Business of the House

Lord Coaker Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am delighted to join my hon. Friend in commending Elaine for her excellent idea. Fighting cancer is a top priority for the Government, and survival rates are at a record high. There are around 7,000 people alive today who would not have been if mortality rates had stayed the same as they were in 2010, but there is much more we can do. Our 10-year plan for the NHS will radically overhaul early detection and boost research and innovation, so I think we are in a good place. There is more to do, but we are committed to eradicating the terrible problem of cancer.

[Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)]

Further to the comments from my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), and previously from my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer), Jayden Moodie’s murder has shocked us all. Notwithstanding the other important issues we are discussing at the moment, I think the country would expect us to reflect on what we are going to do about the fact that a 14-year-old boy has been brutally murdered on our streets. He had just moved from my constituency to Walthamstow. We can be outraged and shocked, as we all are, but what are we going to do about this? What is this Parliament going to do about it? We can all say that this or that should happen, and I know that the Leader of the House shares this concern—she has mentioned the serious violence taskforce and the Government’s strategy—but surely the Home Secretary should be coming to the House on a regular basis to update us on what is happening, and on what is and is not working. Nobody wants to see this happen again. We cannot rewind the clock, but we owe it to Jayden Moodie and to all the other victims, and their families and communities, to show that we know what is going on, that we care, and that we are going to work with them to do as much as we can to stop this.

[Andrea Leadsom]

Again, I totally agree. We owe it to Jayden’s family to do everything we possibly can. I can outline some of the specific actions that the Government are taking. There is a £200 million youth endowment fund to provide support to children and young people who are at risk from a life in the world of knife crime, gangs and drugs, to try to stop that. There will be £22 million over the next two years for a new early intervention youth fund to support youth groups and communities in their attempts at early intervention and prevention. There will be more than £1 million for the anti-knife crime community fund to help communities themselves to tackle knife crime. There are youth violence intervention programmes such as Red Thread in London—it is expanding to include Birmingham and Nottingham—and some of those projects go into hospitals after young people have been attacked with knives to try to persuade them at the bedside to choose a different path. We have also been carrying out the #knifefree campaign, and the police have Operation Sceptre, which is looking at a proposal for knife amnesties. So the Government are doing a lot, but I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman that we owe this to Jayden’s family, and to all the families of the many people who are suffering from this appalling spike in knife crime, which is absolutely unacceptable.