Knife Crime in London

Debate between Jas Athwal and Luke Taylor

Wednesday 12th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor]

I fully agree. The community-based approaches that I will come to later in my speech recognise that point.

I intend today to state the case that a false premise has been advanced; that successive Governments have failed to invest enough in a whole-of-society approach to reducing knife crime and young people are dying as a result; and that if we are to have any hope of getting a grip on the crisis, we must get serious about a public health approach and the restoration of true, old-fashioned community policing.

The pillars of such an approach are threefold. First, we must reinvigorate visible policing by restoring police budgets and get more beats, not just more bobbies. Secondly, we must rescue the early intervention space, protect it from short-termism and ensure that it has the resource it needs. Thirdly, we must get serious about incorporating a public health approach, with greater cohesion between civil society institutions, and willingness to try community and victim-led solutions such as restorative justice.

Let us start with restoring community policing. The data shows that the number of police community support officers in the Metropolitan police force declined from 4,247 in 2008 to a mere 1,215 in 2023. That failure, which occurred on the watch of consecutive mayors from both main parties, highlights the scale of the crisis.

[Jas Athwal (Ilford South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate on such an important topic. Everyone deserves to feel safe, yet over the last 14 years we have seen police numbers being decimated. In the borough that encompasses my constituency of Ilford South, we used to have five police stations. Now, there is only one, for four constituencies. What we have tried to do is to bring engagement and enforcement hubs into the community. Does the hon. Member agree with me that bringing police into the communities they serve is a vital part of keeping our communities safe and of restoring pride in the police?

[Luke Taylor]

I could not agree more. I was interested to hear the hon. Member’s speech the other day about including council enforcement officers in these hubs, too. Having them present in the community and accessible to residents is incredibly important. I am keen to have a conversation with him about the measures that he has achieved.

To follow exactly the point the hon. Member just made, at the time when we should be getting more police embedded in communities to halt knife crime, we have instead let numbers crater. We know that research consistently shows violent crime dropping significantly in areas where the police are present, visible and proactive.

In December 2023, when, tragically, a knife cut short the life of a young man in my constituency, Ilyas Habibi, who was just 17, he was just minutes away from a local police station. Just as worrying is that the fact that in my constituency and across London, we see safer neighbourhood officers being abstracted from their beats—a quirk of the Met police set-up that results in vital officers who should be on our streets, making our neighbourhoods safer, being pulled away for major police operational events, typically in central London. It is, in effect, robbing outer London to pay inner London and it has to stop. These officers want to be doing great work in the community, but the failure to recruit across the Met is letting them and, by extension, us down.

There can be no doubt that recruiting into the Met is challenging. The Casey report outlined the scale of the failures that have occurred in recent years far better than any of us can—the failures to get a grip on damaging internal cultures, to protect the victims of crime, and overall to carry the confidence of the very communities they serve. I have met Commissioner Rowley and I acknowledge his undertakings to reform the Met. Nobody in this place can pretend that his role is easy; we must recognise that he needs the full backing of Government to reinvigorate the force and repair its image.

As yesterday’s ruling on vetting clearance and dismissals shows, the hurdles in front of these reforms are immense, and the single greatest tool to smash through those hurdles is the powers that the Secretary of State holds. To bolster a new Met for London and drive knife crime down, it should be a priority of this Government to expedite the reforms we all know the Met needs. Without these reforms, how can we expect recruitment to bounce back? I urge the Minister to today outline what steps the Government are taking to get back to proper community policing, to work with the Metropolitan police to reduce abstraction rates, and to support Commissioner Rowley as he embarks on his package of reforms.

We cannot look to policing alone, though. The whole-of-society approach that is so desperately needed will require an “it takes a village” attitude, and requires a Government committed to supporting early intervention initiatives. A key first step is diversionary programmes, which we know can cut out knife crime before it can metastasise across our streets. The targeted early help and integrated support teams at Sutton borough council do excellent work with young people in my constituency. Their approach is targeted; once a potential young offender reprimanded by the police is brought to their attention, they work tirelessly to build positive relationships with the child to stop the otherwise steady and depressing downward spiral into criminality. It is vital to remember that these schemes offer opportunities to young people who are often not afforded the luxury of such attention elsewhere in their lives.

In London, these intervention programmes rely heavily on grants from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the Ministry of Justice and the violence reduction unit, but youth services across London often face uncertainty about how and when these grants will be allocated. The team we spoke to at Sutton council is still waiting to see if its grant will be approved for March, which is only a few weeks’ time. In addition, these grants are typically only allocated for 18-month to two-year periods, leaving little space for local authorities to plan ahead.

All the evidence shows that young people susceptible to committing this form of violence require sustained relationships with skilled youth workers to help them to choose safer paths. Such a relationship can take months to form, but it acts as a critical antidote to the peer pressure and social circumstances that are otherwise weighing on the child. It is therefore utterly misguided to continue with this short-termism. Skilled youth workers are deterred from engaging in local authority work due to temporary contract conditions and the lingering threat of grant termination, which could see the shattering of crucial relationships between London’s youth workers and young people at risk of committing knife-related offences. I am therefore keen to hear from the Minister whether she will consider ringfencing funding for local authority early intervention services in London. Without multi-year funding to improve planning and put these services on a more stable footing, this vital first step in preventing knife crime will fall by the wayside.

Backing early intervention is just one of the arrows in the quiver of a wider approach that we must shift to. Young people will continue to die if we do not take heed of our Scottish counterparts and finally embrace a public health approach. Famously, Glasgow took thousands of knives off the streets, and rallied organisations at every level to intervene before a crime was committed. That approach breaks down the silo walls between bodies, putting teachers, A&E doctors, social workers, sports clubs and many more stakeholders in partnership with law enforcement.