Knife Crime

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I want to read out a list of names: Gavin Singleton, 31, Kavan Brissett, 21, Jarvin Blake, 22, Glenn Boardman, 59, Fahim Hersi, 22, Samuel Baker, 15, Ryan Jowle, 19 and Alan Grayson, 85. These are eight lives that ended early in my city of Sheffield last year: eight lives that ended early due to knife crime in a city that is dubbed the safest in England.

I do not congratulate my noble friend Lord Paddick on the debate today. It is a national shame that we are having to have this debate. I could go through statistics about how Sheffield and South Yorkshire have looked at those carrying knives aged between five and 89. I could go through the statistics as others have regarding deprivation and other issues. But I want to talk about my time as leader of Sheffield City Council; I declare my interest in the register as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The most harrowing time was when we started to have a spike in knife crime. I talked to a victim, a parent, a perpetrator and an ex-offender. The victim was now scared to go out, and if he did, he was going to carry a knife. The parent had lost a child, and I have to tell you that when I spoke to them I had never experienced anything like that in my life. There are no words; it is harrowing. The perpetrator felt as though he had no other option. The thing that bound those people together was a lack of hope, a sense of helplessness and despair that they had no power to control how they got themselves out of this mess. Then I met an ex-offender. He was the one with hope, the one who had power and felt that there was a future for him.

I came away and reflected. The Government and the statutory sector do not own this issue in terms of solving the problem. We have to wrap around communities rather than communities wrapping around us; that is the lesson that I have learned. We cannot have a top-down approach. I am appalled that one of the approaches by the Government is a bidding process to save lives. That is unacceptable. I find it despicable that we are saying that the only way to fund communities is to bid to save your children. As my noble friend Lady Pinnock said, the funding has to be sustainable. One of the issues that government and local authorities should be judged on is how much of the third sector is involved and how it, along with parents, children and ex-offenders, is empowered to deliver solutions, not on tick-box exercises for how statutory organisations spend money.

In my professional life I work across the world, looking at government reform. The Government are not dealing with this in a systematically joined-up way, nor have previous Governments. A task force is not good enough. It has to be something akin to what was called the troubled families programme, which was a much more systematic and joined-up approach. In that approach, the Government should not judge the process. They should allow innovation at local level and judge communities and the statutory sector only on outcomes, not getting involved in how, why or what. I trust parents and ex-offenders to have a far greater understanding of what is needed in the communities of this country than some official or Minister sat here in Whitehall. We must empower them and allow them the freedom to deliver solutions.

Another learning point that I came away with from my time as a councillor and as leader of Sheffield City Council was about some of the people who get drawn into this. The youngest person carrying a knife in Sheffield recently was five years old. Over one-quarter of reported knife crimes were in schools, some of them primary schools, so our intervention has to start at a very early age. It is about wrapping around families so that parents can get support, not related to knife crime but support for nurturing, love and hope, and for giving them practical skills.

School exclusions are the breeding ground of gangs and dysfunctional families. Local authorities need power to deal with academies and free schools that more or less have free rein to exclude. There needs to be legislation for local authorities to have a role in making sure that exclusions do not happen; if one thing comes from this, it is that. If we need police to deal with knife crime, we have failed as a society.

There needs to be a much more systematic and bottom-up approach. It needs to allow innovation in communities, it needs to be a whole-family approach, and it needs to listen to the voices of those without hope who feel disempowered and who feel that the only option is to pick up a knife, to give them some form of safety in future.