Serious Violence

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

The first responsibility of any Government is, of course, to keep their citizens safe. Much of that responsibility in Scotland falls to the Scottish Government, and it is worth while discussing the Scottish experience with violent crime.

Serious violence is an emotive subject in this Chamber and across the country. The emotive nature of the subject has meant that politicians are too often pushed towards reactionary and populist “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” policies without properly addressing the latter sentiment. These mistakes can be made because politicians can too often play into the public's fears or can perhaps be consumed by their own base instincts. More often than not, taking this tough Daily Mail, Old Testament approach is the easy thing to do—it is simply the politically expedient thing to do.

As much as I understand this urge—I am a politician—I believe we can aspire to a criminal justice system that is more effective at reducing crime, as well as to a fairer justice system that encompasses a whole-system approach that sees violent crime for what it is: as a societal disease that can be treated, and as a crime that is all too often based in poverty and that can be, if not eradicated, then reduced with a rational, systematic and evidence-based approach. I am therefore convinced that the public health approach is the best strategy to deal with violent crime, particularly knife crime, which is rampant on the streets of London at the moment. That approach was outlined almost two decades ago by the World Health Organisation and first implemented in Scotland. Its adoption elsewhere has been slow. The public health approach recognises that we all have a collective responsibility to tackle violent crime. It is an approach that emphasises rigorous and objective methods, using knowledge from a range of fields. It pools the best practices from everything—economics to education, sociology to medicine, and every discipline in between. In essence, it takes the best we have to offer and turns it on the worst problem we have in justice—generational violence.

Where attempted, the public health approach has been proven beyond doubt to work. It saves lives and allows people to live a life where violent crime is a much smaller risk: it gives peace of mind as we go through days already fraught with worry. It leads to safer communities, better social cohesion, and better mental health and security. The only regret I have is that these steps were not taken far sooner.

Scotland took the first steps towards the public health approach in 2005 when Strathclyde police launched a holistic public heath strategy. This strategy resulted in the creation of the violence reduction unit which has led the way in bringing Scotland to the lowest recorded crime rates in 40 years. The VRU goes by a simple, but powerful motto:

“Violence is preventable, not inevitable.”

Strathclyde Police was the only police force in the world, at the time, to adopt the public health approach and it is now a national centre of expertise on violence and visited by many UK Government Ministers. Since it was founded, it has led the way in good policy deliverance which is making a real positive impact on people’s lives and our communities across Scotland.

In 2005, violent crime in Scotland was at epidemic levels, and Glasgow was infamously crowned by the World Health Organisation as the murder capital of Europe. It was the same year that the United Nations called Scotland the most violent country in the developed world. The VRU carried out its own analysis and it showed that the areas where violence was most out of control were the most deprived: they had the highest rates of addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide, and domestic abuse, the latter of which I will come on to address.

The Scottish Government provided the VRU with £12 million and has supported violence reduction and prevention programs such as Medics Against Violence, which targets young people who are at risk of being killed or becoming victims of serious life-changing injuries. Health volunteers are used to deliver education sessions in high schools focused on talking to young people about the consequences of violence and how to keep themselves safe. The Mentors in Violence Prevention Programme is another initiative by the Scottish Government which aims to empower young people to challenge and speak out against violent and abusive behaviour.

Fast forward to today, and Scotland has been recognised by the World Economic Forum as a leader in violence reduction. Indeed, the UK Government have praised the approach that the Scottish Government have taken. Moreover, I have been heartened by the recent proactive, perceptive and progressive approach taken by Ministers in the Ministry of Justice and, to an extent, the Home Office. I wish them luck in advancing this approach in politically sensitive areas, such as the presumption against short sentences. Just last week, the chief executive of Community Justice Scotland, Karyn McCluskey, who helped to set up the VRU, met the Justice Committee to outline Scotland’s approach in this area, our successes, our failures and our future challenges.

[Douglas Ross]

The hon. Gentleman mentions future challenges. Does he think it is correct that someone in Scotland could be punched, kicked or even hit with a weapon and it would not be considered a violent crime? If we are going to truly assess this issue, we have to get the criteria correct for what is and what is not a violent crime.

[Gavin Newlands]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am by no means a policing expert, and obviously such crimes are recorded differently across jurisdictions. The fact is, however, that violent crime in Scotland has reduced by 49%, as has been recognised by his colleagues in the Scottish Parliament: Liam Kerr said that we have to recognise that Scotland has turned the corner when it comes to violent crime.

Good policy and effective policing strategy should not be controversial, which is why I am glad that similar initiatives have begun to be rolled out, such as the London violence reduction unit announced by Mayor Sadiq Khan.

In addition, the Scottish Government continue to provide real-terms protection to the resource budget for policing and have committed to protecting that budget for every year of the current Session of the Scottish Parliament. That amounts to a significant increase in investment of £100 million by 2021. As of April last year, the SNP has ensured that the police will also fully benefit from being able to reclaim VAT of around £25 million a year, which for far too long was stolen and kept by the Treasury here in Westminster. [Interruption.] I hear chuntering from the Government Benches that we knew it from the start, but the Scottish Conservatives also knew it from the start, yet it was in their manifesto too.

In England and Wales there are now 21,000 fewer police officers than there were in 2010, which makes it the lowest number since comparable records began. Those figures mean a decrease of nearly 15% from the previous nine years. However, I do not want to be complacent, and I stress that there is still plenty of room for improvement, but Scotland is becoming a much safer country thanks to the public health approach.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the White Ribbon Campaign, I draw particular attention to the importance that domestic violence plays in a public health approach to violence. This is an area where we have much further to go, both north of the border and across the rest of the UK. Gender-based violence is a national shame in every part of the UK. In 2016-17 there were nearly 59,000 reported cases of domestic abuse in Scotland, and in nearly 80% of those cases women were the victims. Although the way the data is collected can differ between countries, it is demonstrably higher than in similar small European nations such as the Republic of Ireland.

Domestic abuse clearly has a serious effect on the mental health and development of future generations. Around 16% of adverse childhood experiences are caused by witnessing domestic violence in the household. The vast majority of this, of course, is perpetrated by men against women. That is the largest contributor to ACEs of any household environmental factors. Compared with someone with no ACEs, someone with four or more is more likely to experience a range of negative outcomes in adulthood. For example, they are 16 times more likely to perpetrate violence, and 20 times more likely to be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime.

The Scottish Government are taking action to reduce domestic violence in households through an increase in health visitor numbers and the roll-out of family nurse partnerships, and through targeted investment in projects and services that support parents and families to cope better, keep children safe and prevent children from going into care. Although that falls outwith the Scottish Government’s policing strategy, it is steps like this that help people participate in society, tackle serious violence at its root cause and stop the cycle of violence perpetuating itself on and on.

In conclusion, the most compelling stories are the ones that are true. Over the past decade we have seen Scotland go from being called the murder capital of Europe to being the safest nation on these islands in which to live. I fear that in many crucial ways the serious violence strategy for England and Wales was a missed opportunity to tackle the problem in a completely objective and holistic manner, as we have done in Scotland. I implore Members across the House to see violence for what it is: a resilient societal disease. Although the symptoms must be appropriately punished, the root causes also deserve to be treated. We can no longer waste time and human energy trying to deal with the symptoms of generational violence.

While Scotland is enjoying lows in recorded crime that have not been seen for decades, violent crime in England and Wales is rising to deeply worrying levels. Thanks to the Scottish Government, and particularly the violence reduction unit, Scotland is becoming a safer country. I urge that a similar approach be tried and tested across the rest of the UK so that we may learn from each other. We need to understand better why violence happens, we need to be as objective as possible in tackling it, and we need to be mindful of the many forms that it comes in. We need an all-encompassing public health approach to violent crime.