Knife Crime

Clive Efford Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the Chair, Ms Buck. I know that if you were not chairing it, you would be contributing to the debate with a great deal of expertise. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) on securing this important debate. In his speech, he talked about the need to deal with the causes and reasons young people become involved in crime.

Those causes are manifold. In London, we live in a city of enormous wealth. In fact, the wealthiest 10% of its population own half of the wealth. The disparity in income and wealth distribution in London is very stark indeed. All of our communities, including in my constituency, have examples of shiny new developments that have received enormous amounts of investment, but precious little is reinvested in the surrounding local communities.

Too often, that investment is done to the community rather than with it. That leads to people feeling that they are not part of the enormous growth in the wealth of our city, but that they are excluded from it. More importantly, they feel that they do not have the same—or, indeed, any—opportunities to engage in and enjoy the distribution and benefits of the wealth that they see all around them. That feeds into people’s lack of aspiration and determination to improve their life prospects through, for example, education. That despair and lack of aspiration feed into sections of our community. Not everyone is affected—we are talking about a minority of people—but none the less, it creates an area where those who want to engage in crime can not only prosper, but entice others to join them.

What do we see? Increasingly, in parts of our communities working-class kids are attacking—and, too often, killing—one another. If we pour into that the now nine years of austerity—which means that the services supporting those communities have struggled to cope and keep going—we get a perfect storm in which those sorts of criminal activities can prosper. That is the background that we have to deal with.

We must recognise that those communities are being left behind. A lot of research suggests that they voted heavily to leave the European Union. There were many contributing factors. People felt such despair and so disconnected from the economic prosperity around them that they decided to vote that way. We have to address the root causes of why too many of our young people become involved in crime.

I will not make political points, but we have seen a significant reduction in the number of police officers. As those numbers have gone down, particularly in neighbourhood policing, we have seen an increase in knife crime and violent crime in our communities. My own borough has lost 168 officers since 2010, and roughly 70 of those were from our safer neighbourhoods team. Those teams were not just involved in arresting people and investigating crime, but embedded in their local communities and involved in a great deal of diversionary activities that got young people away from crime. It was the policy of those safer neighbourhoods teams not only to know their communities but to own the streets and make them safe for the whole community, including young people who were vulnerable to becoming involved in gangs. Those teams knew the prominent individuals who were likely to be involved in crime, and they would engage with other agencies in their local communities to divert young people away from crime.

When others are in control and people feel safe in their communities, young people in particular do not feel that the only way for them to move safely around the community is to be associated with one gang or another. Too often, the postcode approach to gangs influences young people. We have lost the community engagement, which had local community policing—one of the range of agencies mentioned by other hon. Members—at its heart.

A safer neighbourhoods team in my constituency has, sadly, been decimated and now has only two officers. I went with them to play football in the pouring rain with a gang of kids on an estate. I very much supported what the officers were doing, but I asked the police sergeant, “This is not mainstream policing—why are you doing this?” He said, “Because it’s very important that these young people see the police in a different light from when they are being stopped and searched. It’s important that they feel that we are a part of the community that they can trust and come forward to; otherwise these young people will feel vulnerable and will be more likely to fall prey to those who want them to become involved in criminal activity.”

That sort of policing has been lost. Too many of the cuts to local authorities have fallen on services that, alongside the safer neighbourhoods teams, support young people. We have to address those issues. I commend the Mayor for trying to get safer neighbourhoods teams back—sadly, we are down to two dedicated ward officers per ward in my area, where we used to have six—because that is the right approach. I am sure that that will have an impact on crime in my borough. If there is one message that I would like the Minister to take from this debate, it is this: we need to return to that effective form of community policing that works with other agencies.

My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) spoke about school pupils and exclusions. I absolutely agree that, too often, young people being excluded from school begins a downward spiral of neglect by services that should provide them with support, because they are overwhelmed with demand. Too often, young people who would otherwise be in school are left to their own devices in the community for too many hours.

We must also look at the other side: what is going on in schools and what are we asking teachers to do beyond educating young people? We have to look at why those young people had to be removed from school in the first place, and question whether it is right to ask teachers—including, quite often, women—in classes to deal with extremely violent situations. When violence takes over in a school—I have seen examples of this—young people see that teachers, and perhaps even the police, are unable to deal with the situation, and that it is the troublemakers or those involved in gangs who are in control. That makes them more inclined to become involved in such activity because it makes them feel safer at school, on their way home or when they are out and about in the local community. It is not just a question of children becoming vulnerable because they are excluded; we must address a lot more of what goes on in our schools. We cannot just leave it to the schools.

In conclusion, I say to the Minister that we must start reinvesting in our community policing, because it works. We must also provide organisations in our communities, such as schools, with the support they need to assist young people so that they are not dragged into gangs and criminal activities.