Gangs and Serious Youth Violence

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I do not want to go into the causes because they have been well set out and time is pressing, but she is right about the lack of understanding of the consequences of violent behaviour. A community group in my constituency ran a campaign called “fear and fashion”, which encapsulates the story perfectly. People are frightened, and “fashion” refers to people knowing that these things are going on in the community and considering them to be normal.

Every single incident, even non-fatal ones, is a tragedy that has ramifications and an impact on communities.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will know, as a former member of the Home Affairs Committee, that the Committee conducted an inquiry into this—I think she was a member at the time. Given the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), is it not important to revisit some of the conclusions because some of the knowledge is already there and just needs to be revisited and acted on?

[Ms Buck]

My right hon. Friend is right. As we have heard, there are changes in the way in which gang and serious youth violence is working itself out, but constants remain, and we need to learn from that experience.

Some positive things are going on in the work that community organisations do. I do not often praise Westminster council, but I do when it deserves it, and it has a gangs unit that includes excellent staff, who work intensively with young people. Redthread community organisation works out of four accident and emergency units and tries to catch young people at what it describes as a “teachable moment”, when injury has been inflicted and young people can learn from it.

There is therefore much that is good, but I am going to break a little with consensus by saying how much we are in danger of losing at the very point when we need to gain. I am deeply worried about the crisis in our youth offending institutes, which are ridden with extreme gang violence. The more the cost pressures bite in the youth justice sector, and the more the overcrowding in our prisons and youth offending institutes, the more dangerous the situation becomes. That is at a time when we are spending £138,000 a year in Medway to keep a young person in one of those units. In Feltham, we are spending £69,000 a year. That is kind of money we spend to lock up a young person—obviously not only for gang and serious youth violence—yet we are doing something dreadful: we are removing the investment that is necessary to prevent that behaviour.

I am horrified by my local council, which is not alone, because it is withdrawing all funding from its youth service. If we are talking about intervention and catching young people at a teachable moment, the youth service is critical. My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham made a point about youth workers and the continuity and expertise that they provide in the community. They are critical and we are losing them.