Helen Hayes
Main Page: Helen Hayes (Labour - Dulwich and West Norwood)Department Debates - View all Helen Hayes's debates with the Home Office
(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)
I would like to place on the record my thanks to the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) for her courage in speaking about her personal experience.
We have heard a lot about how this should not be a political debate, but I am afraid that the choices made have been very political. “London highlights what Labour can do in power”—not my words, but those of the Labour leader in a rare moment of consistency. For once, I agree with him. Just look at the regional crime data and at the data specifically for our capital city, London. The only “PC” Londoners are likely to come across is political correctness. The two areas where knife crime has risen the most, London and the west midlands, both have a Labour police and crime commissioner in charge. If those two areas are taken out of the national figures, they show that across the country knife crime actually fell last year, proving yet again that the shadow Front Benchers need to get their own house in order before preaching to others.
“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”—empty words that we have heard Labour politician after Labour politician parrot for the last 30 years. But when they were in power, those words from the pound-shop Blairites could not have been further from reality. For all the playground politics of this place, we must remember that these failures have real-life consequences for both the victims of crime and our communities.
When I was growing up in Bexley, one of London’s suburbs, life was always relatively safe, with Bexley consistently ranked in London’s top five safest boroughs. Issues such as knife crime and gang crime were viewed as a distant inner-city issue, which many families, including my own, thought they had left behind when they chose a better life for their children in Conservative-run Bexley. Fast-forward to today, and while Conservative-run Bexley is still one of the safest boroughs in London, with a crime rate approximately a third lower than that of the rest of London, fears about knife and gang crime on our doorstep are very real. Several serious incidents have tragically taken place in my constituency in recent months, and my thoughts remain with all those families, and those across London, who have lost loved ones.
The latest crime rate data highlights the fact that violent crime has been on a consistently upward trend since Sadiq Khan became Mayor, and tragically Bexley is not immune from Labour’s shameful record in London over the past eight years, which has seen more than 1,000 people killed. Life after life has been destroyed by the scourge of knife crime in London, with Londoners let down time and again by politicians in this place who are not brave enough to openly back effective policing measures such as stop and search, which take an average of 400 dangerous weapons off the streets each month. The Labour spokesman could not even bring himself to mention stop and search today. Let us not forget that it was this Labour Mayor of London who openly pledged to
“do all in my power to further cut”
the use of stop and search.
Mr French
Now look at the state of London after eight years of Sadiq Khan’s politically correct policing. Just look at the data. In London, we have seen a 54% increase in knife crime since Labour took office. According to the Met’s official data, the number of stop and searches carried out in 2023 was 18.9% lower than it had been in the previous 12 months, and at the same time knife crime offences rose by 17.1%.
Mr French
Before anyone accuses me of stoking a culture war—which, as we all know, is the left’s new buzzword to try to shut down critical debates about their woke ideas—let me also point out that the official data shows that white people were the most searched ethnic group in this period: 10,000 more over a two-year period. That is why I make no apology for my support for frontline officers using the likes of stop and search to help take dangerous knives off the streets, and why I back this Government to close the legal loopholes on zombie knives and to roll out scan-and-search technologies as quickly as possible. As politicians, we should all be showing real leadership in this place and doing the same.
Mr French
The public have rightly had enough of empty gesture politics and warm words from politicians when yet another life is unnecessarily taken. They want action. They want their political leaders to get a grip on crime and make all our communities safer again. In London, the need to get a grip on crime and get back to basic policing could not be clearer. Not only are the Metropolitan police in special measures, but their leadership now faces a confidence crisis, from the perspective of both the public and many serving frontline police officers. Morale in the Met has arguably never been lower. It is little wonder, when decent, hard-working frontline officers feel that time and again they do not have the backing of the Mayor and their leaders to do the dangerous job of being a police officer in London, whether that means using stop and search to take dangerous knives off the streets, or specially trained firearms officers still having the confidence to pull the trigger in those split-second life-or-death moments when they guard us in places like this.
I am genuinely sad to say that I was not surprised to learn that the Met was the only force in the country that had failed to hit its recruitment target, despite millions of pounds in support being provided directly by the Government. That is yet another failure on the part of the Labour Mayor and police and crime commissioner, and one that has cost London more than 1,000 police officers—1,000 extra police officers could be walking the beat, actually attending burglaries or helping to stop what feels like a never-ending rise in knife crime. Seriously, what chance do ordinary Londoners have when criminal gangs roam the streets of London targeting their next victims, with the only questions normally being whether a watch, a car or a phone has been stolen this time, and whether the police will even bother to investigate the crime?
True to form—and this is what Labour Members are trying to do here today—the Labour Mayor of London continues to deflect all of these failures on to the Government, rather than taking any accountability as the police and crime commissioner for London. In fact, I understand that the Office for Statistics Regulation recently had to correct Sadiq Khan’s misinformation on knife crime, stating that it had “significantly increased across” his tenure and not declined, as he had claimed.
Quick to plead poverty at every opportunity, the Mayor always manages to find money for his mates or money to waste on his latest pet projects rather than more funding for frontline policing. All that is paid for, of course, from the wallets of Londoners, including a staggering £200 increase in the Mayor’s share of council tax and his continued hammering of motorists across London. And look how he spends taxpayers’ hard-earned money, with £30 million for his union mates despite a record number of strikes—
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
On 6 January, two people were convicted of the murder of Kalabe Legesse, a 29-year-old young man who was stabbed on 30 December 2022 in Peckham Rye park, in the neighbouring constituency to mine, while being robbed of his mobile phone. Kalabe was my constituent. He was a graduate, the oldest son in his family and very much loved by everyone who knew him. Kalabe was killed by a single stab wound to the heart with a large hunting knife, which was later found at the home of one of his attackers.
On Monday 4 September, I stood at the police line on the Angell Town estate, in my constituency, following the murder of 21-year-old Ronaldo Scott with a huge knife in broad daylight. On 3 October, I stood at the police line on Coldharbour Lane following the murder of another young man, whom I cannot name because of legal proceedings. Again, he had been murdered with a huge knife. Just last Monday, another stabbing took place. This time, it was of a 19-year-old and it happened on the Kingswood estate—thankfully, he survived his injuries. Each time such horrific events take place, a family has its heart ripped out and the wider community are devastated and traumatised. Young people are left terrified to leave their home, and parents are left feeling fearful each moment that their child is out of their sight. Knife crime extinguishes lives, but it also snuffs out hope, aspiration and any sense of a better future.
Knife crime is not inevitable. It is not a normal part of life that we should accept just happens in some places—it is not acceptable. It is not unsolvable. It has been allowed to spiral under this Government because of the political choices they have made: the political choice to make local authorities bear the brunt of austerity, with the resources that funded youth work, early help and support for families, Sure Start centres, play equipment and community centres stripped away year after year for more than a decade: the political choice to take £1 billion out of the budget for the Metropolitan Police Service, decimating neighbourhood policing, the bedrock of good police-community relations, and damaging the trust and confidence of communities in policing; and the political choice to do literally nothing about the growth in the use of the most dangerous bladed weapons—zombie knives, machetes and ninja swords—despite promising to do so since 2016. The Government have repeatedly said that they would do so “when parliamentary time allows”, as if they were not the same Government who have control over the allocation of parliamentary time and can choose to prioritise whatever issues they like.
This Government have chosen not to prioritise taking the most dangerous weapons off our streets. The clinical director of King’s College Hospital’s emergency department has described these weapons to me as “'weapons of war”, capable of inflicting horrific injuries, breaking bones, slicing through internal organs and often leaving victims with no chance of survival and leaving those who do survive with life-changing consequences. The ban the Government have now announced is partial and has significant loopholes.
The appalling losses we have seen in my constituency have led to some exceptional work to tackle serious violence. I want to pay particular tribute to Ecosystem Coldharbour, which is funded by the Mayor of London’s violence reduction unit’s MyEnds programme. Ecosystem brings together a number of trusted local organisations that work with young people and families. For the past three years, they have been delivering a range of positive activities for young people to help them pursue their ambitions; trauma support for people affected by serious violence; and grant funding for a range of smaller community organisations to be able to deliver targeted interventions.
That includes an extraordinary group of women who go by the name of Circle of Life Ignite, all of whom have lost a child to knife crime. They are campaigning, in memory of the children they have lost, to install bleed-stop kits to provide the emergency intervention that is needed when a stabbing happens. I have no words to express the courage of women who are turning their own tragedies into hope so that other victims do not have to do. Ecosystem is showing how serious violence can be tackled at a community level, and that is the approach that the next Labour government will implement across the country.
Young Futures partnerships will bring community organisations together with local councils, the police, youth justice services and others to provide targeted support to young people at risk of serious violence. We will ensure that mental health support is available for young people in every community in the country. We will close the loopholes in the partial, piecemeal ban on large knives that the Government have announced. We will act where the Conservatives have failed.
I want to give the last word to a young constituent named Joshua Eyakware, who wrote the following poem about the work of Ecosystem:
“See in the ecosystem, we show the young people that there’s a better way,
Give them the tools to succeed and make a better place,
Just give them the space to grow to learn and to feel free,
And show them peace and happiness are what they can achieve.
So, let’s celebrate our young people, because they’re our future,
Our next leaders and heroes so let’s make them feel super,
to give them a better life let’s give them love and our time,
and one day the darkness will fade because we taught them how to shine.”
That work in our communities is having an impact and is genuinely transformative, but those in my community who work to tackle serious violence, and those across the country who do the same, need more leadership and support from central Government. That is the leadership that a Labour Government will provide. We need a general election so that it can be delivered.