David Lammy
Main Page: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)Department Debates - View all David Lammy's debates with the Home Office
(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) on holding it. I know that, behind the scenes, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) has been quietly campaigning in the Tea Room for such a debate because of the concerns in her constituency. It is fantastic to be joined by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who has huge experience of these issues and has continually brought them, certainly during my years in Parliament, to the House’s attention.
This is where I start: the issue is not new. In a sense, it is very important not to have this debate as though this is a year zero moment. We have had this problem for several years. Problems with young people getting caught up in crime, particularly in urban and deprived areas, are absolutely not new. Those at home over Christmas who landed on the show “Dickensian”, an adaptation of many of Dickens’s books, and those very familiar with both “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” will know that we had gangs in London. We had groups of young people getting up to criminality in London, and above such gang activity was usually the adult activity running the gangs, so these issues are not new. I was born in the period just after the huge public concern about mods and rockers congregating in different parts—
Mr Lammy
I notice that the Front-Bench Opposition spokesman is absolutely aware of that. She is ever so slightly older than me. At that time, there was real concern about gang activity in seaside areas or in urban areas of the country. The debate in this House about young people and crime and about gang activity is not new, so what is new? I think that the level of violence is new, the age profile is worrying and the geographic spread feels out of control.
On the age profile, the Met police says that its matrix—its central way of recording who is caught up in what it describes as gang activity—had a total of 3,459 individuals at the last time of publication in May 2014. There were 500 individuals under the age of 18: two 13-year-olds, 21 14-year-olds, 71 15-year-olds, 138 16-year-olds and 268 17-year-olds. There were also 356 18-year-olds, while 55% of the total were aged 18 to 22. Something is going on, and it is something we should be very worried about.
Any Members with significant housing estates in their constituency will talk about the arrival in this country of a phenomenon, which we often associate with America, of young people—teenagers—running drug activity on behalf of older individuals.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the serious violence against women and very young girls associated with gang-related activity is not presently recorded appropriately or understood, and that not enough action is being taken on that specific part of this important problem?
Mr Lammy
I am so pleased that my hon. Friend raises that issue, because that is the other factor that is new. I am about to come on to that.
The young age profile has something to do with the fact that enforcement on this national problem is working: the police are locking people up. We are serious about people carrying a knife and, historically, we have been serious about people carrying a gun. The police have locked up some of the older individuals, particularly after the 2011 riots, but all that has done is to drive the crime down to younger individuals.
My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham made a point about the definition of gangs. It is very dangerous to call any congregation of young people a gang. It almost feels as though we call any congregation of young black and brown people a gang. Those of us in the House who have children, particularly children who are getting to their teenage years, know that, to a 12 or 13-year-old, joining a gang is quite attractive. We therefore need to be very careful about the definition of gangs.
Matthew Pennycook
My right hon. Friend rightly raises what happens when the police target older members of criminal gangs—I am talking about criminal gangs, not groups of young people—in operations. It leaves a vacuum that triggers a spike in violence among the younger, lower orders of the gangs, who have been drawn in for the very reasons he cites.
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend is completely right. What is unfortunately being said about the moral compass of these young people is incredibly worrying. They are impressionable; they are young. For reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham raised, when I say that they are impressionable, I am referring to the fact that we live in a society that has prioritised choice for the individual above everything else. We live in a society where people have the choice of whether to be exposed to quite serious violence on social media, on television and in parts, although not all, of the games industry. It is hard for modern parents, however much money they have, to distinguish between access to those images and that impression.
We therefore have young people stabbing others, almost as if they do not realise the consequences. It is quite, quite bizarre that someone might not realise that puncturing skin and causing blood loss might lead to a loss of life. I have seen images—they are on YouTube, so we can see them—of young people being stabbed continuously and it being almost like a pastime. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford is right that much of this goes completely unreported. It never turns up in our hospitals. It is solved by self-medication. People go to the pharmacy and get their band aid. It is sorted out in the community, so there is an indication that this violence is going down.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) raised something else that is new and worrying and that we would not associate, historically, with mods and rockers or Dickensian times: the phenomenon of women, including young women, being at the centre of the action. Again, as some of the older individuals who run the gangs have been locked up—actually, let us be clear that they can still run a gang from prison—they bring in the younger folk. Why? Young folk are less likely to get a sentence if they are caught. They also bring in the women on the estates and prey on the young women. Historically, the Children’s Commissioner has done tremendous work to raise issues such as the sexualisation of women and the way in which women become the victims of gang activity. Someone can hide the knife in their girlfriend’s bedroom or hide their stash with her. She can walk quietly over to the opposite estate and perhaps not get detected or picked up in quite the same way, so the profile is changing.
Mr Umunna
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way during his powerful speech. The issue is not just girls and women concealing weapons or being used to conceal weapons, but the straightforward exploitation of women in our communities, who are passed from one group of young lads to another. That just does not get talked about nearly enough in my view, as my fellow Lambeth MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), said.
Mr Lammy
Absolutely; there is a deeply disturbing pattern in the sexualisation of these women, and they are victims. That issue has not been picked up, as has been debated in other places.
All of this leads to a disturbing combination of violence, sexual activity, real victims, both young and female, and criminality in our areas. It is not just Members who are saying that. Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard’s homicide and major crime command, said that the presence of 13 and 14-year-olds on the gangs matrix was concerning and warned of exploitation. It is very worrying that 17 men aged 18 or under were fatally stabbed in London just last year.
The Minister published a strategy in January 2016. I ask her as gently as I can, does this problem merit an eight-page strategy or something more considerable? At the back of the strategy in annex A, there is a list of the constituencies that are described as being “Ending Gang and Youth Violence areas”. The first question I have in relation to that is what we mean by “ending”. Are we really dedicated to ending this problem?
I have been in the House for 16 years and this story began around about the time that I came here. In 1994 or ’95, at about the time that Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party and John Major was coming to the end of his leadership of the Conservative party, we would not have had a debate about youth violence and gangs. It just was not present in the British lexicon at that point in our history. Towards the end of the ’90s, we started to see an upsurge in gun violence and Operation Trident began. I thought this was inappropriate, but it was termed black-on-black violence. That morphed into the strategies that we saw, particularly under Charles Clarke’s leadership as Home Secretary, under the Tony Blair Government. After the riots under the coalition Government, there was also an upsurge.
Why am I talking about annex A? We have to decide whether we want to end this problem. I am afraid that it is going in the wrong direction. I have talked about the young people. I have talked about the women. I have talked about the violence. Other hon. Members have mentioned trauma. Let us look at the geography. In April 2012, the areas that were identified were places like Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lewisham, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Sandwell. Hon. Members will not be surprised that those were the areas we wanted to deal with. By December 2012, it had moved on to include Hammersmith and Fulham, Merton and Leeds. When it got to Barnet, Bromley, Havering and Thanet, it started to get quite worrying. Last year, it included Basildon, Grimsby, Harrow, High Wycombe, Southampton and Swindon.
What is going on here? Something that was urban and inner-city has become incredibly suburban. Murders that were traditionally black have become white. It is reflecting on all our young people and they are being caught up in this violence. The picture is not unique to particular communities, but is spreading. There is a geographic spread.
I therefore come back to whether this problem is worth just an eight-page strategy of very anodyne statements:
“We will continue to prioritise the reduction of gang related violence including tackling knife crime.”
How? By when? Local areas are encouraged to continue to follow the approach of
“bringing key partners together and developing an effective local response to gang violence.”
How? Who is going to do that? How do we know what is best practice? We have evidence that some of the gangs straddle different local authorities. There is real spread. Gangs in London—adults, actually—are running young people into the suburbs to sell drugs. How does the strategy in Lewisham or Haringey relate to the strategy in Kent? What is the pattern? That is not mentioned.
Apparently, the Ministry of Justice has brought together analysts
“to examine the evidence base”
and
“ensure responses will be more coherent”,
but how is that analysis being shared? Where do I get hold of it? How are we coming together to deal with it? It does not feel that there is enough of a grip on a spreading epidemic that is taking the lives of young people and inflicting real pain and hardship on differing communities. I believe that is why my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham secured today’s debate.
What is required? We need much better understanding of best practice, and we have to get into the issue of violence in society. Any social worker or youth offending team worker will tell us that domestic violence is often going on in the homes of the people involved. We have the troubled families initiative, but what impact is it having on the problem that we are discussing, given that it seems to be getting worse? The statistics are worrying. The figures up to January 2016 show that there has been an 18% increase in assault with injury and a 22% increase in violence against the person in London. Data from the London ambulance service—we know that there are profound problems with its data, so they are not necessarily the best—show a 9% increase in assaults involving knives. Knife crime is up by 14% in London as a whole over the past 12 months. The situation is urgent, yet it is not figuring in our national conversation and responses in the way that it ought to.
After the 2011 riots, there was huge fanfare, because the Mayor of London, now the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson)—he is obviously very good at fanfare—brought in Bill Bratton, the commissioner from New York. Hon. Members will remember that he had all the strategies and plans, but what happened to them? There has been some discussion of the model used in Glasgow, where there was a significant problem. What bearing does what Glasgow has done with its violence reduction unit have on the Government’s plans? We have also heard about what has gone on in Chicago and in Boston. The ideas to end the problem are out there, and there are solutions, but where is the coherent strategy to deal with it?
I am sorry to challenge the strategy document, but to people living in or representing one of the areas affected it feels like a civil service exercise, not the deliberate action that we will require. We particularly need not enforcement but diversion activities, especially for our very young souls.
Several hon. Members rose—
Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
As a new MP, nothing can prepare you for receiving the call from the police telling you that a teenager has been murdered in your constituency. Once was hard enough, but within weeks of each other, it happened twice on exactly the same estate. In fact, since becoming an MP last year, four young people from my constituency have lost their lives due to the needless violence on our streets: Shaquan, Naseem, Kabba and Jamar. I have sat down with many of the family and friends left behind. Many of them are here today. Losing loved ones is hard enough. For them to have been murdered, and to not be able to understand what has happened, is even harder.
I have been calling for a debate on this subject since October last year. I am therefore grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) for securing the debate, and to the Backbench Business Committee for granting it time.
There is so much we could talk about; there is so much that needs to be said—but we also need to listen. We can all stand here and give passionate speeches about gangs and youth violence, but the truth is that nothing will change. There is no speech that any one of us could give today that will stop our young people killing each other. That is the harsh reality, so what do we do? Do we accept that it happens and simply move on? No. Each one of us has an obligation to find solutions. I believe that they will come from building a stronger, more resilient community base for our country—one where we look out for each other.
Do we write another report, pull some words together and call it a policy? No. The Government need to realise that writing down 2,500 words, giving it the grand title of “Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation” and then calling it a policy simply will not work. There can be no more top-down solutions. Things have changed and we must listen and respond. There are some huge Departments looking at this: the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in London. None of them can possibly understand the issues being faced by young people on a daily basis. They all engage with young people, but they do so in a tokenistic way. They do so to tick the box that says, “Must engage with young people.” They do not engage in a youth-led way; no, they do so in a “led youth” way. This whole approach needs to change.
Young people and our communities have the solutions, because they are the ones facing the problems. We need a far-reaching, youth-led consultation to really get to grips with the core issues that underpin the reasons for and the impact of the violence that is present in young people’s lives. This is not just about gangs. If we ask 10 people what a gang is, we will get 10 different answers. It is not just about youth violence, either. We need to drop the negative language. Young people are fed up with constantly being portrayed negatively by politicians and the media.
Vicky Foxcroft
I agree with everything my right hon. Friend says. As he said in his speech, the document is so brief that it barely defines anything or suggests what any of the solutions should be. We need to transform the debate fundamentally.
Karen Bradley
I will come on to funding shortly. I am trying to be non-party political, but I might have to make some comments shortly if I am not allowed to continue in that vein. However, I am trying to be non-partisan and I want to work with hon. Members from across the House. I know that they are facing this problem in their communities and I want to ensure that the Home Office extends whatever support we can in order to get a local solution that is right for their area. That will not be a top-down solution, however, and it will not be one size fits all.
Karen Bradley
I will address that point briefly, but I must make some progress because I am conscious that this debate is to be followed by an extremely important debate on Welsh affairs in which many Members want to take part. On the figures, on which the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) commented, we want to see these crimes recorded. We want the police to know about them and we want to understand what is happening. I recently visited the A&E department at King’s College hospital in the constituency of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). It is absolutely tragic that the first opportunity we get to have a teachable moment with these young people is when they turn up at A&E. They are turning up not in an ambulance—the gangs do not phone an ambulance or any other blue light service—but in private cars and being dumped at A&E, and that is the first opportunity that any agency has to make contact with them.
I want to pay tribute to Redthread, which provides young people’s advocates at A&E departments across London. Those advocates are important in making contact not only with the young person who has been the victim of an attack but with their family when they come to visit. They play an important part in keeping that young person in hospital and getting them to speak to someone they trust. That might be the first opportunity we have to speak to them, and we need to find a way of making that happen sooner. This is about education, about working with schools and about working in vulnerable locations. When I talk about the revised programme, I will mention some of the approaches that we are using in that regard. I want all those hidden crimes that are not being recorded at the moment to be reported and recorded so that we can understand what the problem is. [Interruption.] I sense that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) might want to intervene on me, but this must be the final intervention as I need to make some progress.