Knife Crime

Debate between Meg Hillier and Sarah Jones

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely, completely right. I have had cases in my constituency, as we probably all have, and I have talked before in the Chamber about the worst case that I had.

A young boy who was black was permanently excluded from school. He was on the route to being diagnosed as autistic, which takes a very long time. Everybody knew that he was autistic. His classroom was turned around over the half-term period, so when he came back to it everything was different. He kind of freaked out: he was violent and was permanently excluded. This child was five—five years old. We appealed the case and won, but for obvious reasons his parents did not really want him to stay in that school, so we found alternative provision. His mother is a wonderful woman, who has the wherewithal to be able to fight the system—get in touch with her MP, and do all the things that people need to do. I just feel for the people whom I do not meet; they are the ones who do not have that wherewithal, so they suffer much more.

We absolutely need to look at education. The Government are looking at the issue. Ofsted is looking at it, too, and the Children’s Commissioner has done great work. We really need to work out how some schools manage to keep these kids and not exclude them, while still running a good school without disruption to the other children in their classes.

I will talk a little about the public health approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead said that there is no magic bullet for these issues, and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) said that of course we know what the solutions are, and we just need to follow what works. I think both those things are true, and we need to be clear about that.

We actually know a lot about what works. Violence is not inevitable; how we reduce violence is absolutely evidence-based. The public health model is a way of reducing violence. When we talk to surgeons such as Duncan Bew from King’s College Hospital, he will say that he is a great advocate for the public health approach. He spends his time putting back together children who have been stabbed. Actually, we should also recognise that there would be a lot more dead young people were it not for surgeons’ improvement in their practices over the years. The survival rates for stabbings have gone up massively and it is a credit to our medical profession that they have managed to do that.

Duncan Bew, this great surgeon who is an advocate for the public health approach, would say that if he, as a doctor, knew that there was a cure for a disease but he did not implement it, then he would be done for medical negligence. Why on earth, then, are we not doing what we absolutely know works—looking at violence as an epidemic? That is what it is. It goes up then it goes down, and it spreads and then contracts. Reducing it is all about interventions. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said—completely rightly—we have to keep doing things, because we can do all the right things and reduce the violence, but then it will go up again.

The public health approach is very simply about interrupting the violence, preventing its future spread and changing social norms so that it does not happen again. It is very clear. The World Health Organisation has done plenty of work on this issue as well; it will give people the seven strategies of intervention, which work. We just need to look at the evidence of that work, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham said, there needs to be more than words. We need to make sure that we actually put the funding in underneath, to ensure that we make all the interventions that we know work.

On county lines, I agree with everything that has been said already. Croydon has a line to Exeter and I have met Exeter police. They say that if they go to the coach station in Exeter and see a little chap getting off the coach with no baggage, that is someone they need to be looking out for. However, one of the issues they have highlighted to me is how we make sure that those young people, when they are picked up by the police, are looked after; sometimes the police will ring the council and the council say, “Well, the foster parent doesn’t want them any more, because they have just been found with drugs. We haven’t got any emergency foster care. Can you just keep them there for a bit?” The police end up with these kids sitting in their office for hours on end while the council tries to find someone to look after them.

[Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend highlights a really important issue. One of the other challenges, of course, is that if a child is outside their own local area, they fall between different social services authorities. They are picked up as an emergency case, if they are young enough, by the receiving area, but ultimately they are not that area’s responsibility. I am sure she will agree that that issue also needs to be looked at.

[Sarah Jones]

Absolutely—I completely agree. Joining up all these services, so that we look after these children properly, is incredibly important.

Youth services have already been mentioned, as have policing and the strong case for more resourcing for neighbourhood policing. When we met a group of young people who had been in prison for knife crimes, some of whom had been in and out of prison over a number of years, they talked about knowing their local community police in the past. They said that that was not the case now.

Finally, I will talk about sentencing—we have not talked about that much—and about what we do with our young people. The all-party parliamentary group went up to Polmont in Scotland last year. Scotland has stopped imposing custodial sentences of less than a year for young people, so it has halved its youth prison population, but it has kept the funding in place for the prison in Polmont. Scotland now has half the number of young people in prison that it had before; those young people who are in prison are there for serious crimes. They are the people with the significant issues.

In Polmont, the funding goes into teaching young people to read and write, giving them apprenticeships and giving them all kinds of skills. The fire brigade comes in and does a course with a load of them on public safety. Local businesses teach them how to do bricklaying or other skills that we actually need outside prison. We met a lot of those young people, who are managing to turn their lives around.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham talked about the fact that a lot of the people involved in knife crime in London are black. Of course, in Polmont the entire population is white, but when we asked people there, “What are the issues that cause knife crime in Scotland?”, they will say, “Sectarianism”—a word that we do not use in London at all. Sectarianism is the issue in Scotland.

It is worth looking at the underlying issues, one of which is that of those young people in that prison for youth offenders, two-thirds come from the 20% most deprived areas. The same poverty underlies all this violence. Furthermore, nearly 40% of them had lived in a family where there was domestic violence, and 75% had experienced a traumatic bereavement. Traumatic bereavements are really significant. A lot of those young people had experienced one, two or three traumatic bereavements—somebody in their family had been murdered, or had died of a drug overdose or in some kind of other accident. Some 50% of them had parents who had been in prison. The issues there are exactly the same as in London.

I want to ask the Minister some questions, although I know that she will probably not have time to answer all of them today. I am interested to know how the Government are engaging with young people on this issue, because, as has been mentioned, young people are at the heart of what we need to do. They are the answer to all these problems. It would also be good if she talked about what more we can do about school exclusions, and how we can share good practice on that issue.

There was a recent report in The Independent that the Home Office is reducing the support available to county lines victims. I do not know whether the Minister can comment on that. Also, does she have any understanding of the proportion of children involved in knife crime, or in any kind of serious violence, as a result of grooming and criminal exploitation? My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham talked about that.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics that came out today showed that knife crime is up by 8%—the highest level on record. We absolutely need to tackle that rise and to be far more ambitious about doing so. I end by saying that our ambition should be nothing less than to be the safest country in the world. That is what we should aim for. To achieve that, we need to increase policing but we also need to look at the underlying causes of violence. As Desmond Tutu famously said,

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

That is the answer.