Offensive Weapons Bill

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I must make some progress.

The order may impose such requirements or prohibitions on a person as a court considers necessary to protect any person from risk of harm or to prevent the commission of an offence involving a bladed article. A KCPO that imposes a requirement must specify a person who is responsible for supervising compliance with that requirement. Again, I emphasise that this is about protection and prevention. It is not about criminalising children. The order is a civil order. We do, however, accept that the breach of an order is, in itself, a criminal matter. I know that some have argued that it would be better to go down the antisocial behaviour injunction route, which applies to children as young as 10. The argument is that having a contempt of court rather than a criminal offence for a breach would make the orders more palatable, because it would mean that children did not get a criminal record. The advice from the police—it is advice that we must listen to very carefully—is that making it a criminal offence to breach an order is important if we want these orders to be taken seriously.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

May I congratulate my hon. Friend most sincerely on producing a much needed Bill? Acid, knives and certain firearms are issues that we absolutely need to crack down on. Does she agree that knife prevention orders are a good mechanism? It is becoming de rigueur in some of our cities for people to carry knives in self-defence, in case they might want to use them, which is totally the wrong culture. With these orders, the police will be able to warn youngsters that if they carry knives again, they will be subject to an order and could be subject to a criminal penalty if they breach it.

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend summarises the orders succinctly, and I thank him for all his work on the Bill. The point of the orders is to try to reach those children before they are in the criminal justice system. They include, for example, the ability to prohibit a child from accessing social media or entering certain postcodes, because we know the tensions arising on the streets from particular groups of young people in certain parts of our large cities. This is not about criminalising those young people; it is about trying to reach them.

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[Louise Haigh]

I would respectfully suggest that putting before Parliament orders that would criminalise children for up to two years requires more than discussion at a meeting. It requires full consultation and full parliamentary scrutiny, and none of that has happened.

Before Parliament approves any roll-out, the Government should release a report giving an explanation of what guidance has been given to authorities on the burden on proof, which is a civil standard, the impact of orders on the rights of children and the impact on different racial groups as defined in section 9 of the Equality Act 2010.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Does the hon. Lady not think it is a bit rich that she is complaining on the one hand about the Government introducing a full consultation on a whole range of firearms issues enshrined in statute under the Bill, and on the other hand that the Government have not consulted enough on knife crime prevention orders, which are suggested by the police and are a much-needed part of the armoury in the fight against knife crime?

[Louise Haigh]

The Government consulted on the ban on weapons ahead of the Bill and concluded, on the basis of evidence from the most senior counter-terror police in the country, that it was right to ban assault rifles. It was only in response to a Back-Bench rebellion led by the hon. Gentleman that the Government caved and made the exact opposite case to the one that they made on Second Reading.

These are very basic requests for what is, in truth, information that Parliament should already have when being asked to pass legislation. The parliamentary lock we are seeking to add to the orders should not be necessary, but we know the damage that can result from a lack of joined-up thinking in youth justice, and our communities simply cannot afford another misstep. That is why it is only right that parliamentarians are given the full facts before being asked to approve a further roll-out.

Turning to the content of the orders themselves, all of us in this place are united in our mission to do everything in our power to bear down on the terrible scourge of knife crime, but we must be wary of taking action for the sake of action. Interventions must be evidence-based, have a clear purpose and fill a gap in the existing legislation. The police already have a substantial suite of powers for those they suspect of possessing a knife. The issue is, and has been for several years, the ability and capacity of the police to enforce those powers. As the chair of the Police Federation has said,

“How the Home Secretary thinks we have the officers available to monitor teenagers’ social media use or check they are at home at 10pm when we are struggling to answer 999 calls is beyond me.”

This Government have taken 21,000 police officers off our streets. Response times have rocketed, and in some force areas residential burglaries are rarely attended. The police’s capacity to respond to crime has been extremely diminished, so it is beyond doubt that they do not have the capacity to place orders on people who have not actually committed a crime, and then to monitor and implement those orders effectively. There has been no impact assessment of the resource implications for the police or any of the other services that may be brought in by these orders. We are concerned, and this is what our amendments speak to, that in trying to establish so-called wraparound care for young people, these orders will inevitably end up focusing on the restrictive elements such as curfews, social media bans and prohibitions, rather than the potential for positive, rehabilitative action.

I think we have now reached consensus in this place that, to combat youth violence effectively, a whole-system, cross-governmental public health approach is required. These orders could have been an attempt to bridge such a divide, but instead they place sole responsibility on the police as the only authority that can apply for an order, which risks narrowing the focus of the suite of options available. The fact that there is no statutory requirement to assess the needs of a child, establish their circumstances and consider the safeguarding implications of an order or their family history prior to an order being granted should be fatal for a legislative proposal that the Government have styled as a route to access wraparound services. It simply does not do what is required. That is why our amendments would establish a statutory requirement to consult with the YOT to produce a pre-sentence report. However, we are satisfied with the Minister’s commitment that this will be made clear in guidance.

Furthermore, I wonder whether the Government, in using the example of a youth worker as someone to be responsible for the delivery of an order, recognise the bind they would be putting such an individual in if they were responsible for reporting any breaches to the police. Central to a public health approach is a consistent, constant adult in vulnerable young people’s lives. This could provide an opportunity for that, but it cannot do so if such individuals are then forced to report them to the criminal justice system every time they do not abide by the conditions laid down in their order.

I will round off with a number of questions to which I hope the Minister will respond when she speaks again. The civil burden of proof is concerning, so what sort of intelligence does the Minister envisage would be sufficient for a court to grant an order? Will the police use the gangs matrix to target individuals? Will association with known offenders be sufficient for an order to be placed? Will past offending be sufficient, as the Minister in the other place appeared to suggest?

Does the Minister share the concerns of Members across the House that we risk criminalising children as young as 12 who have not actually committed a criminal offence? Does she really believe that a two-year custodial sentence is proportionate to a breach of a civil order, and can she give an example of when such a sentence would be appropriate? What exactly can KCPOs require or prohibit? Will guidance be brought forward on what measures are effective in tackling knife crime, or will it be anything that the court deems necessary, proportionate and enforceable?

Finally, who will be required or allowed to know that a child has an order, and what action will their school or alternative provider be expected to take when one has been granted? The implications for alternative provision are potentially severe, as some providers refuse to take children who have knife convictions, leaving them completely out of education and therefore much more vulnerable to becoming involved in violence. What consideration has been given to this?

I do not think that the Minister has satisfactorily answered the concerns raised by the Opposition in our amendments or those of expert organisations that work on these issues every single day, such as the Magistrates Association and the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers. We will therefore divide the House on our amendment (a) to Lords amendment 23 in relation to the parliamentary lock, as the report that the Home Secretary brings forward must be voted on before the pilots can be rolled out.

I conclude by thanking and congratulating my right hon. and hon. Friends who have significantly improved the Bill and subjected it to scrutiny during its passage, especially my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield Central, for Sheffield South East, for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), for Birmingham, Edgbaston and for Slough. The amendments in our names have sought to strengthen and improve the weak legislation before us today. They have sought an evidence-based response to the long-term trend of violence that we are witnessing as a result of this Government’s austerity agenda. We hope that the Government will accept that much more needs to be done if we are to prevent any more young lives from being needlessly taken, and we hope that the Government will accept the amendments in our names today.

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[Huw Merriman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: this is about that care and intervention as well as having a deterrent. Of course there has to be a deterrent.

We must not overlook the fact that applications will have to be made by either the Crown Prosecution Service or a chief officer of police, and that the court will have to be satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that on at least two occasions in the previous two years the defendant had a bladed article in a public place or a place of education. That is not enough, either: if there has been a big conversion, that can be demonstrated, and the magistrates court must think it is necessary to make the order to protect the public from harm from a bladed article or, indeed, to protect the respondent from committing an offence.

We talk about locks; there is a series of locks in the magistrates courts, and we must trust our magistrates to look fairly and objectively at the evidence before putting in place an order, which I say will deter young people from causing a tragedy to themselves or other people. Only if that order is breached will we be talking about a custodial sentence. Orders will be reviewed if they are longer than 12 months, and they can be varied, too. To me, they make absolute sense.

I will conclude by explaining why I feel so passionately about this issue. We can talk about long-term interventions, but the reality for young people who carry knives is that one mistake leads to loss of life—either theirs or others’. The impacts of that are dramatic. In 2007, the number of knife crime-related homicides was high—it was 272. We —both Labour and Conservative Governments—brought it down to 186 in 2015. It has now risen to 285 killings in the last year, which is the highest since records began in 1946. Something has to be done, and done now.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I want to back up what my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) just said. In addition to the safeguards my hon. Friend has ably set out, there is the provision for under-18s that, before an order can be granted, a youth offending team has to be consulted, meaning they can be helped by experts not to reoffend.

[Huw Merriman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; YOTs will be consulted. I do not agree with the idea of having a more specific order, because that would tie the whole process up in knots, whereas this needs to be a fluid process. YOTs would indeed be consulted, and then appropriate adults—youth workers—would supervise any requirements under the order.

These interventions can help people turn their lives around. I spent five years working in a youth organisation that was trying to turn young people’s lives around and stop them making these mistakes. We helped with their education and encouraged them to put their energy into sports, performing arts, environmental projects, and so on—something that could turn them away from a life of crime and give them something more interesting, exciting and exacting to work on. That said, we have now regressed. Far too many young people are being attracted by gangs and carrying knives either because of the glamour or as protection. We need to do something now to turn that around and save lives.