Gangs and Youth Violence (2011 Riots)

Debate between David Lammy and Karen Buck

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ms Buck]

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend has been a powerful advocate of our better understanding of social media and how they can interact with long-standing patterns of behaviour and yet change that behaviour, increasing the ability of groups to taunt and confront each other through the posting of gang videos. She is absolutely right.

From all the analyses from across the political spectrum, left and right, from politicians, the media, think-tanks and academia we have a whole range of different contributory factors. Family breakdown, unemployment, the absence of effective role models—in particular for young men—poor relationships between young people and the police, the role of social media, excessive consumerism and poverty have all been analysed and put into the mix. We have yet, however, to translate our understanding of all such different factors into a comprehensive strategy for responding to the violence that has plagued our streets generally and to ensure that there is no repetition of the terrible events of 2011. Are we doing enough to translate our understanding of the causes of such behaviour into a specific understanding of, for example, where flashpoints can occur, postcodes, the role of social media or how adult criminals are directing the behaviour of younger members of the gangs? Such adults are sometimes directing from inside prison or even from outside the country. Young people involved in gang behaviour often say that they are dealt with by the police—quite rightly—but adult serious criminal behaviour is often behind the drug dealing or other criminal activity underpinning some gang behaviour, and those adults are not gone after or challenged. Work is being done in all those respects but I can fairly say that it is patchy, inconsistent and simply not good enough to insure against a repetition of the events of 2011.

In London, the number of people who died on our streets as a result of gang and serious youth violence peaked in 2008. It would be extremely unwise, however, for any of us to feel that that might have been a high-water mark for gang and serious youth violence, because it clearly was not. Serious youth violence was surging in 2011, up to and after the riots, and that would have been a more important element of media commentary had the riots not, understandably, distracted so much of our attention. We are only just beginning to appreciate the role of serious sexual violence, and the way in which girls are being drawn into the gang structure and abused.

It is estimated that around 250 gangs are operating in London alone, and that around 88% are involved in violence. Some 18% of individuals in gangs are linked to drug supply, 20% to stabbings, 50% to shootings and 14% to rapes. The Minister may say that we are calling for additional public spending to respond to some of the challenges, but the reverse is true. I want less to be spent on the consequences of that serious criminal activity, and on holding young people in youth offending institutions and prisons. A place in a youth offending institution sometimes costs £60,000 of public money a year. If only a fraction of that could be invested in prevention strategies, we would make a contribution to tackling the deficit as well as criminal behaviour.

When gang violence leads, as it has done, to serious concern about flashpoints in Pimlico, Parliament should regard that as a wake-up call. I am pleased to see the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) in his place, and he may make a contribution. That was a powerful wake-up call for people on Westminster city council because Pimlico is not the sort of place normally associated with the gang culture.

When a Westminster head teacher tells me that

“Hearing gun shots from my office yesterday really brought home to me how close we are to yet another tragedy”,

that should be a wake-up call. When a busy Oxford street store is the scene of a confrontation ending in a teenager’s murder, as happened last Christmas, we are reminded that gang violence cannot be swept out of sight and consigned to the usual suspect areas, such as Tottenham, Hackney and Lambeth. It can explode into everyone’s consciousness.

Given that background, we might have expected the problem to continue in summer 2012, perhaps with a repeat of the riots, and certainly a continuation of that surging youth violence that we saw throughout 2010 and 2011, but the picture is much more complicated. There has been a significant fall in serious youth violence locally in Westminster and across the Metropolitan police area with falls of nearly one third in knife injuries and 21% in gun-related incidents. The number of young people arrested has also fallen, gratifyingly, in recent times. But that makes my case more, not less pressing. If recent months are not to turn out to be an aberration, we must understand what contributory factors bore down on that youth violence, and how we can continue them.

We are definitely seeing the benefits of gang initiatives in my constituency and Met-wide, supported by some outstanding individuals and organisations which are delivering results with better information sharing, such as through the Gang Multi-Agency Partnership—the GMAP process, which monitors individual and gang activity—gang mediation and intensive family support.

I pay tribute to some of those involved in that work, because they do not receive sufficient recognition. They include Matt Watson, who runs Westminster’s gangs unit, and his team; the outgoing Commander Bray in Westminster, under whose watch a police gangs unit was set up and maintained despite all the other pressures on local policing; front-line gang workers, such as Twilight Bey and the Pathways to Progress team; Manni Ibrahim and the youth workers at clubs such as the Avenues, Paddington Boys, the Feathers and others, who have had to deal with the realities of gang violence on the front line; schools and colleges that have worked together; parent and family groups, such as the Tell It Like It Is campaign and Generation to Generation; and individuals who are doing creative work trying to tackle youth unemployment, such as Circle Sports.

It would be good to describe that as an infrastructure, but it would be unreasonable because, important as that work is, and invaluable as those individuals are, it is held together by gossamer threads. We simply do not know how much of the fall in serious youth crime in the last few months is due to the combination of statutory and community activity, and how much is due to other factors. That is an important challenge for Ministers. We may simply be seeing a lull in violence in the aftermath of the riots, when so many people were convicted and imprisoned and the shock waves went to communities in cities up and down the country.

The Centre for Social Justice report warned that the arrest strategy of recent months has weakened the leadership of some of the more responsible elders in gangs and created a greater risk of a more anarchic gang structure growing up in its wake. I do not know whether that will happen, but nor does anyone else, and that is part of the problem. What I do know is that we cannot afford to relax our grip for one moment. There is no evidence that the tide has turned, and in many respects, the underlying conditions for some of that behaviour are worsening because of factors such as the disproportionate cut suffered by the youth services as local government has been squeezed, and the pressure on family poverty and homelessness.

I was struck by a report that was published today by the Human City Institute. It says that social tenants have lost 10% of their purchasing power over the last couple of years—a total of £3 billion. Grainia Long of the Chartered Institute of Housing, who wrote the foreword to the report, said that it

“is very concerned that the combined effects of austerity and welfare reform run counter to the government’s fairness principle, and…that tenants are…disproportionately taking the strain of deficit reduction”.

That sort of upheaval and social stress cuts across some of the work that we are trying to do in tackling gang behaviour.

Long-term youth unemployment is at catastrophic levels, with unemployment of black and ethnic minority young men and women particularly worrying. The youth unemployment rate for black people has increased at almost twice the rate as that for white 16 to 24-year-olds since the start of the recession, and young black men are the worst affected.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that, when considering that statistic, it is important that the House realises that the situation in Britain is now worse than in the United States of America? That is how bad it has become. Black and minority ethnic communities are also seeing women, who were traditionally employed in the public sector, losing their employment. That is devastating for families who find themselves in that circumstance.

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend, who has spoken eloquently and with great knowledge about the causes of social breakdown in his constituency, is absolutely right. It is shocking that black unemployment is higher than in America. We have often seen the consequences of that in America, and we know that such social polarisation and deprivation are undoubtedly two of the many causes of gang and serious youth violence. That cannot be ignored, because such behaviour does not occur in a vacuum, and the economy is a critical element.

This debate is not about poverty and unemployment, but any Minister who believes that we should not mention them in considering long-term strategies for tackling the sort of behaviour that has led to far too many young people being murdered and maimed on our streets, and hundreds of others being imprisoned, sometimes for life, with a devastating effect on their families, is missing the big picture.

Gang membership and serious youth violence reflect the experience of troubled families and powerful peer pressure on the streets, the hopelessness and alienation of exclusion, unemployment and powerlessness, the power of an alternative identity that gangs offer to young people without community or family protection, and much more besides. Mainstream services must bend to incorporate what we have learned about prevention and gang exit. There is much evidence from the work of the London School of Economics, from “Reading the Riots”, from the work of groups in the Transition to Adulthood Alliance, from Catch22, the Brathay Trust project and Working with Men, and from Harriet Sergeant’s powerful book, “Among the Hoods”.

There may not be a grand theory of everything to explain the riots and gang and serious youth violence, but we broadly know what to do. We need to prevent young people getting drawn into gangs, offer gang members a way out and ensure that enforcement works when all else fails. The question is whether we can ensure that we do that, and that we do enough of it.

Finally, Mr Speaker—[Interruption.] I apologise. In time, perhaps, Mr Streeter. The final point is that we have no certainty at the moment about the long-term funding for the anti-gang initiatives that we already have. According to my borough, the funding for 2013-14 will be less than it was for 2012-13, and we are anticipating cuts from the Mayor of London’s contribution in the region of 12% to 20%. The chief executive of Westminster council has advised me that it receives two grants from the Home Office for 2012-13, but the ending gang and youth violence fund, which represents a sizeable proportion of the council’s spend on tackling youth violence, is only for the current financial year. There has been no indication of further funding from the Home Office for 2013-14.

Having said that, the Home Office peer review of Westminster’s gang programme highlighted the importance of creating a period of stability in provision. I ask the Minister to reflect on how it is possible that on one hand, the Home Office requires local authorities to provide a period of stability in gang prevention and exit programmes, but on the other hand refuses to guarantee the funding or ensure that the Mayor of London maintains at least the current levels of contribution.

Legal aid

Debate between David Lammy and Karen Buck

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I am delighted to have secured this important debate so soon after the publication of the legal aid Green Paper. It is a mark of how significant such issues are that there is a good attendance in the Gallery and that a number of Members of Parliament are present hoping to make a contribution.

Members of Parliament have a particular interest in legal aid, particularly in the broader context of advice services, because we are part of the family of advisers. That was brought home to me during my first week as an MP when, at my very first surgery, a gentleman asked me for assistance in having his wife deported. I was not able to refer that case to a partner legal aid firm.

Over the course of 13 years, I have made extensive use of, and am enormously grateful to, private firms, law centres and other advice centres in my constituency and elsewhere, and I will pay tribute to them by name. Paddington law centre is an excellent local facility that has assisted thousands of people in the community. The London borough of Westminster is often used as a byword for prosperity and the great institutions of central London, but in fact it includes a number of the most deprived wards in the country. Westminster citizens advice bureau is another superb organisation and I had the pleasure of attending its annual meeting a couple of weeks ago. Other organisations include the North Kensington law centre, the migrants resource centre, the Mary Ward centre—that is not in my constituency, but it is an important local organisation—Just for Kids Law, to which I will refer in a moment, and many private practices, as well as the Central London law centre and the Brent private tenants rights group, which is just over the border and provides an important service to tenants.

Those professionals in the sector provide, for the most part, a service to many of the most vulnerable and distressed people in society, and they do so for what is a challenging level of remuneration in a professional context. We hear—sometimes rightly—about the eye-watering sums of money paid in legal aid in some criminal cases. I understand that such cases cause public concern, but as in so many areas of public policy, we are being driven by policy making by anecdote. We need to address extreme examples and issues, but, overwhelmingly, legal aid practitioners are not well remunerated and they do an excellent job at astoundingly good value to the public purse.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend says that those professionals are not well remunerated. Does she agree that they are not even as well remunerated as many of the senior police officers and teachers in our constituencies? Their average income is between £28,000 and £40,000 in London.

[Ms Buck]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. It is true that legal aid practitioners who take on institutions in the public sector, and sometimes the private sector, are significantly less well paid than those professionals who make the public policy decisions that they challenge.

It is important to put on the record the fact that the previous Labour Government took decisions that bore down on legal aid expenditure. Not everyone will have agreed with those decisions—they may have challenged them—but there was a healthy debate. It must also be accepted that had Labour been re-elected, there would have been cuts in the legal aid budget. It is not the case, however, that the unfolding policy of the Labour party would have placed the pressure, which we now see emerging, on civil, family and social welfare law. Those are the areas of concern that I want to address.

It is critical to protect criminal legal aid. If it is not available at the right level and provided by quality professionals, justice will be denied. It is very important to protect a proper criminal legal aid budget. I pay tribute to Lord Bach, the former Minister with responsibility for legal aid, who looked at ways in which to bear down on exceptional costs in the criminal legal aid budget without sacrificing the principles of access to justice. I think there was consensus on that.

My concerns are about the manner in which the legal aid Green Paper attacks—and it is an attack—the legal aid budget. It bears down particularly severely on civil cases, including family and social welfare, and takes a number of areas out of the scope of aid entirely. Such areas include children and family cases in which domestic violence is not a stated factor, education, immigration where a person is not detained, clinical negligence, welfare benefits, employment, debt and some areas of housing. As a consequence, more than 500,000 people each year are less likely to receive help. Not only will that have an effect on those people unable to access legal aid services, but it will destabilise and possibly destroy such services in many areas and make it extremely hard for public services to be held to account when they are at fault.