Serious Violence

Diane Abbott Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Few aspects of crime frighten our constituents more than violent crime. The sad truth is that, under this Government, violent crime continues to spiral.

I begin by declaring a personal interest and concern. I have been an MP in the heart of the east end for 30 years. I am immensely proud of being a Hackney MP. It is an amazing community, and we lead the way in tech, fashion, fine art, music and all types of culture, but a person cannot live and work in Hackney for the number of years I have and not be aware of the harsh reality of violent crime. For my constituents and me, violent crime is not just a newspaper story but the cause of tragic incidents that haunt friends and neighbours and regularly scar our community.

Let me remind the House of the parameters of the violent crime wave we face. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics reveal that violent crime soared 19% to 1.5 million offences in the year to last September. Consider that for a moment: it equates to an average of more than 4,000 offences a day. The ONS also reports that it includes a 14% rise in homicides and an 8% rise in knife crime, which equates to 110 knife offences daily. Murder and manslaughter are at their highest levels for more than a decade.

The Home Secretary sometimes tries to hide behind the fact that the rising figures are the result of better reporting and recording. That may be a factor for some types of crime, but the ONS says:

“We have also seen increases in some types of ‘lower-volume, high-harm’ violence including offences involving knives or sharp instruments.”

To look at the issue of violent crime from another perspective, there has been a 15% increase in the number of hospital admissions in England for assaults involving a sharp instrument. That is not better police recording; it is our A&E units across the country being swamped by the effects of serious violence. In fact, a report published by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary in 2014 found that violent offences had actually been substantially under-recorded by 33% nationally. We are in the middle of a crisis.

Behind the statistics are a thousand personal tragedies: the victims of violence; the people who have been robbed or attacked on the street; the innocent young men and women caught up in the crossfire in a club or on the street where they live; the vulnerable young people caught up in the drugs trade, and possibly the county lines phenomenon; the mothers who lie awake most nights until their son or daughter returns home; the parents who dread the phone call from the police or the hospital to tell them that a family member has come to harm; and the young men who will never come home again.

As the Home Secretary reminds us, almost a year ago his predecessor launched the new Home Office serious violence strategy. The strategy has many theoretical elements that the Opposition would support, but we contend whether the money made available for it actually offsets all the cuts in local government funding that have contributed to the crime wave we now see. I will return to that subject.

Ministers’ responses to violent crime have included calling for more stop-and-search, knife crime prevention orders and asking the internet companies to stop videos that glorify violence. All those ideas have their merits, but I stress to the House that random, non-evidence-based stop-and-search has never worked. Properly targeted stop-and-search can play its part in reducing crime but, in New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio got rid of what they call “stop and frisk” altogether and crime went down.

When she was Home Secretary, the current Prime Minister came to the realisation that random stop-and-search does not work, because that is what the Home Office’s own research reveals. The Opposition can only speculate on how long it will take the current Home Secretary to come to that understanding.

There were also concerns about knife crime prevention orders. We have to contemplate that, on the grounds purely of suspicion, people as young as 12 will be targeted, put on a curfew and prevented from accessing the internet. There are already laws against the carrying of knives, threatening to use them and actually using them, but there is a problem with enforcing those laws. That issue relates to police numbers and person power, and I will return to that point.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

The shadow Home Secretary is mentioning powers against knife crime and enforcing them. Does she believe it was wrong for the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Chancellor to oppose the change in legislation in 2014 that means anyone caught carrying a knife twice would face a custodial sentence?

[Ms Abbott]

The idea that the answer to knife crime is a simplistic multiplication of the sentence mistakes the drivers behind knife crime, which I will come to later in my remarks.

The new orders stopping young people from accessing the internet appear reasonable at first sight, but have Ministers never heard of young people creating multiple online identities? Labour Members have grave concerns about how these orders will be used, with the possibility that they will target poor communities, and black and minority ethnic boys and girls. We have yet to be given the reassurances that care will be taken to ensure that particular communities and groups of young people will not be unfairly targeted.

I agree with the Home Secretary that the internet giants have a role to play here in the type of material they allow, but, as he will know, that is true in respect of all sorts of crimes, from online fraud to child pornography and terrorism. All of that is too easy online, and the Government must do more than have a cosy chat with the companies that allow it. So I was glad to hear him say that he is actually prepared to act. It is long overdue for the Government to use their powers against companies that fail to act on these issues.

However, the underlying problem with violent crime is that there is also a crisis in policing. It is all very well for the Home Secretary to say that the police are having the biggest increase in grant since 2010, but this Government and their predecessors since 2010 have imposed austerity policies on the police, as they have done in every other area of our public services.

The result is there for all to see: since 2010, 21,000 policemen and women have been axed by Tory-led Governments of one kind or another. That has undermined the entire capacity of the police services in this country to tackle crime of all types, including violent crime. Community policing has been decimated. Every MP in this debate, on either side of the House, will know of the negative consequences that the fall in police numbers has had in their area: the lower police presence; the decimation of community policing; tardiness in responding to 999 calls, with them sometimes not getting replied to until the next day; and the resultant fall in public confidence.

The Home Secretary talks about increasing investment, but the cuts across almost every other area of public spending have helped to fuel the rise in crime, including the rise in violent crime. Those cuts, particularly as they fall on local authorities, have exacerbated the causes of crime. They include the crisis in housing, growing inequality, and the crisis in our schools, including school exclusions. Too many pupil referral units are just academies for crime.

A one-time director general of the Prison Service who went on to head Barnardo’s, Martin Narey, said that on the day when a child is expelled from school, we might as well give them a date and time to turn up at prison. Ministers have to pay more attention to this pipeline from educational failure—school failure—to the world of crime. The other issues that help to promote criminality are the hopeless job prospects for many of our young people, the collapse of the youth service in many areas of the country and the crisis in mental health care.

When we ask senior police officers, as I am sure the Home Secretary has done, they tell us, “You can’t arrest your way out of this”, and of course they are right. Rounding up whole drug gangs, as the police sometimes do, often means simply opening up turf wars as neighbouring gangs move into the vacant territory. Under this Government, the police cannot even make the arrests that they should be making, and arrest and conviction rates have plummeted.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, all our constituents engage with the question of violent crime with fear and concern. It is one thing to pay lip service to the causes of crime, including violent crime, as the Home Secretary did in his remarks, but the Opposition say that the rise in violent crime since 2010 is connected to the reluctance to give the police the funding they need to fight all types of crime. The violent crime epidemic that we face is at least partly to do with austerity, the policies of this Government and the funding of the police. The Opposition are committed, when the time comes, to taking serious, co-ordinated action to start to push back on this rise in toxic and frightening violent crime.

[Several hon. Members rose—]