Public Health Model to Reduce Youth Violence

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

It is as though the hon. Lady had my speech in front of her, because I am just about to move on to the further work that we have announced in recent months. Of course, having positive role models is key, particularly for young people with the biggest set of vulnerabilities, who perhaps do not have someone at home on whom they can rely. That may be because their home lives are difficult and chaotic, for reasons that we have heard about earlier in the debate. There is already a programme of work: the Home Office supports charities such as Safer London and the St Giles Trust to do innovative work to try to reach and then keep hold of the young people who most need their help.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am not going to, I am afraid, because I must make progress.

It has been a great pleasure for me, as part of my role, to meet youth workers and discover what they think will most help their young people. We in the Government are then in a position to help them in their work.

On 2 October, the Home Secretary announced additional major new measures to tackle violent crime. First, he announced a consultation on a new legal duty to underpin a public health approach to tackling serious violence. This would mean that police officers, education partners, local authority and healthcare professionals would have a new legal duty to take action and prevent violent crime, and fundamentally support our public health approach. The consultation will be a fundamental change in our approach—indeed, it will go further than the often-given example of Glasgow—and I will be very interested to see the results.

Secondly, the Home Secretary announced a new £200 million youth endowment fund, which will be delivered over 10 years and will support interventions with children and young people who are at risk of involvement in crime and violence. It will focus on those who are most at risk, such as those who display signs of truancy, aggression and involvement in antisocial behaviour. It will fund interventions to steer children and young people away from becoming serious offenders. Because we are delivering this £200 million over 10 years, it will provide longer-term certainty to those organisations that are helped through the fund, so that they can develop their programmes.

Thirdly, the Home Secretary announced the independent review of drug misuse, which will ensure that law-enforcement agencies are targeting and preventing the drug-related causes of violent crime effectively. Drugs have been identified as a major driver of serious violence. The review will consider recreational drug use, as well as use by the smaller number of users who cause the most harm to themselves and their communities.

Let me be clear: tackling serious violence is a top priority for the Government. The approach set out in the serious violence strategy, with a greater emphasis on early intervention, will address violent crime and help young people to develop the skills and resilience to live happy and productive lives away from violence. But we cannot deliver that alone, which is why we are supporting a multi-agency public health approach to tackling the issue and investing heavily in tackling the root causes of the problem and consulting on further measures to underpin the public health approach, to ensure that everyone is working collectively to stop this violence.

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[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

At the beginning of November, a 15-year-old child, Jay Hughes, was murdered in Bellingham in my constituency. Less than 72 hours on from that tragic event, a 22-year-old, Ayodeji Habeeb Azeez, was murdered in Anerley, just a year on from the murder of teenager Michael Jonas, which shocked the community back in 2017. These murders have utterly shaken our community, and constituents have expressed to me their fear for their family’s safety. No parent should have to harbour such concerns. No family should have to lose their child to violent crime. Similarly, no young person should be so bereft of opportunity and aspiration that they feel that violent crime is a path to follow. But this is the situation that we find ourselves in.

We are in the midst of a youth violence crisis. I will turn to the causes, but before that, I want to say how heartened I have been by the community’s response in Lewisham West and Penge. In the face of such tragic circumstances, they have shown strength and determination to bring our communities closer. I mention not least the work of the Bellingham community project, Youth First, the local police, Elfrida and Athelney primary schools in Bellingham, and Stewart Fleming Primary School and the Samos Road community in Anerley.

But as much as the community has worked to rebuild what has been lost, they cannot do this on their own. Tackling youth violence requires work from an array of public services in co-operation with our communities. Sadly, ever since 2010 we have seen some of the most devastating cuts made to our public services, especially the Metropolitan police, which has faced £1 billion of cuts since 2010, with further savings to be found over the next few years. As a result, we have seen the loss of 30% of police staff and 65% of police community support officers. Our police do a fantastic job, but in the wards that I represent, we have, at most, two ward officers and one PCSO per ward. They are fantastic, but they are overstretched. It is inevitable that with reduced police visibility and presence in our neighbourhoods, relationships with communities deteriorate, trust is eroded, and opportunities for crime arise. The Met urgently needs more funding so that it can work to prevent crime rather than just reacting to it. However, youth violence is not just a question of police funding and enforcement. The causes are extremely complex and involve societal problems such as poverty, adverse childhood experiences and lack of opportunity.

Tackling youth violence therefore requires a public health approach, which means addressing the environments that make people vulnerable to the risk of crime. We have talked about the example of Glasgow, where the violence reduction unit teamed up with agencies in the fields of health, education and social work, and the police force became the first in the world to adopt a public health approach. As a result, recorded crime in Scotland is now at a 40-year low. There are lessons to be learned from that, but it will work only if we join up health, education, youth services, housing, the Home Office and the justice system. Yet all those departments have been cut as part of the Government’s austerity agenda.

For example, the Government spend less than 1% of the NHS budget on children’s mental health, with many children waiting many months for treatment and often being turned away for not meeting the threshold. In the case of education, schools in my constituency tell me that they can identify children who are vulnerable from as young as three years old, because they may have older siblings or other family members in gangs. That is the point at which intervention is really needed, but schools can barely afford to go on as they are, so intervening to carry out that sort of work becomes increasingly difficult. Similarly, we have seen Sure Start centres have their budgets cut, and the loss of things like youth clubs and youth projects across the country.

The Minister mentioned St Giles Trust in her opening remarks, and I pay tribute to it for the work that it does. It was running a fantastic county lines pilot project down in Kent for six months, but then the funding from the Home Office dried up. That is the reality of the situation that we are working in. These projects need funding in order to carry on doing their work. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) for the work that she has done on the Youth Violence Commission—she has campaigned on this issue tirelessly—and also to the Mayor of London, who, despite restricted budgets, has launched the youth violence reduction unit. Such agencies desperately need money so that they can carry out this vital work.

We cannot bring back those we have already lost, but we can take action to prevent more from losing their lives. We can help prevent our vulnerable young people from turning to crime, and we can offer them aspiration and a stake in our society. What is needed is the funding and the political will.