Support for Women Leaving Prison

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab) [V]]

It is a genuine pleasure to see you and serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for calling this important debate and for her stonking speech. There have been excellent contributions today from Members on both sides of the House.

This Government’s female offender strategy set out some very clear principles, and we agree totally that we need to address vulnerability, acknowledge the role of gender, treat women as individuals with the potential to make a positive contribution, and break the cycle of reoffending. To do this, the strategy made it clear that

“Short custodial sentences do not deliver the best results for female offenders”.

It acknowledged the essential role of women’s centres and made it clear that when women leave prison, the support they receive has to respond to their complex needs. Again, we agree. However, it has been almost three years since the strategy was published and, as we have heard, as many as six out of 10 women leaving prison are being released into homelessness—60%. The strategy is simply not being successfully implemented.

We know that without a home, it is so much harder to find work. Reuniting with children and family is even more difficult. Meeting probation commitments and accessing healthcare and substance misuse treatment is that much harder. Not having a stable home damages mental health. It destroys life chances and lives. It kills hope. This Government have acknowledged that the likelihood of reoffending can be as much as 50% higher for those released into homelessness. Between 23 March and 31 August last year, during the height of the first lockdown, more than 3,500 prisoners, including 275 women, were released into homelessness. During those first terrifying months of covid, 65 women were sent out to sleep rough on our streets on their very first night out of prison. Some of the most vulnerable people in our society were effectively sent by the Government to sleep on the streets, when the rest of us had been told to stay home, to stay safe and to protect the NHS. It beggars belief.

We have got to acknowledge that outcomes for women leaving prison are frankly terrible. One reason is clearly the lack of accommodation, but another significant reason is the lack of continuity of care for those in need of drug or alcohol abuse treatment when they leave prison. Last year, the national average of continuity in care in England was just 35%. When drug-related deaths are at an all-time high and when a third of people in prison are there for reasons related to drug use, surely to heavens continuing treatment outside of prison must be a priority? I am told there is an ambitious Government target to go from this derisory 35% to 75%, but there are simply no details of how that will happen. I am hoping that the Minister will tell us today how and when that 75% target will be met.

It cannot be a surprise to anyone listening to this extremely well informed debate that reoffending is rife. Of women who have served a sentence of under a year, 73% will be convicted of another offence within a year. If we are to tackle reoffending and if we want fewer victims of crime, we have to tackle the root causes of that crime. The Government’s own research tells us that often women in prison are dealing with enormous trauma caused by sometimes years of abuse.

That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East was absolutely right to highlight the need for women’s centres. The evidence is clear that they slash reoffending, they cut crime and they help many women to heal and create better lives—and, unlike short prison sentences for women, they are great value for money. Some women’s centres have managed to demonstrate that they save £2.80 for the public purse for every £1 invested, so why are the Government planning to spend £150 million on women’s prison expansion when they have committed just £2 million to women’s centres? That is 75 times more to be spent on something they have admitted does not than on something that does. Why?

Let me touch on one aspect we have not yet discussed: the specific needs of black, Asian, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller women and all of those from other minority ethnic communities. We know, and the Government know, that projects led by women from a community are best suited to develop effective resettlement within that community. There are excellent examples like the Khidmat centres in Bradford, but there are not nearly enough of them across the country. Why?

As we recover from covid, it is even more important to have additional support in place for women leaving prison. It is good to see that the Government plan to take some action on homelessness among prison leavers, but, as we have heard, only five of the 12 probation regions—less than half—are likely to receive some funding for temporary accommodation pilots, even though the value-for-money case for better accommodation is overwhelming. Why? May I gently point out that London and the south-east are two of the areas where the problems of prison-leaver homelessness are greatest, yet neither is included as a pilot?

I have been doing this job for less than a year and I have already worked out that the Ministry of Justice is, frankly, addicted to pilots, but there is no follow-through. Time and again, projects are proven successful but they are simply not rolled out. The truth is that, when it comes to women prison leavers, we need ambition and commitment. We need to provide accommodation, and that accommodation needs to be fit for purpose. Women domestic abuse survivors may need to relocate away from their area. Homes often need to be able to accommodate women’s children. If those needs are not met, women do not get a second chance, their families do not get a chance, and reoffending becomes even more likely.

Despite all those facts, in their announcement on temporary accommodation the Government went out of their way to trumpet just how basic and temporary the planned accommodation for prison leavers will be. I ask the Minister gently: how will the new accommodation address the specific needs of women leaving prison and the needs of their families? How will it stop the very expensive revolving door? I have to ask: is the priority cutting reoffending and cutting crime, or is it about dog-whistle politics and cutting costs? If it is about cutting costs, the Minister should know that that is a false economy. His own research shows that. The lack of approved premises for women around the country has been a huge problem. How many of the 200 new places planned will be in specialist women’s hostels? When will they delivered? Where will they be located? Perhaps the Minister can inform us today of the progress of the approved premises for women in the south-west.

Another public relations announcement was that of a paltry £6 million for through-the-gate support for prison leavers. Only one of the 16 prisons receiving that funding will be a women’s prison: New Hall in West Yorkshire. Why?

Frankly, when women are put into prison but are not supported to deal with the trauma and violence that they have experienced in their lives, or with the addiction that has put them there, and when they are released knowing that their only option is to sleep on the street, and they are condemned to the revolving door of reoffending because support services for drugs and alcohol just are not there, that is an injustice. It is Government failure. Women are not being given a fair chance to change their lives, or their children’s lives, for the better.

The Government must demonstrate that they truly understand their own research. They need to demonstrate real commitment to and ambition for their own strategy. They need to begin to create a criminal justice system that truly understands the root causes of women’s offending, and that starts to treat women fairly.

Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill

Lyn Brown Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Money resolution & Programme motion
Monday 10th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

If I may, I will finish the point. To rebuild that trust, working with third parties and other stakeholder groups and organisations is vital, and we will continue to do that.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

On that point of trust, the phone calls to my office today are about a flight tomorrow to Jamaica, and some of my constituents believe that this Bill is being used as some kind of flim-flam before that flight goes. Will the Home Secretary assure me that she will look carefully at every one of the cases that we bring to her to ensure that only those people who absolutely need to be deported are deported tomorrow?

[Priti Patel]

Let me make a few points on that. First and foremost, we should not be conflating this charter flight—the criminality—with the issue of the Windrush compensation scheme. The hon. Lady will know that the House has heard the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) respond to the urgent question earlier, and every person on the flight has been convicted of some of the most serious offences and has received a custodial sentence of 12 months or more. That means that under the UK Borders Act 2007, introduced by the Labour Government at the time, a deportation order must be made. These crimes cover manslaughter, rape, violence, the appalling scourge of drug dealing and sexual offences against children, with a total sentence for this group totalling more than 300 years. It is important to say that the suffering of their victims is incomprehensible, and these offences have a real impact on victims and their communities. It is important to recognise that the individuals being deported have criminal convictions, and that this is about the criminality of the acts they have participated in, not their nationality.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Powell]

My new hon. Friend makes a very good point. That very much reflects my experiences of trying to coach and support people, navigating them through what are for many very difficult and uncharted waters. The original Windrush generation—I will come on to their descendants in a minute—are very isolated. If it were not for support networks, for example churches, they would have very little in the way of support services. They are very scared about coming forward.

As I said, it is really important that we recognise that the Windrush generation and their descendants are, and always were, British citizens, and that we are leaving so many people effectively stateless and feeling unwelcome in this country. I could go through many cases with the Minister—I have raised many cases here—but I will not because a lot of other people want to speak. However, the sorts of situations that I have come across include people not being allowed back into the country for one, two or three years, with them, in the meantime, losing their job and their social housing, which meant that their children also lost their homes. I met an individual who had a refusal to have their status regularised in the mid-’80s—I think it was an administrative error at the time—which frightened them so much that they have lived under the radar ever since, never having a job, never accessing public services and never having a home. They have been living among their family networks for their entire life—this is somebody who is now in their 60s. As well as those types of situations, others have been well rehearsed in the media, such as where people have served in the British Army, or worked as nurses or public servants, and have found themselves on the wrong end of this shameful, shameful situation.

As others have said, including the Home Secretary, no amount of money can compensate for the loss of life, livelihood and dignity—of people’s whole lives. People have never gone on holiday, and people have lost their home, status and dignity. However, that does not mean that we should not properly compensate them, nor does it mean that, just because no amount of money can compensate them, paltry amounts will do. We need to give people justice and be seen to be giving them justice, and I will say a bit about what that might look like.

The purpose of the compensation scheme has to be, at its core, about restoring trust, undoing some of the damage that has been done and properly compensating people for their losses. It is difficult to see how the scheme, as designed, will help to do those things. The Home Secretary has said that these cases are complicated and of course they are, but the scheme’s design has made them much more complicated than they need to be. People do not have the time, the support and, in most cases, the documentation that is being asked of them.

How do we put a price on many of the things that they have lost? How do we put a price on someone not having had a holiday for 30 years, even though they are a working person? How do we put a price on someone not seeing a family member for 30 years because they live in fear of going on holiday? How do we put a price on someone not getting healthcare 20 years ago when they were poorly and that having had a detrimental effect on their life ever since? These things are hard to put a price on. As others have said, there is an undeniable fear of the Home Office, so many people do not want to come forward and make themselves known to it. A lot more needs to be done to overcome that.

I have a few asks of the Minister on the compensation scheme, and then I will talk about a couple of other things before I finish. Others have talked about the timeline. I welcome that it has been extended by two years, but that still makes it shorter than the amount of time that people had to claim for payment protection insurance compensation. If that is our benchmark, which seems a perfectly good one, we are failing on that. People should have longer to claim for this than they had for PPI.

The documentation has to be made a lot simpler. There will have to be a certain amount of discretion. It is about people looking at an application with common sense and judging it based on the evidence that is before them. As others have said, we need more support services. If it is not legal aid, which I think there is a strong case for, let us at least put some money into the support and advice services that can help people. Can we look again at some flat rates—some amounts of money—for things that we cannot put a price on, so that we can get proper compensation?

There are a couple of other things about the scheme, which I have raised and will continue to raise, even though I know that this is not a particularly popular cause. On proving good character, if we are agreeing as a House tonight that people were British citizens when they arrived, and that their descendants were also British citizens when they arrived, we cannot then apply the legislation from 2006 and 2009 about whether people meet a good character test or not. They are British citizens or they are not. As the Minister will know, I have dealt with a number of cases of people who have had convictions, and I know that Ministers have the discretion to let them apply under the terms of the Windrush scheme.

[Ms Lyn Brown]

I repeat that Ministers have discretion, and therefore, if they do not use that discretion, we will hold them to account for that for as long as we possibly can—as I will, while there is breath in my body.

[Lucy Powell]

I thank my hon. Friend—my good friend—for that comment. Ministers do have discretion, but I suppose that I am going even further than that: this should not be discretionary, because somebody either is and was a British citizen when they came, and therefore their descendants were, and their right to be here, to remain and to have citizenship is outwith any discretionary decision about their good character, their moral conduct or whether they have a conviction. I know that this might not be as popular as the case I have of someone who served in the British Army, or of someone who was a British nurse for many years—I am talking about people who have been convicted, in some cases of very serious offences—but that is our country’s problem, in terms of getting those people to serve their criminal sentence and then rehabilitating them, because they are British citizens. We need to look at that.

There are still a number of issues about Windrush descendants. The same principle needs to apply: if somebody’s parents were British citizens when they arrived here in 1969 or 1970, with their British passport that they came over with from Jamaica, their children are also British citizens regardless. They should not have to meet tests that have subsequently come into UK law. They are British citizens and we should apply that as a consistent principle. It is only when we start applying those principles consistently that we will begin to restore trust. It is all very well to paint people as terrible criminals, which is why they have to be deported, but that still gets the moral argument wrong because they are British citizens—[Interruption.] They are. If they are a descendant of a member of the Windrush generation, or are themselves a member, they had a right to British citizenship from the day that they were born and therefore, they are British citizens. The Government are applying retrospectively their moral judgments on that to try to appease some test of being tough on deportations and foreign criminals. I am sorry that this is not perhaps the same publicly appealing call as others, but until and unless the Government recognise the core principle—that somebody is and was a British citizen from the off and that we are trying to get that right in their compensation and by regularising their status—we will not go any way to restoring trust.

The Minister can shake his head all he likes, but I can talk to him now or afterwards about the cases that he or his predecessors and I have discussed, where that principle has been recognised. However, it is still being recognised discretionarily and that is wrong. I am sorry—I know that that is not popular but I will keep banging on about it until we sort it out.

That brings me to my final point. We cannot have these conversations without the lessons learned review being on the table, being debated and discussed. Until then, he and I will continue to argue about whether the deportations are necessary. If lessons are being learnt, everything else should be on hold until they have been understood, absorbed and acted upon. More than the financial compensation, members of the Windrush generation in my constituency, who are angry about what has happened and in some cases afraid, want to know that this will never happen again and that lessons are being learnt for them, for their children and for people thereafter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It has been two years since the Windrush scandal. We still have not had an official response to an independent review, and the injustices continue. Tomorrow, one of my constituents is due to be forcibly deported to Jamaica. I am going to talk about him a bit, because he is facing the same kind of injustice that we have seen in the past couple of years and this Bill does nothing at all to help him.

His name is Akiva, he is 22 and he came to this country at four years of age. Akiva’s mum, dad and younger brother are British nationals. This is his home. When he was 14, Akiva started to get into trouble. He had lost his older brother to suicide, and he was utterly lost. He fell in with a bad crowd, and was groomed and exploited. He was sent off on county lines, carrying drugs, stolen property and knives. Today, we know much more about the grooming that is happening to our children on county lines. We have talked about it in this Chamber a lot, and Members from both sides have now understood what county lines has done to a generation of our children. Stories like Akiva’s have been told in this Chamber: the stories of grooming and exploitation. Police, social workers and teachers are slowly getting better at identifying and targeting the groomers, rather than the children who have been groomed by them—the victims of the groomers. These children are victims of people whom I am told are living lovely lives behind gated communities in Essex and Kent—these are people we have yet to bring to justice.

The problems of county lines were not understood by many of us until recently, and in Akiva’s case the exploitation was not stopped. So finally, in 2016, Akiva pleaded guilty, he went to prison and he served his time. His indefinite leave to remain was cancelled. Since his release, Akiva has worked as a painter and decorator. He helps his younger brother with his homework and he looks after his mum, who has serious health problems. He has a real chance to turn his life around, yet the last time he went to sign on with the Home Office, as usual, he was detained. He is due to be deported on tomorrow’s flight. The Bishop of Barking and the Archdeacon of West Ham have written to the Minister asking that he be taken off the flight. I believe, as they believe, that this has to stop.

We need to hear the Government recognise that resolving the Windrush scandal, and preventing it from happening again, go beyond what is in this Bill. If they do not recognise that, how are we supposed to believe that the lessons learned review will be taken at all seriously? Time and again, people whose lives are here have been deported into destitution. Five of those who had been deported to Jamaica were killed in a single year between 2018 and 2019—two were killed in a single day. They were preyed upon by gangs, denied the healthcare they needed and left cut off from their families, who remained here in Britain, with nowhere to go and no way of supporting themselves. Nothing in this Bill will change anything for Akiva—only the Minister can do that. Until we see the lessons learned review and how it is acted on, nothing will change to stop similar injustices being done. Unless the Home Secretary recognises the compelling circumstances of this case, Akiva will be on that flight tomorrow and he will be in danger.

We should have been able to keep Akiva safe from those gangs and offer him the life he deserved, just as we should for all those other children caught up in this. I do not want anybody in this Chamber to genuinely believe that their children could not go this way. I have sat and spoken to police officers who have cried because their children have been caught up in these gangs—it is there but for the grace of God. Instead we are going to make Akiva pay for a third time. Akiva has had a childhood without the support he needed to get him through and past the grooming of the gangs. He was not supported, in mental health, through his grief. He went to prison and now he faces deportation. How many times does a person need to be punished?

If reports are to be believed, the lessons learned review will recommend that the Government stop chartering these flights altogether. The review may, rightly, recommend that no one is deported after coming here as a child and growing up here, because this is the only home they have ever known. So much of the Windrush scandal and so many of its injustices are in these flights: We are deporting people to somewhere they will be destitute and somewhere they do not know, where they will not be safe. We are doing this without a fair process, without proper representation, and all because of what went wrong in their lives when they were just a child, here, in our society, in our communities. It is wrong. These are the injustices that are due to be done to Akiva and others tomorrow.

So I want to know: is the Home Office deliberately pushing through this flight before the review is published? If so, it is truly shameful. If righting the wrongs done to the Windrush generation is so important to the Government, why has the hostile environment not truly been dismantled? Why has it taken such a long time for policy to change? Why is Akiva on that flight tomorrow, when his parents and his siblings are British citizens? He is one of us.

Policing and Crime

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison), who clearly wants the best for her constituents. Unfortunately, like so many in her party, she appears to have forgotten the global financial crisis. The cuts were a choice, ditched when convenient, and they have had a consequence.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend not think that such empty soundbites are not appropriate for the Chamber today, on an issue as important as this?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

Indeed I do, because my constituents, like the constituents of Members across the House, have had to suffer 10 years of cuts.

The Minister seems to expect us to be grateful, but on behalf of the people of Bristol West, I say that we are not. We wanted investment in our police in 2011, 2012 and 2013. We have faced cuts every year. We have seen the cuts, we have felt the consequences, and the Prime Minister’s announcement of the growth in police numbers does not make up for it. In Avon and Somerset, it will mean just 403 new officers, but over three years—and we have lost 700 over the last 10.

Meanwhile, crime has not gone down, and the nature of crime has changed, partly as a consequence of other cuts—cuts to drug treatment; cuts to youth services; cuts to mental health provision; cuts across the board. All have had a cost. My constituents are smart people. They can add up, and they are not fooled by being told that we are now going to get some new officers over the next few years.

Of course I am proud that Avon and Somerset police managed to rise to the challenge of those budget cuts, but it is not what I wanted for them, and it is not what I wanted for my constituents, who deserved better. I pay tribute to our police and crime commissioner, Sue Mountstevens, and our chief constable, Andy Marsh, and to every single officer and civilian working in the constabulary of Avon and Somerset, because they have worked so hard to keep us safe; and to the PCSOs, the specials and the officers who put their lives on the line daily.

I am proud that my niece’s husband James is a serving police officer in the Dyfed-Powys police force. We are really proud of him and we are grateful to him and all our officers, but they should not have had to work in such conditions. It is the specialist services as well as the overall numbers—as the Minister said, it is not just about numbers; it is also about specialist services, and that is where a lot of the cuts have fallen. It is not fair; it is not sustainable. It is affecting our safety as civilians and our feelings of safety.

I briefly mention knife crime. Bristol had 1,237 knife crimes in the past 12 months, an 11% increase on the previous year. Like so many other constituencies, we have a knife crime problem, but when the Government first announced a response to knife crime our force was not initially among the seven allocated money; our police and crime commissioner and chief constable had to fight for it. We are grateful for the fact that we have got some now, but we should not have needed to beg for it.

We need long-term certainty. We need more attention to be paid to the other factors in responding to and preventing knife crime, particularly among young people. I hope that every word that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) said today, and on so many occasions as chair of the Youth Violence Commission, will be heeded.

I am angry, because 10 years of cuts to youth services, 10 years of cuts to other help and support for families, such as Sure Start, domestic violence support and mental health services, and 10 years of cuts to drug and alcohol services have all had consequences, and we are living with them. We are living with drug-related crime, for instance.

Ministers have mentioned their concerns, which I understand. Members across the House have concerns about how we respond to drug crime. Even on the Opposition Benches we are not in agreement. I respect the different points of view, but I would like everyone to understand, when we discuss drug consumption rooms, that we already have a drug consumption room: it is called the streets of Bristol, and it is dangerous for people who consume drugs and dangerous for the bystanders. I would really like the Minister to work with other Ministers to find out what the potential solutions are. I believe they are having some form of drug safety in treatment rooms. The Minister may disagree, but I would really like to know what she thinks.

As in the areas of other police forces, one in three violent crimes in Avon and Somerset area are domestic violence and one in five of homicides are domestic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford said, there is a strong connection between childhood exposure to domestic abuse and other adverse childhood experiences, and future harm and harmful behaviour. It is good that domestic abuse reporting has increased as public tolerance has decreased, and I am really grateful to the Minister for all she has done to champion responses to domestic abuse. I urge her to redouble her efforts to get the Bill back before us, because that had cross-party support. She knows—I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—that I shall be pressing her on the responses to domestic violence perpetrators. It is not just about current victims; it is about future victims and their children.

However, our entire criminal justice system has suffered under austerity, which was not necessary and has undermined the responses to police work and prevention. I did not want us to create the posts of police and crime commissioners, but I have really appreciated the attention to violence against women, to child sexual exploitation and to knife crime that our police and crime commissioner, Sue Mountstevens, and others have shown. She has shown determined, locally focused leadership.

That is the plus side of localism, but on the downside it has many weaknesses, such as fewer economies of scale, and weaker responses to crimes of an international dimension, such as modern slavery and trafficking. It has meant passing the blame for the impact of national cuts to the local police and other services.

I want to mention the Brexit word, briefly; I am not afraid to mention it. I know that the Prime Minister would like it all to be over on Friday, but as we leave the European Union on Friday we will be hampered in the international dimension unless the negotiations for the future relationship prioritise safety and security and data sharing. At the moment, if our police make an arrest, they can share information about risk and gain information about risk with forces across the EU. They can issue a European arrest warrant, which helps to respond to the flight of criminals to other EU nations. I urge the Minister, in her closing remarks, to tell us how the Government will be prioritising, in the future relationship negotiations, those aspects which are about keeping us safe.

Finally, I ask the Minister a few questions. I hope that if she cannot address them in her final remarks, she will perhaps consent to meet me to discuss them. I ask for a focus on the preventive health approach to knife and violent crime. That covers all forms of violent crime: intervention in schools and awareness on safe relationships and the difference between safe and unsafe relationships, as well as long-term, sustainable funding structures for local authorities, youth services and police, because that is what we need to bring the number of serious violent and knife crimes down.

The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service said in his opening remarks that it was not all about numbers of police officers and he is right, but it is also about the funding of those other services. He cannot duck the consequences indefinitely. I would like a multi-year funding settlement for our police forces, so that they can plan. I would like an acknowledgment—just once—of the damage done by 10 years of unnecessary cuts and the impact on police officers, such as my nephew-in-law and his colleagues and our police across the country, who too often have had to be on single crewing in call-outs and had to deal with the fact that they knew they could not manage all the things they wanted to do. I would like the Minister to commit to an end to the boom-and-bust approach, because our constituents and our police deserve much better than this.

--- Later in debate ---

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

May I welcome you to your position, Mr Deputy Speaker, and thank colleagues across the House for their contributions during this important debate on crime and policing? Members on both sides have spoken powerfully about their constituents’ concerns and, indeed, about the sad stories of those who have fallen victim to crime. One line from my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) struck home: his home town has seen four murders in 10 weeks. Those families and other families across the country are having to live with their terrible losses, and we all know that an act of violence may last no more than a few seconds, but it leaves a destructive legacy of human tragedy. We in this place will never forget that, which is why the Prime Minister made it clear that cutting crime and keeping our streets safe is an absolute priority for this Government—a point backed up forcefully by my new colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook) and for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison). The Government’s commitment to cut crime and keep our streets safe is absolute.

However, there remains no short cut to solving violent crime. We need a clear, well-funded plan to stop violence where it appears, to identify the repeat offenders and knife carriers more likely to be involved, and to address the root causes of violence, giving young people a future that does not end on the point of a blade.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Will the Minister come to update the House on the work of the National Crime Agency and what it is doing about the so-called county lines? County lines have almost become an immovable part of our landscape, and it should not be like that. We need to do something to protect our children from exploitation in the pursuit of profit.

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Lady is a real advocate for her constituency, which is sadly so often blighted by serious violence. The National Crime Agency, of course, conducts a national threat assessment, and I am happy to update the House on its report either orally or through other means.

We owe it to our young people to offer them a better future and to end the pervasive sense of hopelessness that drives so many into the arms of criminality. This principle was eloquently articulated in the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger). Representing Devizes, he is perhaps the only Member of this House who can call the great historic monument of Stonehenge a “vulgar upstart.” One sentence of his speech struck home with me:

“Our love of our country begins with love of our neighbourhoods.”

He brings to the House his experience of working with young people in prisons and of the vital role of independent civil society organisations in helping to cut crime and in helping those young people, which I will address later in my speech.

We have heard a lot today about the Government’s plan to bring 20,000 extra officers—new officers—into police forces across the country. One of the first acts of this Government was to make that pledge, and the work has already started. I am delighted that all forces have joined us in meeting this commitment to the public and have prioritised recruitment. Some £700 million from the police settlement will be made available to police and crime commissioners to help forces recruit the first tranche of 6,000 officers by the end of March 2021.