Gangs and Youth Violence (2011 Riots)

Debate between David Lammy and Gary Streeter

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) for her comprehensive remarks on the whole range of issues, and for returning, as she has done over many years, to the root causes: housing, welfare and some of the central challenges that exist across London.

I want to concentrate on diversionary activity, but will begin with some fundamental assertions. First, gangs are not new in British life. In the 19th century Dickens wrote well, in “Oliver Twist”, about gang life in London and how older men like Fagin could prey on groups of young men in the inner city and cultivate criminality among them. More recently there was violence involving mods and rockers. There are certain points in history when young men, masculinity and violence become issues—so what is new now? Why are we particularly concerned? I think it is because of the callousness towards human life, and how quickly it is taken—usually with knives—with so little regard for that life. The House needs to pause and think deliberately about how so many groups of young men can take life so lightly—and how they can take female life and the dignity of a woman’s disposition so lightly, displaying such terrible misogyny. The work of the Children’s Commissioner in recent weeks highlighted the way in which young women are often sexually exploited, which underlies that callousness about human life for which we should have concern.

Gang activity is but one small component of the story of the riots and it amounts, when we look at the arrest profile, to no more than 20% of the arrests that were made. We should not overstate the effect of gangs there; but in some areas those involved in gangs clearly orchestrated the violence. It may well be that those who were arrested initially were new to criminality and therefore were caught earlier. That is an important aspect of the matter; but, to underline the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North made, it is a matter for deep concern that we live in a country that is prepared to spend up to £2 million on an inquiry but does not want to get to the fundamental reasons for the riots and then act. I pay tribute to the work of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel but it was not a judicial inquiry. I am sure that hon. Members taking part in the debate today will want to revisit the issues, particularly on the anniversary of the riots, to consider what has happened since, but when we look for lessons it is not clear at all that there has been a coherent approach, save for the work on troubled families and some activity on gangs. What comes across in a debate such as this, from all the hon. Members who have spoken, is the comprehensive way in which the problem needs to be attacked, and the fact that such comprehensive action is lacking.

I applaud the efforts that have gone into a joined-up approach to gang activity in London. It is right to pay tribute to the work of the Metropolitan police, because there is a reduction in such activity across London. Young men are being imprisoned because of their gross antisocial behaviour. In Haringey there has been a 31% reduction in serious youth violence, a 31% reduction in gun crime, a reduction of just under 21% in knife crime and a 26.2% reduction in knife-enabled robbery. However, there is a lot of experience in the Chamber this afternoon and hon. Members know that when young people are put in jail they come out; that the same effort has not gone into the prison system; and that the recidivism rates for people getting out of Feltham are about 75%. They know that young people in their late teens or early twenties who are arrested have younger brothers and cousins who take over the turf, and that gang violence is quintessentially a turf war, a ridiculous parochialism about postcode. That means that the mainstay of violence in the London borough of Haringey is what happens between, broadly speaking, 12 gangs, although three dominate. Those three are NPK in Northumberland Park, Tottenham Man Dem, largely around the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, and the Wood Green Mob. Just weeks after the riots, we had the most amazing knife crime incident, with multiple knifings outside the McDonald’s in Wood Green, for no reason other than a turf war. I am afraid that as arrests are made, new people move on to the turf.

It is right, building on what has happened in Glasgow, to approach the issue as one of public health and to be purposeful about diversionary activity; but that is where I have deep concerns about the understanding of what works, the comprehensive nature of what is taking place, and the money that is being dedicated to the purpose. Communities Against Guns, Gangs and Knives funding in the London borough of Haringey is £45,000. It is barely possible to buy a lock-up garage in Tottenham for that. Ending Gang and Youth Violence funding—that is for projects such as the Ben Kinsella knife crime exhibition that young people visit, and targeted mentoring work—is £199,000 in the London borough of Haringey. A one-bedroom flat cannot currently be bought in the borough for that money.

I must ask what the priority is. Austerity issues are rightly raised, but in that context we must at least consider what our priorities are. I want to reinforce the points that have been made about quality, cost and the sustaining of investment. We know what works in mentoring, and not enough of it, of a high enough standard, is going on comprehensively in our constituencies. We know, too, that there are particular problems in high-rise tower blocks in constituencies such as Lambeth, Haringey and Hackney across London. The issue is about getting down to a neighbourhood level. It is not about a feral underclass; it is about the workless poor and an endemic worklessness in too many such tower blocks—dysfunctional and not working. It is deeply problematic that only 110 young people in Tottenham have benefited from the Work programme long-term. It is not good enough and it cannot be good enough in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

There are question marks over the work needed to ensure that young people do not follow in the footsteps of their brothers and cousins following arrest. As a society, we must underline the importance of men, and particularly fathers, in our communities. They cannot be forgotten. We must challenge the stereotypes coming out of the games industry and parts of the music industry in particular, where toleration of violence and misogyny is totally unacceptable. Not enough is being done to tackle it. I shall end my remarks there. Many of us could go on, but we hope that the subject is revisited in the main Chamber soon.

[Mr Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that the wind-ups begin at 3.40 pm.