Tackling Knife Crime

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) for setting the scene so well, and I associate myself with all her comments. As I always do, I am trying to put myself in the hon. Lady’s position in relation to her constituent, and I would have found it very hard to deal with that situation. It is never easy.

This is a topic that I feel we have been discussing and debating for years and, sadly, it seems to be an ongoing issue, with crime figures still on the higher side and continuous calls for the Government to act. I am of a certain age, and I was a member of the boy scouts. I remember well that we each had a small penknife. What did we use them for? To make bows and arrows, to carve sticks and for all the innocent purposes a boy scout would. Today, however, in the society we live in, things are very different.

I want to go back to basics and ask why knife crime is such an issue to begin with. Knife crime is a complex social problem, as hon. Members have said when they have spoken about the issues in their own constituencies. It is a symptom of toxic environments that are created around younger children. Socialised by their peers from a young age, these children grow up to become the perpetrators of such violence. Knife crime figures may be higher in certain sections of the United Kingdom, but such crime impacts on all regions of the United Kingdom, including back home in Northern Ireland.

I will give an example. I told you this story at the table last night, Mr Paisley, and I told it to the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) beforehand. My son is the manager of a shop in Newtownards. I met him on a Monday morning when I went to collect the paper as usual, but he was outside and the shutter was down. I asked, “Jimmy, what’s wrong?”, and he said, “Dad, I was robbed last night at five to 10.”

The guy who came to rob him had a long-handled fish-knife, and in all honesty he was probably spaced out. Jimmy said to him, “Look, the tills are cleared. We clear them early. All we have here is the £50 float.” The man pushed by him with the knife, and Jimmy said, “If you want the float, take the float; don’t stab me. Take the two bottles of Buckfast and move on.”

As I said to the hon. Lady beforehand, in this case, the better part of valour was to do nothing. It is not as if Jimmy is not courageous or does not stand up for himself; he was also a manager of a shop in a different part of Northern Ireland and he got to know people like that quite well. On other occasions, when he knew who the people were and they tried to rob him but they did not have knives, he took them on. In many cases, the police were called to arrest them.

The point I am making is: why do these people use knives? The knife this man had was a large fish-knife. We have a fishing community in our area; did the knife come from there? Those knives are incredibly sharp. One wrong move, and we could be looking at a very different situation. The point is that it is not just a problem in the constituencies of the hon. Members for Luton North, for Lewisham East, for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), and for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson). It is a problem across the whole of the United Kingdom, and it is particularly worrying. It is worrying because a person can get a knife from their kitchen. They can take one from their job down in the fishing ports in Portavogie. They can lift one up in a shop, or from the hardware shop two or three doors up. That is how easy it is.

Recent police recorded crime figures published by the Office for National Statistics show a 2% increase in the number of knife offences recorded: from 35,146 in the year ending March 2019 to 35,815 in the year ending March 2020. It has continued to increase since 2013. I am looking to the Minister—I am not being critical, by the way, and I always try to be constructive in my comments—but the frustration is, how do we stop this crime? That is the question we are all asking. How can we stop it happening? I look to the Minister in the hope that he will give us some encouragement. I know that the Government are doing lots of things; I always like to give credit where credit is due. They have lots of strategies and policies, but I want to put forward something for down the line, which I hope the Minister, in conjunction with other Ministers, will take on board.

We have proof that current ways, means and legislation are not working. I say that really respectfully. Across mainland England there is an increasingly concerning issue with knife crime in schools. In 2019, 45,000 young people aged 10 to 17 were sentenced for carrying a knife or offensive weapon, with more than 1,000 of these weapons found on school property. In my day, school was always a safe place to be. We have to ask how we can make it the safe place that it was before. Every one of us today wants to make sure that that can happen again. Why do they carry knives? I cannot fathom why they do. If they carry one, the use of it is not too far away. It is easy to pull it out and then the inevitable can happen. We want to stop that.

The police recorded 275 murders involving a knife or sharp object in the 12 months between April 2019 and April 2020; 23 were children under 17 years of age. Why are under-17s being stabbed to their deaths, and what further action can we take to stop that from happening? The Ben Kinsella Trust, a leading charity in tackling knife crime, has also revealed that from April 2020 to July 2020 there was a 54% increase in hospital admissions for those who were victims of knife crimes. What discussions has the Government had with the Ben Kinsella Trust? There are charities working on the frontline. They must know the symptoms and must have an idea of how to respond to try to control it.

As a possible way forward, there should be more mandatory resources available, particularly for young people, where the danger of knife crime is brought to light. If it happens in a certain area and if it happens on a regular basis, we need to put resources and time into trying to address the issues. All too often, children are blamed and stereotyped for societal issues surrounding knife crime, but the bigger picture is not evaluated. It is all very well to sometimes point the finger without looking at the source of why the problems happen.

For example, I stated earlier that these situations are created around younger children. Ultimately, it can be said that they do not know any better. In some cases, they might not, but they have to be taught what it means to carry a knife. Growing up, we were all taught to do as we were told and to obey our elders. Again, that is a generational thing. I think a lot of us will subscribe to that. Can we really place full blame on the young people?

I believe there is a partnership for the Minister on schooling and education; I hope we get an assurance on that when he replies. This is a crucial element in the debate. It is critical. It is not just the responsibility of the Minster here today; it is the education Minister’s, too. A partnership of the two together could try to address the issue.

Schools are a safe place for children, and the correct facilities should be in place to reassure them that they can talk about issues surrounding knife crime. How do we do that? We need to have teachers available to engage with children and look out for them. I am not saying that they are not doing that; teachers are very responsive to their pupils. However, if young people are worried about getting mixed up with the wrong crowds, support needs to be available.

If a pupil tells a teacher that their friend carries whatever it may be, we need to be able to respond, to take that pupil away and to address the issue for their friend. I therefore call again on the Secretary of State for Education—it is not the responsibility of the Minister—to ensure that schools in England have the funding to add that support for children, so that partnership between schooling and policing can work successfully.

I would also like to mention the relationship between local communities and our policing systems across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We need to focus on maintaining a steady and trusting relationship between the two. It is really important that local communities and the police come together—another partnership—to work out how we can provide safety for our young people, as opposed to provoking violence and hatred.

The hon. Member for Luton North referred to the “Bin Your Blade” campaign, and I commend her for supporting it. I hope that it encourages people to come forward, discard weapons and seek help to become better people. It is the second time today that the hon. Lady and I have been in a debate: we did the first one this morning, we are doing another this afternoon. These are important issues that we are dealing with on behalf of our constituents.

There is no time for complacency when it comes to any crime, but especially when it is a crime that is killing hundreds of our young people. It cannot go on. When I read about cases in the press or see them on the TV, I do not know the cases, but I always see the pictures and they tell me about a family that is devastated because their loved one has been killed by knife crime. That has a lasting effect on everyone in the family. Mr Paisley, you and I, coming from Northern Ireland, know that the ripples from those things go long and deep. I cannot begin to imagine the harrowing phone calls that parents must face.

I therefore call on the Minister to encourage the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary to work in partnership. I encourage the Minister to ask communities groups and police to engage together in a more effective way. All those bodies, Ministers and local bodies must get together and take all the steps that they can to reduce knife crime in the United Kingdom.

If we can save one life, and we can stop the heartache of others, we will have done a good job. I very much look forward to the Minister’s response; I look forward to the SNP spokesperson’s and shadow Minister’s responses as well. What the Minister has heard today is a small capsule of what we all think: what we need is something more effective. I hope that the Minister will have answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

In my contribution, I referred to the need for a strategy or partnership between the Minister’s Department and education. Is that part of the strategy? If it is, I believe that is core to changing the mindset but also to improving the situation. I just ask the question.

[Kit Malthouse]

That is a good question. It is certainly the case that violence reduction units, which are led locally, include wider education programmes, and I have seen good examples of that. They are there to generally educate young people about the dangers of carrying a knife, and the fact that someone carrying a knife is more likely to be a victim than to protect themselves. I have seen some imaginative use of such programmes. I was in the west midlands a couple of weeks ago, where a virtual reality set-up was used with schoolchildren to indicate to them the best way in which to continue their lives.

I know that the hon. Gentleman has taken a strong interest in the Bill. It contains serious violence reduction orders, which give the police the power, as the hon. Member for Croydon Central pointed out, to stop those individuals who are known knife carriers, and are known to have been convicted in the past and to have shown a proclivity to violence. They are designed to discourage and deter people from carrying weapons, given the increased likelihood of getting caught, and to protect offenders—to give them an excuse to move away from being drawn into exploitation by criminal gangs.