Knife Crime

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, but I have to acknowledge that after 19 years in this place I am weary, depressed and upset. Here we are again: colleagues—often the same ones—coming to use our words in debates such as this. Hansard will record the issues we explore, and the tremendous number of ideas conveyed.

When I began my career in this place, Operation Trident was just getting going in London. At that stage the discussion was about whether we could get over the gun violence then happening in London, associated with gangs often described as Yardie gangs. There was a sense that we would be able to get on top of the problem, and that it would go—that the issue was really to be associated with downtown America. Almost two decades later, we might view the situation we have got to with knife and gun crime and gang activity in the UK—in London and England, overwhelmingly—as if it were a patient, being assessed by a doctor. The patient’s condition could be getting worse, stable or improving. Sadly, it has clearly got a lot worse. Something has gone drastically wrong.

I agree with everything said in the debate so far, and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer), who secured the debate. I send love, humility and respect to the family of Jaden, aged just 14, who lost his life recently. When I think of him, I cannot but think of my eldest son, who is just a year younger. It breaks your heart. I also reflect on the loss, on Easter Monday last year, of a beautiful young woman, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, who was shot and killed leaving a newsagent in Tottenham. That led to the current debate, which is currently overwhelming us.

Things have got worse. We have heard that there were 40,147 offences in the year ending in March 2018. Today we found out that violent crime has gone up by 19%. Homicide and knife crime are up. It is all up. The problem is, in a sense, not new: we just have to read Dickens’s description of Fagin and the gangs that populated London in 1839. However, it is a problem that grips us hugely at this time.

An important issue has been touched on, in relation to county lines, and that is drug use. What we are talking about is not just kids knifing each other because they happen to be violent. Behind much of the knife crime lies a huge industry, which reaches all over the world. It begins in countries such as Colombia. I have spoken to quite a lot of young urban people aged 12, 13 and 14 and many of them cannot even tell me where Colombia is. They certainly could not organise the trans-shipment of cocaine across the Atlantic and through Spain and Amsterdam to this country. They are not the men in suits—often anonymous—who deal with that traffic. Those men are not sufficiently made the subject of debate in this House. Yes, such organised crime traffics huge amounts of drugs. However, it also traffics people—women—and guns, which is why there is an increase in gun crime.

There are many different types of young people in the urban communities affected by the problems we are debating, but I will give Members a picture of some of them. Of course, there is the young man or woman who has fallen into a gang. We talk about them a lot; but there is also the young man or woman growing up on one of the great housing estates. They are not in a gang. They do not know anything about gangs, really. They are just seriously scared.

I think about those young people a lot, because that was me once—scared. They are picking up knives and burying them in bushes, because they do not feel safe in the communities where they live. I must tell the House that if they do not feel safe in the communities where they live it is the responsibility of this place, of the Met Commissioner, of Government—the Home Secretary—and of the Mayor. We have failed those young people living on estates who do not feel safe and who pick up knives and bury them before and after school and at the weekends, to protect themselves—and then find themselves using them.

There is another group of young people. I care a lot about them. They are the kind who might be in a park after school, following the crowd. Often they have special needs such as dyslexia, ADHD, mild Asperger’s or autism. They are just following the crowd, in the park, but they are another group who get rounded up. We could be having a debate about joint enterprise. Why do we have a law that throws young people into prison, even though they did not commit the murder, because they happened to be in the same place? They are vulnerable and impressionable—like most teenagers—and some of them are in jail as I speak. Why? It is because the police are not close to the intelligence, and there is a culture of “no snitching” and not telling tales. Therefore we round them all up. To put it bluntly, because we are mainly talking about black lives, no one really cares.

There are different groups of young people, and then, of course, there are the victims. All of that is largely driven by drugs, which are prolific. The price of cocaine has dropped, the purity has risen, and it is estimated that 875,000 people used cocaine in England and Wales last year, a rise of 15%—it just gets worse—with an 8% rise among 16 to 24-year-olds and 432 deaths related to it.

All that is driving the gang activity, serving markets across the country. That struck me when I was in Highbury Corner youth court. I had a young constituent, 17 years old, and the magistrate announced that he had been arrested in Aberdeen. I have been to all four corners of this country, but I must admit I have never been to Aberdeen. I thought, “What’s he doing in Aberdeen?” It turns out there is a big cocaine market in Aberdeen. There is a lot of money coming off the oil rigs, and there was my young constituent, serving the market in Aberdeen—or rather being pimped out by an adult to serve that market.

Of course, the trafficking of that drug drives a culture of violence back home. It can affect kids who are not county lines, because it creates a culture of violence in the communities we represent. I must ask the Minister: in that context, why, oh why has the Home Office budget for the UK Border Force been cut by £110 million, or 18%, since 2012? We talk a lot about cuts, but if we cut the Border Force it will have an impact on the drug market.

Most sane commentators, who in this country stretch from William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative party, to Charlie Falconer, the former Secretary of State for Justice under the previous Labour Government, are beginning to talk very seriously about the idea that the war on drugs has failed, yet we in this place have failed to keep up in our responses. That is for another debate, but let us put that squarely at the centre of this discussion. Sadly, just as was the case when Dickens was writing about London all that time ago, where there is poverty, where there is hardship—I will return to that in a moment—there will always be young souls who can be taken up. Much can be said about prevention, but let us address the seriousness of the demand driving this whole agenda and the need to support the different kinds of young people I discussed.

Many in this debate have talked about the importance of policing, but there are other crucial services beyond policing. We require our local authorities and young offending teams to set effective violence reduction and youth strategies, but it is hard to be effective when council budgets have been slashed by 54%. Youth centres, after-school activities—gone. Between 2012 and 2016, 600 youth centres closed, 3,500 youth workers lost their jobs and 140,000 places vanished. Spending on universal youth services has fallen by 52%. Interventions at local level have disappeared. That is on top of the neighbourhood policing that we have discussed.

Let us be clear about what that neighbourhood policing is really about; my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) made this point. We have housing estates where, I am afraid, the police cannot be found. That is why the young people are scared. The police are just not there in the numbers they need to be. I think of the Broadwater Farm estate in my constituency, which has 3,500 people. The police are not there in the numbers, and that is why the young people are scared.

When those young people are making a decision about whether to tell on a young person they know who has a knife or a gun hidden in his bedroom—“Do I worry about him and his mates on the estate or do I tell the police?”—they are making a reasonable judgment. Of course they do not tell the police, because they do not think the police can protect them; they do not see them in the numbers and the police are not present on the estate. It is not an unreasonable judgment that these young people are making.

I must also make it absolutely clear what is happening in reality in these young people’s lives and those of their parents. This is not to make excuses: poverty is never an excuse for violence. I grew up poor and working-class. Many Members of this House, including some who have spoken already, grew up in those circumstances. I never, ever say that poverty and being working-class or poorer is an excuse for violence. Nevertheless, black youth unemployment in this country between the ages of 16 and 24 is currently running at 26%. The national average is 12%—it is more than twice that for this community. People say, “Oh, why is it always black youth that we see?”, but my mother would have said, “Idle hands make the devil’s work.” It is quite simple. I am sure you too have heard that saying before, Sir Graham.

Young people must have jobs, and we must do something about the housing crisis, which is also creating polarised communities: people living perpetually in houses of multiple occupation, again in the context of the housing estates I am describing, with a lack of services, polarisation and increasing poverty, against a backdrop of huge cuts to welfare—they, too, have a bearing on this—and unemployment. The cauldron in which the story we are telling is mixed starts to feel akin to what Dickens was writing about. That is the point.

Yes, we need a public health approach, but it will have to be more than just a nice slogan or phrase; I am worried that it is becoming one of those in politics. I have seen it happen before. It happened with another phrase that we started using a few years ago: “affordable housing”. Affordable housing? In London? At 80% of market value? We still use that phrase, but it means nothing to ordinary people, and I am worried that the public health strategy, which had a great name when it came out of Glasgow, is being tarnished, because it needs resource, joined-up activity and real co-ordination.

I am very pleased that I was asked to be on the violence reduction task force, but there is a hell of a lot to do. On the issue of drill music and YouTube, some of the commercial companies have a lot to answer for at the moment, but we should not focus entirely on the music that young people listen to. There are issues across social media with all young people in Britain, including young girls bullied on forums such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

[Lyn Brown]

I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend was here for my speech, but the only thing I would like taken down is the specific drill video that celebrated the murder of a 14-year-old in the playground, not all drill music. I do not intend to blame a genre of music for the deaths of children.

[Mr Lammy]

Let me put it on the record that my hon. Friend is entirely right; if my comments came out the wrong way, they were not what I meant. However, there are issues about what it is acceptable to put on social media—what it says and what it is driving—and there is a real question about regulation. That is absolutely clear.

France has just banned smartphones for under-14s in school, I think. We have heard nothing from the chief medical officer in this country—nothing. Nothing has been said. But we know that there are issues of mental health. We know that self-harm is up and anorexia is up. In a way, knife crime is a different sort of self-harm in the community, is it not? So there are some ingredients here, but we need to be careful about focusing on one particular group when actually this is an issue across the board.

I hope that the Minister might say something about serious organised crime and about cocaine—about drugs. I hope that she understands that the thrust of much of what has been said here is entirely about the resources available for the police, local authorities, youth services and families themselves to grip and deal with this problem so that we are seeing a reduction and not—as we are seeing now, month on month and year on year—a rise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

That is absolutely true. There is a greater vulnerability to influence. There are lots of issues with PRU systems. For example, children tend to finish much earlier than in mainstream schools; they finish at 2 o’clock, so they are more likely to be on the streets for longer. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) has mentioned before in Parliament, if we look at when knife offences occur, we see that there is a peak after school and before parents come home from work. It is absolutely tragic, but the number goes up, and then it goes down again. It would be good to keep children busy for that time, before their parents get home from work.

[Mr Lammy]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. In pressing the point about PRUs and alternative provision, will she also recognise—I am sure that she sees this in Croydon—the very real concerns about the disproportionality in the number of black and minority ethnic children who are excluded from schools and find themselves in alternative provision, and, frankly, the seeming scarcity of public concern about that escalation in school exclusion rates?

[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.