Serious Violence Strategy

Catherine West Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

Serious violence is not just a big-city phenomenon. Earlier, after some of my hon. Friends’ interventions, the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) said that this was artificial politics. Let me say to the House that nothing could be more real than mothers crying over their dead sons, and nothing could be more real than keeping our constituents safe. This is not a parliamentary game; this is about our constituents’ lives.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is not just about the £253 million that is going to be cut from the Metropolitan police in the next 18 months? The cuts to youth services since 2010 have also fuelled this despair and worry.

[Ms Abbott]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend and shall return to those issues later in my speech.

We welcome the broad themes in the serious violence strategy—tackling county lines; early intervention and prevention; supporting communities and local partnership; and law enforcement and the criminal justice response—but I hope the Minister will agree that it is reasonable to talk about resources when we discuss those themes. For some time, Ministers claimed that they were protecting the police budget and that crime was going down. I am glad to hear them now admit that there is a major problem with serious violence, the crime about which people are most frightened and concerned.

In the latest 12 months, police recorded gun crime is up 11% and knife crime is up 22%. There are widespread reports of serious violent crime, including knife crime, throughout the country. Reported deaths have risen sharply from the beginning of this year. Ministers have said that the Home Office serious violence strategy is designed to address all that. In her foreword to the report, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), said that £40 million of public funds have been committed to the strategy and that it is a

“significant programme of work involving a range of Government Departments and partners, in the public, voluntary and private sectors.”

Are Ministers really telling us that the resources that they are promising are adequate? To be clear, in the past 12 months the police recorded almost 40,000 knife crime offences and well over 6,000 firearms offences; the funding allocated to discourage, prevent, divert and detect serious weapons-related violent crimes is therefore just a few hundred pounds for each offence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. If the level of charging has plateaued and people are literally getting away with murder, communities must think that, for all their protestations, Ministers do not really care. [Interruption.] Well, Ministers may try to reject that analysis, but the thoughts of the people in our communities must turn to that.

We want a serious violence strategy, not just increased levels of stop and search. Evidence-based stop-and- search has a role, but any serious strategy to tackle violent crime will involve a number of Departments and local stakeholders, as the Minister has said. We need to learn from what works. The Home Office’s own research into stop-and-search shows that there is

“no statistically significant crime-reducing effect from the large increase in weapons searches during the course of Operation Blunt 2. This suggests that the greater use of weapons searches was not effective at the borough level for reducing crime.”

Research from the College of Policing came to exactly the same conclusion. When the New York Mayor, Bill de Blasio, completely ended stop-and-frisk, he found that it coincided with a decline in crime. The Prime Minister, when she was Home Secretary, had this to say:

“I strongly believe that stop and search should be used proportionately, without prejudice, and with the support of local communities”.

I agree with her comments then, even if her views and those of other Conservative Members differ now. Indiscriminate or mass stop-and-search has no discernible impact on reducing crime. Only targeted, intelligence-led stop-and-search has shown to be effective.

Ministers will be aware of the advances in tackling knife crime and other violent crime in Scotland. In 2017, there were no deaths from knife crime in Scotland, even though Glasgow was once thought to be the knife crime capital of this country. The approach taken there, which itself developed from lessons learned in the United States and elsewhere, was to treat knife crime as a public health issue. That means tackling the gangs and the gang culture, including diverting people from crime and helping young people get out of gangs. It includes work in communities and in schools, and ending the widespread use of school exclusion, rather than class exclusion.

[Catherine West]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, although we have good and outstanding schools in many local authority areas, including in my own, sadly, the numbers of exclusions are going up, which seems to correlate with the rise in youth crime? That seems to hold up the evidence on the public health approach, as keeping young people in schools, or in some sort of care, seems to be an effective anti-crime approach.

[Ms Abbott]

We must reflect on the rising level of school exclusions and acknowledge that pupil referral units sometimes look and feel like academies for crime, even though the people who run them work very hard and do their very best.