with photos of gangsters or knives, make areas out to be the hood; and the Government with photo ops in A&E or with ex-gangsters.

Our young people are cool. They are cool because they are our future lawyers, bankers, nurses, doctors, social workers, footballers, music artists and, indeed, politicians. They can go on and achieve anything, and we have to ensure that we provide them with the opportunities so they can do anything.

To be brutal, the Government have provided an excellent analysis of the problem but, quite frankly, this is not a decent enough strategy. It is tinkering at the edges. At £40 million, the strategy just is not enough, especially when we consider that, at the same time, £387 million has been cut from our youth services.

The cross-party Youth Violence Commission, on which my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna), the hon. Members for Braintree (James Cleverly) and for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), the right hon. Members for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) and for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and I have been working with our academic partner, Warwick University, has been studying the underlying causes of youth violence for nearly two years.

In February 2018 we conducted a national survey of more than 2,200 young people looking at their experiences of violence. More than 70% of young people tell us they are exposed to serious violence in real life at least once a month, and younger respondents aged eight to 19 experience the most serious violence. More than 16% of young people say they do not feel safe in their own home. Thirty-eight per cent. of young people know at least one person who sells drugs and, shockingly, almost 10% know more than 10 people who do. Forty per cent. of young people agree it is easy to buy illegal drugs where they live. And 33% of young people know at least one person who carries a weapon, and 7% know more than 10 people who do.

Put simply, this shows us that our young people are experiencing adverse childhood experiences far too often. We must do more to address that. I am pleased that the Government’s strategy references ACEs and the need to have a trauma-informed approach to policing, the youth justice system and looked-after children.

I am also pleased that police forces in Wales will be piloting a public health approach. We already know from the work of the violence reduction unit in Scotland that closer integration of services and communities can produce extremely positive results, but with just £7 million allocated to this public health approach, following £58.8 million of cuts to Welsh policing, surely the funding does not even fill the gap. We have seen 59% cuts to the Youth Justice Board, but those have been countered by a 23% increase in what we have to spend on our looked-after children. We therefore have to question whether we are paying for failure, because we have not invested in youth services, children’s services and schools.

We do know that we can get dramatic results by investing in and taking a public health approach to addressing serious violence; listening to communities, not dictating to them; and seeing the evidence of how such an approach works from Scotland, as the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) mentioned, from Chicago and elsewhere. With Birmingham, Reading and many London boroughs looking to replicate this, surely it is time we seek to do this on a wider scale, empower our communities to do this and look for a public health approach.

We have been listening to people and trying to find solutions that work. As part of the work of the commission, we held a series of evidence sessions where we listened to experts, practitioners and, most importantly, young people on a range of issues, including youth services, trauma and mental health, education and housing. I have visited numerous youth organisations and projects across the country. Our last session took place yesterday, and it covered policing and the criminal justice system. We had an interesting discussion on drugs. Some believed that if we legalised drugs, that would be enough to stop the drugs market. Others rightly identified the disparity between the treatment of, say, a young white kid caught with drugs at university and a young black kid caught with drugs on a street corner. The law is not implemented indiscriminately: black people are twice as likely as white people to be charged with possession of drugs, despite lower rates of drug use.

One thing we agreed on was the importance of educating people on the societal impact of recreational drug use. Many people today are conscious of where they get their clothes, coffee and meat from, but have a blind spot when it comes to the illegal drug market. Many of the people who are so careful to buy only Fairtrade coffee and wear ethically sourced clothes are the same people who do cocaine at the weekends, with no consideration of the wider impact of this habit. Perhaps if there were educational programmes on the real harm caused by the drug market, more people would treat cocaine with the same disdain they do to clothes made in sweatshops or eggs from caged hens.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent argument, which associates that middle class so-called “recreational drug use” with the normalisation of drugs and the supply lines that do so much damage. One person’s recreation is another person’s misery.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, and I think this is probably one area where we would have a cross-party consensus.

Some other clear themes emerged from the commission’s evidence sessions and the visits that I undertook. The Government’s serious violence strategy has much that aligns with our work, particularly a focus on early intervention, which is crucial. Many young people who are affected by serious crime, either as a victim or a perpetrator, have themselves been subjected to adverse childhood experiences. As a result, they grow up with unaddressed trauma and mental health issues, which can make them extremely vulnerable to negative influences, so support mechanisms are crucial. Young people need to have consistent and safe spaces where they can go for advice and support. Those could be counsellors in school, mentors or role models, community spaces, or grassroots charities and organisations. Right now, too many young people do not have access to any of those. We must do more to provide the training and funding for these types of activities. Prevention is always better than cure, and in this case prevention will undoubtedly save lives.

One thing we have definitely learnt from our work is that there are no quick fixes. The path to change will require long-term investment and an integrated approach, with public services, the police, communities and individuals all working closely together. The commission’s work has produced a lot of questions that we must address and that are beyond the current scope of the serious violence strategy, because the net has not yet been cast this wide. We must ask ourselves whether our school system is fit for purpose. Police officers in Lewisham have told me that the most dangerous time of day for stabbings among young people is after school and before parents come home from work. Should we therefore consider changing the hour that school finishes at to, say, 5 pm or 6 pm?

We must look at whether young children have enough positive male role models in their lives. Should we look into recruiting 50% male primary school teachers? Should we teach sex and relationship education at an earlier age? Perhaps we should teach primary school children what positive and negative relationships look like. Should our teachers be trained to teach in a trauma-informed way? Should we have dedicated police officers in all our schools, including primary schools, to build up trust with our young people so that they know police officers are safe people to speak to? Should we aim to have a policy of zero exclusions in schools?

Should we revisit the school syllabus, so that we can actually give young people the life skills for future employment—for example, by teaching them about budgeting, getting a mortgage or investing? Should we also teach social media classes that not only prepare young people for employment but ensure that they are safe online? Should we change our history syllabus to ensure it is much more culturally diverse and representative of our communities? Are we providing the right level of mental health support for young people in school?

There are also questions about youth service provision. How do we ensure that there is less needless competition between charities, and instead foster more collaboration? Time and again, grassroots charities see the usual suspects —the large charities that are able to afford bidding teams and that know how the system works—get funding for programmes. How do we provide long-term, sustainable funding for programmes that prove that they get results, run by smaller organisations right in the heart of our communities? As politicians, we have a responsibility to our young people and future generations to answer all those questions.

There is so much more that I could say and want to say, but I want to ensure that everybody gets to speak in the debate. Hopefully, Members can see that the youth violence commission’s work has been comprehensive and rigorous. Our initial findings will be published before the summer recess. I am grateful that the Prime Minister has agreed to meet me to discuss our work. As chair of the youth violence commission, I am aware of how many previous reports and strategies successive Governments have published that have been related to youth violence in one way or another. Many of the recommendations from those reports have never been implemented or, when they have been, progress has not been evaluated. I hope the Government’s serious violence strategy does not follow the same path, because young people continue to die on our streets. We owe it to them and to future generations to make sure that we fix this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

I am constantly asked that question, as the hon. Gentleman will imagine, and I challenge my officials to tell me the answer, because I want to get to the truth and I want to ensure that we are tackling this as effectively as possible.

During the previous spikes in knife crime in the late 2000s and mid-1990s, there were many, many more officers on the street. In addition, there does not appear to be a relationship between the numbers of police officers and the national rise in serious violence. I absolutely understand why hon. Members on both sides of the House have raised this issue.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend makes a compelling point about the collaboration taking place across Government, and her own work on this is well understood and widely admired. Will she also look at the allocation of police resources and what I described earlier as the police culture? We need policemen who are involved in their communities and who are familiar to and respected by those communities. Such work will build the strength and social solidarity that is essential to tackling the problem.

[Victoria Atkins]

One of the first challenges that the then Home Secretary, now the Prime Minister, put to the police was to use warranted officers on the frontline rather than in back-office roles. I am delighted that we have seen police forces rise to the challenge and ensure that more warranted officers are used, as they should be, in frontline policing.

Draft Licensing Act 2003 (Royal Wedding Licensing Hours) Order 2018

John Hayes Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 General Committees

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for responding in her usual stylish and thoughtful way. The Government share the hope that the football-related celebrations will not spill over into anything other than good cheer and good will. We take some comfort from the fact that Her Majesty’s 90th birthday coincided with two Euro 2016 matches involving England and Wales and there were no reports on that occasion, or during the extension of licensing hours for the 2014 World cup, of increased disorder as a result of the extensions. We have looked carefully at the responses in the surveys. No evidence was received from the police or other respondents to the consultation demonstrating that there would be any increase in football-related disorder as a result of the extension, but of course our very responsible chief constables, police and crime commissioners and, indeed, all people concerned in the emergency services will be taking that into account. I hope that they have a chance to celebrate, along with the rest of the country.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way before she concludes her remarks?

[Victoria Atkins]

How could I resist!

[Mr Hayes]

I will not comment on that. My hon. Friend is making a compelling case, which is clearly supported on both sides of the Committee. I wonder whether she might explore whether there are other occasions on which this exceptional extension of licensing might prevail. Her Majesty is now a great age, and it seems to me that her birthday might be celebrated each and every year; and there might be occasions—Trafalgar day, for example, and other great national days—for which an extension of licensing, in a modest and considered way, could be taken into account. I am sure that my hon. Friend has the information at her fingertips, but if not, she might write to the members of the Committee.

Seasonal Migrant Workers

John Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

Exactly: to what extent do we keep chasing? As other countries become more affluent, why would people come here and not go to other countries where they would be able to earn more without—

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The hon. Lady will know, presumably, as she has clearly studied these matters very closely, that SAWS brought in people from all kinds of places—from Africa, Asia, and so forth. When that scheme ended, that opportunity ended for those people too. Does she welcome that?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I think we are going to have to look further afield. I am not arguing against reintroducing SAWS; I am just casting doubts on whether that will be enough to address this problem and whether we will be able to attract workers. We will find that this applies even to some of the countries that we previously recruited from. For example, British companies in Kenya are sourcing beans, flowers or whatever—monocrop cultures—and employing workers there. Will we be able to attract workers to come over to Britain for the British summer when there is production in their own backyard?

There is much talk of stepping up recruitment of British workers—the Government focused on that quite heavily in their response to the EFRA report. We hear about having more skills, and the role of agriculture in universities and in high tech. It is very important that we encourage far more people to go into agriculture and the food sector, but those are not the types of jobs that we are talking about. The problem with attracting British workers is that the areas with the highest unemployment do not tend to be that close to the areas that need these seasonal workers. Students are often mentioned, but they have many other options. Moreover, as the hon. Member for Angus said, this is quite tough work. It is not just about fruit picking in the summer when the sun is shining, if it is, given the British climate; it is about jobs like picking Brussels sprouts in the freezing cold. It is backbreaking work, not something that people do because they fancy a little holiday while getting a bit of pocket money on the side.

As the Environment Secretary acknowledged in his recent speech, the sector will also have difficulty in accessing skilled labour when freedom of movement ends in areas where shortages are currently filled by European economic area workers. Some 90% of abattoir vets come from EU countries, and the vast majority arrived in the past five years, so they are not automatically covered by the right to stay here. The existing immigration system for non-EU skilled immigration is complicated, expensive and slow. There is no Environment Minister here today, but I would like to know—perhaps the Immigration Minister can tell us—whether the Environment Secretary has made a submission to the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee on the future visa needs of the sector, as well as pushing for SAWS.

At a broader level, the Environment Secretary sees the long-term solution to this problem lying in the move from

“a relatively labour intensive model of agriculture to a more capital intensive approach.”

However, automation and mechanisation, such as robotic fruit harvesting, is said to be at least five years away from commercialisation, and that means five years of missed harvests and countless farms going under. Even after those five years, probably only the largest, most profitable businesses will be able to afford to buy into such technologies. There are also some areas in which, I am told, automation is simply not possible. Asparagus has to be picked individually. Raspberries are too delicate not to be picked by hand.

This is part of a much broader concern. I would have liked the Environment Secretary to come before the House this week when the agriculture Command Paper was published. In fact, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming, I have just put out a statement welcoming very much of what is in that Command Paper and the whole concept of moving to public money for public goods. I hope that he will consider the strong case made by people in the agroecology sector for making farming more sustainable and more environmentally friendly. We also need to look at the economic viability of the sector. Sufficient labour is absolutely crucial to that. We need some answers here today from the Home Office. We also need a much stronger focus from the DEFRA team, who are not here, on what they are going to do to address this impending crisis.

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair), my co-chair on the APPG on fruit and vegetable farmers, on securing this important debate and on giving us the opportunity to have this important and urgent conversation in the Chamber. I also thank her for all the work she is doing to campaign for seasonal workers. It is a great pleasure to campaign with her on the matter.

With fields in my Kent constituency currently blanketed in snow—as is the case, I am sure, for pretty much all of us—the pleasures of summer strawberries and autumn fruits seem rather far off, but that is certainly not the case for our fruit and vegetable growers. They are already very worried that they will not have enough workers to harvest the crops this year. The NFU has been gathering extensive data on the growing problem of the workforce shortage. For example, in May last year, there was a national shortage of 9,000 workers. Later in the year, 60% of apple and pear growers reported that they were short of labour for their harvest. Last year was difficult; this year will be harder. As for further into the future, farmers are very worried.

The uncertainty has consequences. It takes three to six years to grow a productive fruit tree. Farmers are putting off investment decisions because of their fears about future access to labour. Thirty-one per cent. of top fruit growers say that uncertainty about staff has made them change their investment plans, so some are reducing investment, some are scaling down their businesses, and some are saying that they are going to chop down and scrub up their orchards.

That is particularly sad and worrying in the context of the past couple of decades, which have been a great British success story for fruit and veg growing. It has been a great area of growth for our economy. For example, home-grown berry production has increased by 131% in the past 20 years and the industry is now worth £1.2 billion. Strawberries have gone from being a luxury that a family might occasionally buy for a special event such as a barbecue to being a very normal and common part of a family’s weekly shop throughout the summer—and very frequently British berries are being bought. The UK’s production of fruit and vegetables is a great success story for our country. It is a growing industry that we should be supporting. But unless we fix the labour shortage, prices will go up, fewer people will be able to afford British fruit and vegetables, that growth may well reverse and a share of the British produce that we currently consume will be replaced by imports.

Like the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), I have a farmer in my constituency who is not alone in shifting production overseas because of the shortage of labour here. Labour shortages are not just a problem in Britain. As other Members have said, the whole of the European Union is struggling to recruit its workforce for picking fruit and veg. Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal and Poland already have permit schemes that enable them to recruit workers from beyond the EU. If in the UK we introduced our own seasonal workers scheme, that would simply allow our growers to compete on a level playing field with their foreign competitors.

Since I became a Member of Parliament for a Kent constituency, where we grow lots of fruit and this is a common topic of conversation, I have often heard people say, “Why can’t British people do the work?” In the past we had the wonderful thing of people coming out of London to pick fruit in their holidays. Constituents tell me that they first came to Kent from the east end of London with their family when they were children to pick fruit and hops. It is also said that students could make up this workforce.

I have spoken to the growers in my constituency about this. They too would like to recruit British workers—local workers—to pick and pack the fruit and they have tried to do so. They have advertised locally and some have sometimes managed to recruit a very small number, but they know from experience that the local workforce do not supply the labour they need.

Part of the problem—and this is a good thing—is that we have very low unemployment. In my constituency there are about 700 people currently claiming jobseeker’s allowance. In the season, farms in my constituency require a workforce of 5,000 to 10,000 workers, and one farm alone employs around 1,000 seasonal workers, so those 700 people in my constituency looking for jobs simply cannot plug that gap.

[Mr John Hayes]

As my hon. Friend will know, I represent a constituency that, with the surrounding area, produces about 30% of the fresh produce in the country, with a big demand for seasonal labour, which it has had for a very long time. Would she concede that the ready supply of relatively inexpensive labour displaces investment in recruitment, in skills and in technology and automation? That is certainly the macroeconomic evidence from around the world, as well as in this country.

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. When employers have access to a ready supply of relatively cheap labour, they may choose to use that workforce rather than invest in technology. We know, though, that there are particular challenges with the automated picking of soft fruit, which I will come to in a moment. Although we would like to see more automation, it is not going to be achieved overnight. We need a near-term solution to the immediate labour problem, hand in hand with investment in the technology that can help us to shift to a less labour-intensive industry.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Whately]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I am wary of saying “never”, but it is true that, with certain landscapes or certain produce, it is very difficult to have an entirely automated production chain. That is simply impossible, or certainly a very long way off. In the process of getting there, we must ensure we do not destroy our industry. If we do not even manage to sustain the industry now, we will not have the opportunity to do all sorts of wonderful automated fruit production in future.

Many people have said that we might be able to employ students, but as Members have said, the duration of the season has changed. Thanks in part to things such as polytunnels, we now have a much longer fruit-growing season and it is far longer than the student holidays. Along with the expectations of the consumer and the supermarkets and the requirement for a certain level of intensity and consistency in production, that means that a casual student workforce simply is not the right answer for modern production.

In the long term, recruiting people from further and further afield is probably not the answer either. It probably is not going to make sense to fly people from the other side of the world to come and pick fruit indefinitely. As I said, I think automation will gradually replace manual labour, and in some parts of the production line it already has. There is a large amount of automation in various parts of the production line, particularly for vegetables, rather than soft fruit.

Farmers and growers tell us that the robotic picking of soft fruit is a long way off. A robot has been developed, but it is very slow. It is certainly not able to do it at remotely the rate or cost-effectiveness that is expected by supermarkets and consumers. When a product is being manufactured, the robot needs to pick up a consistent part and put it into something, but every single bit of soft fruit is different. That requires a huge amount of sophistication from the robot’s vision systems and artificial intelligence. That technology is out there, but we are some way off.

That said, I very much welcome that, in the newly published Command Paper on the future for food, farming and the environment in a green Brexit, there is a recognition of the need for investment in research and development in agriculture to improve productivity. There is also an industrial strategy challenge fund to support this area. I urge the Government to do even more to consider how to incentivise automation in the horticulture industry but, to be clear, the benefits of that automation are particularly for the future. We have to deal with the immediate problem our farmers have and their ability to harvest fruit this year and in the next few years.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. She is right, of course, that there will continue to be a demand for labour, but that demand is not static, for the very reasons she has just given. In Lincolnshire, colleagues are working with the local enterprise partnership and the University of Lincoln to look at exactly the matters that she has described, and I invite colleagues across the House to do so with their own local universities and LEPs. There is real progress to be made in looking at where greater productivity can stem from greater automation and technology, as well as the investment in skills that I mentioned earlier.

[Helen Whately]

I agree with my right hon. Friend.

I want to talk briefly about the health dimension of this debate. There have been headlines just this week that more than seven in every 10 people born between the early 1980s and mid 1990s will be overweight by the time they reach middle age. We know that one in five children are obese by the time they leave primary school. One part of tackling the obesity crisis we face as a society is to encourage people to eat more healthily.

On average, our fruit and veg consumption needs to increase by 64% to be in line with the Government’s dietary guidelines, and one of the biggest factors influencing people’s food choices is price. The price of fruit and veg is already going up. On average, prices of the most popular vegetables rose by 3.2% last year, and fruit prices rose by 7.2%, compared with overall inflation of 2.7%.

Just the other day, I happened to be talking to a couple of mothers, who told me how they were shopping around to get the best value fruit and veg. For instance, they chose a shop that sells carrots, including the funny shaped ones, for 39p a bag, because they wanted to give their children a healthy diet. They are worried, however, about the rate at which the price of fruit and veg is increasing; if those prices continue to go up, they are worried about whether they will be able to afford fresh fruit and veg for their families.