Knife Crime

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

We have heard too many harrowing statistics about knife crime, which is akin to a modern plague on our society. Many speakers have informed us of its awful impact. Of course, many more young people are involved in knife crime than the figures for arrests show. What is the impact on the lives of those young people and their families of carrying a knife, whether it be as part of a gang or as an individual for self-defence? I am sure that none of us can imagine what it must be like to lose a loved one through a fatal stabbing: the knock on the door and the police officer standing there with the family liaison officer to tell you that your son or daughter has been stabbed to death.

I want to spend my seven minutes drawing on my experiences in local government and education in an attempt to understand what is going on and why this is happening, and perhaps how we can prevent it. In my view, it is not just about the shocking rise in knife crime but the breakdown of the fabric of many communities and the alienation of young people from those communities, particularly those on the margins.

When I look back to my childhood, or indeed those of my children, I see a very different community experience than that faced by young people today. Many young people in school, and quite a few who are not in school, will grow up without being able to join a local youth club, or to go to the after-school club, as most of them have to be paid for now. They will be without a local library and unable to afford to go to the leisure centre or swimming pool, and they will never see a detached youth worker or indeed a neighbourhood bobby or community police officer.

Last summer, the Children’s Commissioner spoke of “battery” children—those barely leaving their flats during the long summer holidays. What has happened to holiday play schemes provided by local councils in parks and on playing fields? I can remember in Liverpool marvelling at a national programme called Summer Splash. The young people, with student mentors, enjoyed engaging, developmental, inspiring summer activities. The scheme involved thousands upon thousands of young people for every day of the summer holidays and changed their lives for good. That was in the days when it was fashionable to talk about community development and community cohesion.

Today, to ask about summer play schemes is to ask a purely rhetorical question. Local authority budgets, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Pinnock, have been so reduced that there is no money left to provide for these positive activities, which are now seen by local authorities as unaffordable luxuries. Many children are growing up in communities where the only contact with the local authority is if they come to the notice of social services, the fourth emergency service. Local councils are having to cut statutory services, let alone sustain more positive services and develop policies for community development and cohesion.

Noble Lords may be wondering what all this has to do with knife crime. The answer is: nothing, directly. I am trying to lay out the sort of community that too many people grow up in. We have succeeded in fragmenting and destroying much of the fabric of local communities. In tandem with dealing with the immediate, we must attempt to rebuild an infrastructure that will offer children and young people a range of positive activities that provide an alternative to the violent gang culture which is becoming normalised in some parts of our cities.

I am sure that the £40,000 annual cost of a place in a youth offending institution would more than cover the cost of a youth worker. Ensuring that just one young person a year did not stab someone is surely worth striving for. We hear a lot about early intervention; investment in the communities in which our young people are growing up is an investment worth making in simple economic, cost-benefit terms. In human terms, the dividends are far greater.

This debate should not be about knife crime: knife crime is a symptom, not a cause. Why are we allowing half a million young people, often in the most difficult circumstances, to be excluded from our schools? The Department for Education does not know how many children are excluded, nor how many are placed with unregistered providers who have never been inspected. Noble Lords need only read the House of Commons Select Committee report on alternative provision to realise how serious the problem is. We have thousands of young people—often in the most disadvantaged circumstances, often with learning and behavioural difficulties—with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It is hardly surprising that these young people are drawn into or recruited into gangs, with all that gang culture entails. Integral to that culture are drugs, violence and of course knife crime. Is this any way for society to allow its young people to be treated?