Oral Answers to Questions

John Cryer Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I do not want to spawn intra-family discord. We have heard a voice from Lewisham, so we have to hear a voice from Leyton; I call John Cryer.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Further to Question 7, it is widely known that fire crewing per pump has been cut across the country from five to four, and even from four to three. Although we all know that this is an operational matter, is not the safety of firefighters a ministerial matter as well?

[Mr Hurd]

The safety of firefighters is of huge interest to Ministers, and it is something that we do keep an eye on, but the hon. Gentleman is right in his fundamental point: these operating decisions are best taken locally. [Interruption.] He makes a face, but we cannot have a Minister sitting here and making judgments on what is right when it comes to allocating resources to risk in Cleveland, Cumbria or anywhere else.

Serious Violence

John Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My understanding is that this year the Met plan to hire at least 300 additional officers. I cannot tell her how many there will be in Ealing, because that will be an operational decision for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but that increase can take place because of the rise in funding—the largest cash increase since 2010.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

In my constituency, we are seeing stabbings on a weekly basis. It is difficult to find exact numbers, but both boroughs that I cover—Redbridge and Waltham Forest—have lost about 200 officers each. How will the increase the Home Secretary is talking about plug the gap left by so many officers leaving the service?

[Sajid Javid]

One thing that will certainly help in our capital is the violent crime taskforce, which is dedicated to fighting violent crime in London, as well as other measures that I will come to in a moment—for example, the resourcing specifically for fighting serious violence, in the Metropolitan region and elsewhere, including new police officers specifically dedicated to that fight.

Knife Crime

John Cryer Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered tackling knife crime.

It is always a pleasure to serve when you are in the Chair, Ms Buck. First of all, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing a debate about this hugely important issue. In particular, I thank its Chair—my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns)—as well as the other members of the Committee and its Clerk, Sarah Hartwell-Naguib, who has been extremely helpful in assisting me to put together this debate.

The main spring for the debate was, very sadly, the murder of 14-year-old Jaden Moodie just over two weeks ago. The attack took place in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), albeit right on its boundary with my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead. The family live in Walthamstow. Both of my Waltham Forest neighbours—my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)—will speak later in the debate.

To many people, that appalling incident in Leyton two weeks ago was a new low in a wave of violent crime that has been sweeping across and beyond London, because we are dealing with county lines and all sorts of other related issues. That wave of violent crime seemed to start some months ago and it has not abated; there is no sign that this knife and gun crime is going to disappear, and we have become quite used to it.

Before I continue, I would like apologise on behalf of two hon. Members who supported my application for this debate, but who unfortunately cannot be here today. Over the past few months, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) has, week in, week out, during business questions and Home Office questions, raised concerns about problems in his constituency. I also apologise on behalf of the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who chairs the Select Committee on Science and Technology, which recently completed a report on adverse childhood experiences. It covered trauma, abuse, neglect and so on, and found a clear correlation between those experiences, school exclusion and mental health problems. It also found that early intervention—on which the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green has done a great deal of work—is vital, and many other reports have come to the same conclusion.

To some extent, we have become inured to the violence on our streets. It is certainly happening across east London, but it is also happening elsewhere in the country. Every week there seem to be more news stories about stabbings, gun crime and related activities. However, what happened a couple of weeks ago seems to an awful lot of people to be a new low. To some extent—I am not talking about specific cases, but speaking in generalities—there have been profound shifts in society and profound changes in the way in which society is structured and how people live. A lot of those profound changes underlie what we have seen over the past few months or the past year. Structures that used to provide security and safety, particularly for children, have been undermined and in some cases have completely disappeared.

I have met and dealt with many youngsters who come from profoundly chaotic backgrounds and have become involved in gangs, partly because doing so provides them with some sort of security. To give a couple of examples—I cannot give too many, because I am talking about people in my constituency and they might be identified—a few months ago I remember meeting a 14-year-old whose father was in prison and whose mother had just disappeared. He was living by himself in a council flat and having to look after himself at the age of 14. A person does not stand much of a chance in those circumstances. I can remember another, slightly older but not much older, who was living in a bail hostel 20 miles from Waltham Forest and whose exclusion order meant that he could not go to Waltham Forest. I am not commenting on the rights and wrongs of what he had done—which I am familiar with but do not want to talk about—but those two cases give a sense of the gravity of the situation and the shifts we are dealing with.

There is no magic wand for youngsters in that position; there is no magic bullet that will sort it all out and make their lives so much more secure, happier and safer. However, we cannot just throw up our hands and say, “It is all far too complicated. It is all far too profound and difficult, and there is nothing we can do about it.” To even start to tackle these issues, we need to start to talk about resources, because at the moment they are simply not there to cope with the consequences—I am talking to an extent about consequences, rather than the root cause.

I will come on to the root cause in a little while, but we certainly need early intervention. We need the resources to tackle both the causes and the consequences, and the stark reality is that the resources are not there. Both Waltham Forest and Redbridge—I cover six wards in Waltham Forest and two and one third in Redbridge—have faced huge cuts in the numbers of police officers. The exact numbers are not clear, but there have certainly been profound and extensive cuts in the numbers of officers.

Police stations have also been closed. When I was elected MP for Leyton and Wanstead nearly nine years ago, there were three police stations in my constituency. Now, there are none. Every single one has closed. Wanstead police station was one of the oldest in London, and while this is slightly beside the point of the debate, its closure seems to have led to a very sharp rise in burglaries in my constituency, particularly aggravated burglaries. It seems like common sense that if a police unit has to come from Ilford—which is quite a long way away—rather than Wanstead itself, burglars are going to work out that that is the case. We have therefore seen a rise in aggravated burglary rates in Romford, with associated violence in many cases.

Waltham Forest has one of the highest rates of serious youth violence in London. To give one example, in 2017-18 the rate for serious youth violence leading to injury was 9.9 per thousand of the population. That is 18% above the London average, and with a clear upward trend over not just the past year or two, but year after year.

As an aside, it is a historical quirk that Waltham Forest has been categorised as an outer London borough. The reality is that we are dealing with virtually all of the serious problems experienced by inner London boroughs, but because of the strange decision made in 1964—the year I was born, so it is going back a while; well, not that far, but Members know what I mean—we are regarded as an outer London borough. I have always thought that the judgment made all those years ago was perverse. If Waltham Forest were categorised as an inner London borough, there would at least be some further resources available for police and other agencies.

In the 12 months to July 2018, Waltham Forest experienced the sixth highest volume of knife crime resulting in injuries—not knife crime per se, but knife crime leading to serious injury—to young people in London. At the same time, there seems to have been a rise in the number of schoolchildren, including those as young as year 6, getting involved in gang activity. Again, those are all upward trends; it is not that there has been a levelling off or that the numbers have been going up over just the past year or two. Year after year, there has been an upward trend in involvement in gang activity and in knife crime and related activities.

For some time, Waltham Forest Council has run a widely praised anti-gang strategy and a violence reduction unit, but that council has lost well over £100 million in central Government funding over the past few years. Redbridge has lost a similar sum, so across both boroughs, perhaps £250 million in central Government funding has been lost. The local police and council, among other agencies, are working together, as we are regularly and rightly told to do by Ministers. I am keen to praise those police officers, social workers, volunteers and many others who work long and hard to prevent violent crime and to tackle its consequences.

To address those fundamental issues against a background of a huge loss of resources places those agencies, volunteers, officers and social workers in an impossible position. Sometimes it is an actively dangerous position. That is why it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit social workers, particularly for youth services. The physical danger is obvious. They have had a pay freeze and they have not got the support, so it is no wonder that they are not joining the service. Between 2011 and 2017, Waltham Forest’s youth service budget suffered cuts amounting to 67%. We have reached a stage where we have hardly any youth social workers left in Waltham Forest, which is one of the biggest boroughs in London in terms of square footage or acreage. We have a youth service today that has been decimated by the cuts.

[Mr Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend, who is making a powerful speech. In Nottingham, we face a similar situation to the one he faces in London. He mentioned my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker). Resources for youth services are crucial for diversionary activities for, let us face it, young boys in particular, so that they can go into positive, productive activities—music, sport and so forth—that absorb their energies and take their attention away from perhaps less productive activities. He is absolutely making the right point. I hope he will extract some change in policy from the Minister.

[John Cryer]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. We are talking about prevention rather than cure, and it is always better to engage in a policy of prevention. I will say one thing that slightly contradicts what he said, which is that, increasingly, girls are getting involved in gang activity. At one time it was very much male-dominated. To some extent that is still the case, but there are increasing numbers of female gang members getting involved in related criminal activity. We are certainly seeing that across east London, at least.

As well as youth services being cut to the bone in Waltham Forest, mental health services are also being cut. Many Ministers have said over the years that mental health services have been seen as a poor relation in the national health service, and that has to change. There is little sign of that changing when mental health facilities are closing on a regular basis, including in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, when budgets are being squeezed and when posts are being left open. We are talking about prevention, rather than cure, and mental health services are doing that right on the frontline. It is better to start there, rather than tackling the consequences when things have gone completely wrong.

It is worth mentioning some of the Mayor’s initiatives, including the London-wide violent crime taskforce, the Young Londoners fund and increased investment in the London gang exit service. The Young Londoners fund is £45 million, which sounds like a large amount of money—actually, it is—but that is spread across one of the biggest cities on the planet. It does not go very far per borough, despite the best efforts of the Assembly and the Mayor. City Hall has a London-wide programme to provide knife wands to every school, but, again, that deals only with the consequences. When we get to a stage where we are using knife wands in schools, including primary schools, we are in a pretty desperate area. We have to deal with the causes, not use knife wands, which are hardly a magic bullet in anyone’s analysis.

We desperately need joined-up policy approaches and joined-up working between the various agencies. Ministers regularly and rightly talk about that, but we also need a properly resourced range of agencies. It is not just about the police; there are the local authorities and the voluntary services, many of whose budgets are being cut or have even disappeared. People are working increasingly long and hard to prevent the sort of problems under discussion. I will mention for a second time the efforts of social workers, police officers and others who put in a tremendous effort to try to make our society better, but it is an uphill battle because they do not have the resources any more, given the profound cuts.

We are getting to the stage where there needs to be an inquiry into youth crime and related activities. Perhaps that should be a Select Committee inquiry, but we have had those in the past. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) is leading a violent crime inquiry, but I wonder whether we could have an inquiry under the Tribunals and Inquiries Act 1992. Such an inquiry could subpoena people and force them to appear as witnesses, which Select Committee and other bodies are unable to do. A public inquiry could also listen to young people on the receiving end of criminal activity, the attentions of gangs and all the other related issues. In Select Committees, it is more difficult to hear the reality of what is going on out there. A public inquiry could listen to the voices of young people, as we heard to some extent on last night’s BBC programme, but we need a proper inquiry that will come to conclusions and be conducted by someone who understands the causes and consequences of what we are dealing with—that wave of crime sweeping across London.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) said, the wave is also sweeping across other parts of the country. The midlands, the north, the south-east, Essex and Kent are all affected by the issue. County lines are reaching out further and further, and they are causing mayhem, often in areas that do not have a history of that kind of criminal activity. I would like a public inquiry, and I am interested to hear the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

We now have three Front-Bench speakers to wind up, but I know that the hon. Gentleman who secured the debate would also like to wind up briefly at the end for a couple of minutes.

[John Cryer]

If we have time.

[Sir Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

If we have time.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Cryer]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I will be brief, because I do not have much choice. This has been a cracking debate; I wish I could refer more extensively to the speeches of hon. Members across the parties, but I will make just two points.

First, my friend and neighbour the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) and many others spoke extensively about the public health approach to youth crime and youth violence, particularly knife violence. Crucial to that approach, as far as London is concerned, is the restoration of the safer neighbourhoods teams, which were introduced about 20 years ago. I was the Member for Hornchurch at the time—it was before I lost to the predecessor of the hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez): not that I am bitter about it.

I remember the teams coming in and making a palpable difference almost straight away. There is intelligence that cannot be picked up when the police address crime purely by responding to incidents; it takes safer neighbourhoods teams out there, getting to know their wards. Every ward in London had a safer neighbourhoods team with a “one, two, three” system: one sergeant, two officers and three police community support officers.

Secondly, will the Minister consider my request for a full public inquiry into youth crime and its relationship to drugs, knife crime and violent crime generally? Perhaps she could discuss the matter with the Home Secretary and come back to me.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tackling knife crime.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Cryer Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

In October, we announced £9 million of grant funding to charities and other organisations so that they may assist people, particularly those in vulnerable groups, through the process of applying for settled status in this country. We want to ensure that the maximum number of people apply and that those requiring the most support can access it easily via assisted digital services or, in exceptional cases, face-to-face support. It is important that we acknowledge that many groups may face challenges, which is why the Government have made £9 million available to help.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Given the likely large number of applicants, has the Minister considered allocating specific funding to Citizens Advice?

[Caroline Nokes]

As I mentioned in my previous answer, we are providing up to £9 million of grant funding, which will be made available to civil society organisations to mobilise services targeted at vulnerable EU citizens. We already work with a group of organisations, including local councils, to help them to help their residents, but the scheme will be open to applications from bodies exactly like Citizens Advice, and I hope that many such organisations will be prepared to play their part in helping citizens.

Serious Violence Strategy

John Cryer Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

In the Home Office we are always open to listening to more demands. After Manchester last year I, as Security Minister, received a demand from Mark Rowley and the head of MI5, and we worked hard at the Treasury to get £50 million of extra money to respond to the operational pressures.

It is not just London. Merseyside MPs saw a spate of murders and gun crime at the start of last year. There is a real pressure that we have to try to address. Of course the Home Office will work with colleagues to see where we can get more out of the resources we have.

We have found more resources. We have put £49 million into the strategy, and we have put more money into some of the broader responses, including local government and community responses. We will work with the Mayor of London, with whom we will discuss what his priorities may or may not be, on which we may or may not agree.

I wish I had more money. We did not come into Government to cut things. There is sometimes a suggestion that we had a choice and we chose not to spend money. We will try to do our best to meet the resources, but burden share is important, and it is the same in other growing areas of crime. We cannot arrest our way out of some of these things. We have to burden share, and we are doing a whole range of things. A new contest will be launched in the next few weeks and, in order to meet the growing scale of the threat, we have to burden share with both the private sector and the public sector on keeping us safe on the ground. That is the scale we face not just here but internationally.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Wallace]

I will give way, and then I will have to make some progress.

[John Cryer]

The Minister is right to say it is not just about the police, because it is also about the other agencies. The problem is that every agency across the board has faced cuts, certainly in London. My east London constituency covers two boroughs. Waltham Forest has faced cuts of around £100 million, and Redbridge has faced similar cuts. The boroughs cannot mount early intervention and provide greater resources through schools and social services while, at the same time, carrying the burden of £100 million in cuts over seven or eight years.

[Mr Wallace]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. As I have said throughout, where we can find more resource to meet this pressure, we will. We might disagree on the wider economy issue but, nevertheless, we are trying to balance the books. Without doubt, it is important that we have this framework in place, with £49 million of early investment, as well as other sums, to make sure that we start the process of gelling together all the people who can help to deliver on some of these issues.

Windrush

John Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Thank you for the warning, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to follow a former member of the Anti-Nazi League. I have always thought that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) was a bit of a closet pinko; she obviously needs to be looked into by the Conservative Chief Whip. I should like to congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on bringing a proper level of scrutiny to bear on this issue, including the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

In particular, I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who really kick-started this and brought the issue out into the public spotlight. I should like to point out that his predecessor was Bernie Grant, who was a friend of mine. He came here from Guyana—it was British Guyana when he was there—with his head held high, proud of where he came from and proud of where he was going. That is the whole point about this scandal. People like Bernie are now being threatened with deportation. I say “people like Bernie” because he cannot be threatened with deportation; sadly, he passed away some years ago.

I am dealing with between 30 and 40 cases in my constituency. I have a big Windrush community. As a proportion, I am dealing with a very large number of cases. These are people who have been threatened with deportation, and I will give two brief examples. The first is a woman, and she is a classic Windrush baby case. She came to Britain as a baby in the 1960s, and she cannot remember Jamaica, which is where she was born. She has a broad east London accent, and it is pretty obvious that she is as quintessentially British and a Londoner as anyone else, yet when she went to apply for a passport for the first time in her life, having brought up a family and worked here for all these years, she was told not only that she could not have a passport but that she was going to be deported back to Jamaica. As she said, it is a country that she cannot remember.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Cryer]

I can’t really say no, can I?

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. A constituent of mine who came to Britain as a child in 1972 was recently detained upon his return from Jamaica after visiting his father, who has dementia. He told me about his humiliation and that he has had no recourse to public funds since then. He now cannot visit his father again for fear of being detained. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a travesty and that my constituent, along with his, should be afforded the same rights as every other British citizen without further delay?

[John Cryer]

Of course, I agree.

My second example is more unusual and involves a woman who came from Jamaica when she was a baby. She was abandoned by her parents and grew up in a nunnery, which—Members can tell what is coming—was closed down and demolished after she left, and its records were lost. Again, this is somebody with a broad east London accent. She is quintessentially British and has the right to stay here, but she was told, after she had been through all that, “We’re going to deport you.” That is the sort of culture that we are dealing with at the Home Office, and I suspect that it goes across Government, which I will come to in a minute.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I actually agree with the hon. Gentleman. There are aspects of this case that are deeply concerning, and I hope that the Government learn from it. May I suggest that, at the end of the day, we have to protect Government records and civil servants’ advice to Governments to ensure that civil servants can give advice with candour? Given that we will have an inquiry, which we all hope will go to the heart of the matter, we should look to it to take the issue back to where it began, which was before 2010.

[John Cryer]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the inquiry, but this is an issue of transparency. He and I agree about an awful lot of things, but we are on opposite sides of the fence here. The documents should be put in the public domain. We can redact certain things, such as civil servants’ names, but the names of elected people should not be redacted.

Both the cases that I mentioned earlier resulted in victories, but I am dealing with many other cases. Over the past two or three years—this goes back a long way—I have spent an awful lot of time writing to schools, former employers, colleges and the police. In one case I even had to write to the Army to try to check the records to prove that people who had every right to be here could assume that right.

This country has close ties with the Caribbean and with other Commonwealth countries, and we should bear in mind that this debate will be watched across the Commonwealth. Thousands of people will be watching us in countries such as Jamaica, India and Pakistan. Those close ties with the Commonwealth, and with the Caribbean in particular, have their roots in an appalling institution: the empire. It was built on piracy and slavery, but nevertheless the one good thing to come out of that poisonous institution was the Commonwealth, which has always given relatively small countries, often with little political and economic clout, a platform for their voices to be heard, especially here and particularly at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings.

After the war, a series of Governments in this country and in others worked to foster the bonds with the Commonwealth, but those bonds have now been loosened. It is not simply that communities in this country have been given cause to fear what might happen, which is bad enough; we have also undermined relationships with countries across the globe. I never thought I would see the Prime Minister of Jamaica standing in Downing Street, expressing his dismay at the British Government and their policies. That goes way beyond what any previous Jamaican Prime Minister has said, and previous Prime Ministers were fairly critical—I am thinking of Michael Manley and his father Norman. Nobody has expressed such sentiments in the heart of the capital. This Government’s job now is to rebuild links with the affected communities and reassure them that they are safe and not under threat. The Government also need—this includes the Foreign Office—to rebuild links with the Commonwealth countries that have had their faith in Britain shattered.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Cryer Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. Friend is right to point out his worries. We hope that the Criminal Finances Act 2017 will give a new boost to training local authority officers to deliver on it and increase the amount we take from rogue landlords and property owners.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

A number of migrant workers are starting to lose their jobs because of delays in the renewal and extension of visas. What can the Home Secretary do to speed up the process, so that they do not face that problem in the future?

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Gentleman will have to give me a bit more information—which sort of migrant workers and where? Of course, there has been no change to EU citizens being able to come and go, nor will there be until we have actually left the European Union. In terms of any other types of migrant workers, I ask him to write to me with more information.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Cryer Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend on his ten-minute rule Bill. The Government share his view that attacks on service animals are unacceptable and should be dealt with severely under the law. As he will know, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published the draft Animal Welfare (Sentencing and Recognition of Sentience) Bill, which will increase the maximum penalties available for animal cruelty, including attacks on service animals. The short answer to his question is that of course I would be delighted to meet him.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Cuts in police services do not just mean fewer pumps, as the cuts also fall on the crews of those pumps. Some brigades, instead of sending out crews of five, are now cutting them to four. Instead of four, they are sometimes sending out crews of three or even two. Is that not dangerous and unsustainable?

[Mr Hurd]

The hon. Gentleman referred to police services, but I think he meant to say “fire”, so I refer him to my earlier answer: funding for fire services has kept pretty flat against a background of fire incidents falling; we feel that fire services are adequately resourced; and how resources are allocated is down to local authorities and leaders.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Cryer Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

This morning, I met students from Leyton Sixth-Form College who talked persistently about the rising levels of knife crime and gang activity. Is that entirely unconnected with closing police stations—I do not have a single one open now in my constituency—and falling police numbers?

[Amber Rudd]

Closing police stations is a matter for local police and crime commissioners to decide. The issue of young people and knife crime is incredibly serious, and the age of perpetrators is reducing. We need to ensure early intervention is in place, so they understand the danger of knives and of carrying them. We have introduced legislation to ensure that if somebody is caught carrying a knife twice there will be a custodial sentence. It is a combination of prevention and enforcement.

Police Funding: London

John Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Catherine West]

There is no doubt that neighbourhood policing was the biggest police reform in London back in about 2000; it was rolled out in every ward. It made an incredible difference, particularly in our cities, but in rural areas as well. Its diminution over the years is a huge shame.

Police stations are closing and neighbourhood policing is under attack across the capital. Half of London’s remaining 73 police station counters are set to close, including a number in Hornsey and Wood Green. There are fewer police officers on the street. The UK has 20,000 fewer police officers than at the peak in 2010, and 924 fewer than last year. The Police Federation has branded those startling statistics “deeply worrying and disappointing”.

Our constituents are worried. In my surgeries, I regularly see people who are concerned and scared about the rise in reported gun, knife and moped crime.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

In my constituency, there is now not a single operating police station. Diminishing the police presence in the streets and removing the preventive force across the capital is making people more vulnerable, or at least more fearful.

[Catherine West]

The argument is often trotted out that a police station is just a building, but we all know that it has an authoritative image. Closing all police stations says something about the diminution of the state’s role in our communities.