Tackling Knife Crime

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

I am sure that hon. Members are aware that social distancing is no longer in operation, but I would like to remind them that the Speaker has encouraged us, where possible, to wear facemasks when not speaking. I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the hybrid arrangements. Timings of debates have been amended to allow technical arrangements to be made for the next debate. There will also be suspensions between debates.

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There are no Members sitting in the Public Gallery, and there are four speakers for this debate. Before I call the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) to move the motion, may I suggest that I intend to call the Scottish National party spokesperson at around 3.20 pm? We do have lots of time and I do not think I need to impose a time limit at any point, but that is the time at which I would like to call the first Opposition spokesperson. I call Sarah Owen.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

As well as prevention, at some point, we need to think about wrapping our arms around those people. I do not think that knife crime prevention orders are the answer, but they are being piloted. [Interruption.] The Minister talks about them from a sedentary position. He announced them with great fanfare in the middle of the knife-crime panic a couple of years ago, but nothing has actually happened yet. They are being piloted now, two years after they were talked about as the answer to everything. I am just saying that we need to have a conversation about the pathway and about exactly what happens to young people when they come to the attention of the police.

As I said in the Chamber last week, our summer holidays should be full of opportunities, including youth work, mentorship programmes, sports clubs, mental health support, as well as good neighbourhood policing, of course. In the medium term, we need proper wraparound support for at-risk children, including different housing when it is needed—moving people away from the area where they are susceptible to violence is a huge issue—people to talk to, mentoring, and proper youth services. In the longer term, we need to completely change the way that we tackle violence. The Government need to do more work in schools to better detect, prevent and eliminate violence, and they need to work with the NHS to properly treat the epidemic and immunise our society.

Under this Government, criminals are getting away with it, pathways to crime are wide open, and our children are being exploited by criminal thugs and groomed into violence. Our justice system is not taking the right response, and our Government are not taking the problem seriously. My question to the Minister is: where is the emergency summer plan to stop our children fighting and murdering one another over the summer holidays, and how does he plan to stop riots over the summer? Knife crime prevention orders have not been piloted yet; the education recovery plan is one tenth of what it needs to be; the Youth Endowment Fund is spread super-thin over 20 years; and the summer activities fund amounts to pennies per child. We need action. The scale of the problem needs to be matched by a proper response, because at the moment, drug use is rising, crime is rising, and the Government have no summer plan.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Minister, it is your opportunity. You have lots of issues to respond to.