Lord Cryer
Main Page: Lord Cryer (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Cryer's debates with the Home Office
(12 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberYes, and one of the things we will be doing is looking at the support that is available for young people in young offenders institutions. The Metropolitan police are already doing work at Feltham to ensure both that there is no gang violence in the institution and that gang members are helped and given the support they need to leave the gangs.
I was pleased to hear the Home Secretary mention the London borough of Waltham Forest. It has a pioneering anti-gang strategy that has used resources properly, as I am sure will be confirmed by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). However—the right hon. Lady can probably guess what’s coming next—many of the budgets that feed into that strategy are facing the squeeze. The Home Secretary talks about resources that she hopes will be available in the future, but we must have access to them fairly quickly. How might that be done in the near future?
Sources of funding are available, such as the innovation fund, for which authorities can bid, and which will have a specific role in making funding available for gang-related projects. The chief executive of Waltham Forest and local Metropolitan police representatives came to speak to the inter-ministerial group, and they made the point that the amount of money they were spending effectively on families was often lower than the amount that Government collectively might have been spending on them in the past. There is therefore a significant reduction in the amount of money that needs to be spent to deal with this issue.