Offensive Weapons Bill (First sitting)

Louise Haigh Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 17th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

The deadline for amendments to be considered at the first line-by-line sitting of the Committee is Thursday 30 August.

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Victoria Atkins.)

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the publication of written evidence, but the responses to the consultation that was the forerunner to the Bill have not yet been published. A summary of the responses is on the Home Office website, but several of the witnesses who will give evidence today reference their consultation responses in their biographies, and we have not had access to them. Could we at least have the consultation responses from the witnesses who are giving evidence today and on Thursday, if not all the responses?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

Yes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Thank you. May we hear your views on the availability of knives and acids to young people at the moment? We will start with Mr Poynton.

John Poynton: I do not have the precise statistics on what is coming in, but there is no question that there is no place for zombie knives, machetes and large weapons like that. My concern is that a number of young people will come to hospital with all sorts of improvised weapon injuries from screwdrivers and the like. Clearly it is important to make weapons less easy for young people to get hold of, but there will always be a need for education and earlier intervention, to look at how we get young people to understand that certain weapons are tools, and that there are ways to use them. This should not be about finding any sharp implement, be it a screwdriver or something else that has been sharpened, to use. When young people come to hospitals, it is not as clearcut as saying that it is just about zombie knives or kitchen knives.

With regard to availability, a lot of young people talk about the traditional method of ensuring that the public feel safer that weapons are being taken off the streets: we see the traditional use of photos of weapons that have been found or taken, and that helps us to feel that those weapons have been removed. The broader picture—the public health approach to looking at this issue—is that lots of young people will see those same pictures that make us feel safer, but they will perhaps not read all the copy that goes with the picture and they will see those pictures as showing the weapons that are available, and they are somewhat traumatised by the idea that those weapons are available. The availability or lack of availability of certain weapons needs to sit alongside a clear and simple narrative to ensure that the entire community—including young people and us—understands that the community needs to be safe. We all need to have the same perception that the community is safe, and not have this misunderstanding of what they need to do to feel safe.

It was interesting for the police to recognise last year that only 25% of knife crime could be attributed to gangs. My question is about what we do with the 75% of “normal”—for want of a better phrase—non-gang members. How do we really educate them to understand that they do not need to pick up a knife to feel safe on the streets?

Rob Owen: Picking up on John’s point about escalation, it is almost like an arms race. What is happening with county lines in particular is that London gangs are looked up to as the grandfathers of gangs, and regional areas aspire to be more like London gangs, often because of social media. They are saying, “We now need to have weapons, because we need to up our game.” In the old days the drug market in a market or coastal town was safer. Nowadays the kids who are involved in county lines or local drug dealing groups are thinking, “We need to have the next big thing.”

There is definitely an escalation in violence, and there is definitely an escalation outside London of the use or ability to use a weapon. The really sad thing is that a screwdriver is more deadly than a knife. If you talk to a surgeon, they will say that it is more complicated to sort out a stab wound from a screwdriver than from a knife, which I was surprised by. In primary schools, it is about demystifying. On social media, people see that there are safe places to stab each other—this is well documented. Actually, there is no safe place to stab someone, because if you hit an artery, it is pretty much game over.

A public health approach has to be taken. When the police catch a kid with a knife, one of the things that has to happen is that has to be seen as a beacon of need—that that kid needs some support to try to break that cycle. The kid is carrying that knife for a multitude of factors, but we are not going to solve things by taking that knife away or taking the drugs off them—then they would have a drug debt, too—and throwing them in prison. They will come out and have the same problems. It is about putting in that intensive care, even if they are caught with a knife, however unpalatable that is to the Daily Mail or whatever it is. It is about a beacon of need. All these kids who are being targeted by gangs are either in pupil referral units or have been excluded from schools. So 100% of the clients we are working with on county lines who are carrying weapons have been excluded from school. If you ever want a beacon of need for where resources should go, it is kids who have been excluded from school.

Patrick Green: Clear, unambiguous messaging around knives is important in the preventive world. If you are working with young people and there is any ambiguity, you get the “but” argument—“but I know somebody who this didn’t happen to”. You can lose the group. We are working with peer groups in schools, and that is so important.

I believe that it is important that the online world is brought into line with the retail world in terms of sales and the restrictions on sales. I have no figures for you, but from the conversations we have with the young people we deal with—particularly those who admit to carrying a knife or having carried a knife—knives will mostly be got from domestic settings, but shoplifting comes very high up in where they get knives from.

I feel that the voluntary code for e-tailing is not delivering as it should be. That possibly relates to the second part of your sitting today. The open display of knives gives young people an opportunity to take knives that they might use in other places. They are less likely to buy a knife and are more likely to shoplift it. That is why I think the legislation is important. It will help the preventive agenda and our conversations with young people. It will make it clearer to them what they can and cannot do, and that is important at this time.

Jaf Shah: I would echo much of what has been said, particularly around deploying a public health approach to addressing the root causes of this escalation not only in acid attacks, but in violent crime. In the case of acid and the availability of corrosive fluids, many complications clearly arise from the availability of lots of household products that contain high levels of corrosive content. How you regulate access to those types of products is a challenge. What the Bill proposes around licensing for sulphuric acid is an important step, because sulphuric acid at a concentration of 98% causes enormous physical and psychological damage to survivors. That licensing is a vital step, but the passing of legislation in itself is insufficient.

We need to ensure that we deploy a long-term approach to dealing with the root causes. We know that once you reduce the availability of one type of weapon, another weapon becomes available, and I think that is what has happened with the rise of acid attacks. It came at a time when there were greater attempts by law enforcement agencies to control other weapons. Many would-be perpetrators saw loopholes in the existing system that are now being addressed, so they chose to use acid, because it is a lot easier and cheaper to purchase and causes an enormous amount of physical and psychological scarring.

[Louise Haigh]

Q May I echo the Minister’s thanks for coming to give evidence to the Committee today? Your evidence so far already shows the vast experience that you have in this area. You mentioned exclusions and the fact that gangs target pupil referral units. That is certainly the experience in my constituency, where every child who has been murdered so far this year had been permanently excluded from school, and was murdered by another child who had been permanently excluded from school. In your experience of working with schools, are they all willing to co-operate? If not, is there anything that the Government could do to help that co-operation at a local level, with the voluntary sector, the police and local authorities?

Rob Owen: I think it is very varied. We do work on prevention. Through SOS+ we go into quite a few PRUs. They have been fantastically helpful and welcoming. It is really mixed. A lot of schools do not like to admit that there is a gang problem—some primary schools particularly are very worried about admitting that they are becoming targeted.

The gangs are becoming much more sophisticated in the way they recruit. They often do it through siblings. It is not simple. The different county lines are not uniform; they all have their own style and tolerance to violence. They all do it slightly differently, but there is a theme emerging that any child excluded from school becomes a target, because they have become alienated, and are the sort of material that the gangs are looking for.

Sadly, the people we are looking at are 10, 11 and 12-year-olds. It is no longer 16 or 17-year-olds. County lines have been going forever, but it was always older kids doing it. Now the real problems are the level of sophistication in almost brainwashing them into the gang, the levels of violence that are associated with those gangs, and the targeting of kids who have been excluded from school.

Patrick Green: I would echo that. It is really sad. We work with a lot of young people who have been excluded from school. There is no question that they are in a particularly difficult place in terms of the level of intervention and support that they need. I feel that some schools, as you would expect, do that a lot better than others.

I do not think that there is universal engagement at the moment. Things have definitely changed. Certainly, schools listen to Ofsted. We could get far more co-operation from Ofsted in terms of safeguarding, not just in the school itself but in the surrounding area and on the journey that young people make to and from school.

I just think that far too many young people are being excluded from school in the first place. We can probably tell when primary schools come to us and highlight young people whom we are already concerned about, purely from the attitude that we can see in a short two-hour workshop. Far more could be done in terms of safety nets and checks and balances on young people. When they get to being excluded from school, it is really difficult and a tough road back.

John Poynton: There is a real need to not make the schools and the young people feel as if they just have to focus on a lesson on gangs and knife crime. We have all mentioned that knife crime, gangs and county lines are symptoms of much deeper, longer-term root causes. Schools will probably not have any problem recognising that they have children who have had adverse childhood experiences throughout their lives. They have parents who perhaps are not able to support their children in quite the way they need. I suppose I really want to look at how schools are supported to engage the families and the children on those root-cause issues, rather than at trying to talk a headteacher into just having a gangs, knives or county lines lesson plan in their personal, social, health and economic education. I think you need to do both but, again, this is similar to my point about showing weapons that have been taken off the street. In going into schools, my colleagues here obviously do a very good job of ensuring that children are not traumatised. For children who perhaps are not engaging or listening in quite the same way as those who are going to stay on in mainstream education and do well, they might hear that this is normal. There is an element of re-traumatising, or possibly triggering a previous childhood trauma.

For me, it is again about ensuring that schools are better supported to work as early as possible around adverse childhood experience and support the parents through primary school, so that, as Rob pointed out, we are not having to bring the personal, social and health education lessons around county lines and gangs lower and lower, because we should be meeting it at the very beginning.

It is less threatening to teachers and to heads to talk about how we support all children with adverse childhood experience from reception, rather than to try to go backwards in talking about the more worrying subjects. I am not saying it is either/or; it is both.

[Louise Haigh]

Q You have all talked about the multitude of factors that can lead to young people, and indeed adults, carrying knives and acid. I am sure we would all agree that simply taking that weapon off a young person is not going to solve the factors behind this. Do you agree with evidence we have had from the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, which has concerns about the mandatory minimum sentencing for young people in the Bill? It says:

“Children carry weapons for a multitude of…reasons”

and criminal justice measures are unlikely to be effective in tackling this. It also says:

“There is no evidence that the threat of custody deters children.”

Is that a concern that you share?

Rob Owen: I broadly do. I do not think that, for many of our clients that we are working with, that is a factor that stops them carrying a weapon, sadly. A lot of it is to do with the glamorisation on social media, which has been mentioned before. Social media is now explaining to kids the most effective place to stab someone in the heart. How is that possible? Failure rates of surgery are very sensitive, but kids are now being shown on videos the two places if you are going to kill someone.

It is not a simple solution about saying, “You’ll have a mandatory sentence if you get caught with a knife.” It is completely about educating kids to understand the effects it will have longer term and the effects it will have on families. The longer term solution has got to be much more about education than sentences. That is not working; it is not putting people off.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Just to come back on that, the Government would obviously argue that they have a serious violence strategy and that there are measures alongside it. Do you actually oppose mandatory minimum sentences for under-18s?

Rob Owen: There have got to be two things. One is that there have to be regulations and laws, and I completely get that. At the same time, there has also got to be some form of common sense and humanisation about that situation and about what the best thing is for that person to ensure that they do not create another victim.

My experience of parents of victims, sadly, is that what they are most obsessed about is ensuring that no other child suffers and no other parent has to go through what they have gone through. What we are trying to achieve is that the best environment for that to happen is available. But that is often not just about sentencing; that has got to be about a package of support that is put in place.

Patrick Green: It is a difficult one. Certainly, from the victim’s perspective, many of the young people who have been victims of knife crime are often concerned that the perpetrator is back on the streets very quickly, and that heightens their feeling of insecurity. Our view in terms of first-time offences is, yes. Young people carry knives for a range of reasons; some of them may be around protection, and people are just making a mistake. Certainly, when it comes to second offences, there is due concern there about the young person falling into a trend and sentencing really playing a part in helping take that young person off the street.

The key issue is the support from the first offence to the second offence. I am not entirely sure that young people who are caught with a knife are getting the right level of support to help them and deter them from coming back on to the street the second time. The “two strikes and you’re out” should absolutely be the final option, but there should be a range of support. This is about rehabilitation and helping—as somebody said earlier on, if you are carrying a knife, it is almost a cry for help, and we should be doing far more around that.

John Poynton: Earlier this year, with Sarah Jones, we had young people from all around the country attend the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime to talk about their experiences. One of the overriding messages from them was that their experience of prison or the threat of prison was not a clear deterrent to being involved in risky or criminal behaviours. As Rob says, there needs to be a clear package of support. I think it is really important that that strategy is recognised. It is about vulnerability and safeguarding, and we need to look at how we support the young people.

The comment was made that young people are very clever at finding loopholes. We had a number of young women who talked about the fact that they are coerced into carrying weapons so that the young men are not caught carrying them. I am just making the point that the young people carrying the weapons are very possibly not the young people likely to be using them. That is a statement—just to recognise that young women and very vulnerable young children are coerced into behaviours that they would not otherwise deem normal on their own.

You cannot have a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I am very aware that the strategy is not saying that—it is putting a raft of support in to look at how we work with these young people—but my concern would be the classic “cry wolf” issue or the “but what about” point that Patrick made. Young people will always know of someone else who has been stopped twice holding a weapon, who, perhaps quite rightly for a number of reasons, may not have been given a mandatory sentence. The issue is that that will always become the narrative, “In that case, it is not going to happen to me.”

I would push for a really broad package of support for young people and a very simple narrative around the issue, so that young people recognise that they should not be carrying weapons. We also need to look at why these young people are being coerced into carrying weapons or drugs or other things that they would not normally do on their own.

Jaf Shah: May I flip back briefly to an earlier question around engagement with schools? As I mentioned, our engagement in the UK at a programmatic level is embryonic, but what we know from our work overseas in terms of engaging with schools, schoolchildren, teachers and so on, and engaging from a very young age, is that it is a very effective way of engaging with children about the repercussions of a violent act—in particular acid violence. By the very nature of acid attacks, the face is targeted, so you have a very visible form of violence. When survivors go into schools and talk with children, the impact is very strong. They certainly realise that there is a human beyond the facial disfigurement and that they have their own narrative, and that story carries a very strong message.

I was very interested when I visited Scotland and met Dr Christine Goodall from Medics Against Violence. I thought that their work was absolutely brilliant. It is a strand of work that could work particularly well with survivors of acid attacks engaging with school children.

To fast-forward to the most recent question, it is enormously difficult around the mandatory sentencing of under-18s, because there are many complicating factors. I have been hearing locally that young children are actually carrying acid in schools—but as protection, because it has become so commonplace. I think it is a very difficult subject in terms of having an absolute answer. It requires, as everyone else has mentioned, a far more sophisticated package of engagement with groups who might be affected.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

Q Mr Owen, I think you mentioned earlier that you are hearing about children as young as 10 or 11 carrying knives. At what age are children actually perpetrating acts of violence or being victims? How young are we talking about?

Rob Owen: Same age.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

Q The measures on knives are mirrored when it comes to corrosive substances. What are your views on that?

Andrew Penhale: Again, it is important and needed. There is this gap with online provision, and it is really important that that is duplicated from knives. It is exactly the same problem: there needs to be a verification process to ensure that they are delivered to people 18 or over.

Ben Richards: We mirror the importance of this, and we understand that. As Trish has touched on, the issues are within statutory duties and resources to be able to take on duties on top of those already being carried out.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Ms Burls, did you say that the Bill is still missing the statutory powers you need?

Trish Burls: For trading standards officers, yes, it is.

[Louise Haigh]

Q What would those powers look like?

Trish Burls: We have powers within much of the rest of the legislation that we enforce that allow us to do things such as enter premises and seize documentation and goods in relation to an inquiry we are carrying out if we suspect that an offence has taken place. The Bill does not contain any powers for trading standards officers, whereas police powers would obviously come from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Do you have drafts of amendments that would reflect that, or could you submit that to the Committee?

Trish Burls: We could submit that to the Committee.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Mr Penhale, in the last four years in particular we have seen violent crime rising, but equally the numbers of arrests and prosecutions have fallen. A recent Sunday Times investigation into nearly 1 million crimes in 2017 showed that nearly half of violent and sexual offences were not taken to successful prosecution even when there was an identified culprit. Is the CPS and the criminal justice system sufficiently resourced to deal with the current legislation, let alone more legislation?

Andrew Penhale: Gosh, that is a broader question than I had anticipated. We have resource. I cannot answer the question of whether we have sufficient to do our jobs as a whole; that is a bigger question that I guess the director would have to answer. We are resourced how we are resourced, and we are dealing with the crimes presented to us. We are certainly not not prosecuting because we lack resources to do the job.

We prosecute in accordance with a code, and whether cases meet the code because they are not evidentially sufficient is another matter. We can only prosecute those cases that do meet the right standard. In a very short answer to your question, we are not not prosecuting because we lack the resources to do so.

[Louise Haigh]

Q But there have been increasing numbers of cases and increasing numbers of trials that have collapsed, have there not? This is largely due to a lack of sufficient resources in the wider criminal justice system.

Andrew Penhale: There are a number of cases that collapsed where decisions were made that should not have been made because of a lack of consideration of wider evidence. That is not necessarily a resource issue; that is a decision-making issue.

[The Chair]

Can I gently suggest that we ask questions specifically about the Bill?

[Louise Haigh]

My point, Mr Gapes, is that there is not a lot of point passing new legislation if it is not going to be enforced.

[The Chair]

I understand your point, I am just gently suggesting that we focus on the Bill.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Can I ask, then—we covered it slightly in the first session—about mandatory minimums and whether you have concerns that mandatory minimums, particularly for under 18s, fetter judicial discretion?

Andrew Penhale: By the nature of their being mandatory, there is not a great deal of judicial discretion. In relation to some offences, they are there for a reason that Parliament has decided, which is to signify the importance of dealing with knife crime and firearms robustly. There are other offences where mandatory sentencing is imposed. Essentially, Parliament has made that decision. It is not really for the Crown Prosecution Service to say whether or not that is the right thing; we have got to implement what Parliament requires us to.

[Louise Haigh]

Q Finally, part of the lobbying around this Bill and around serious violence more broadly is around the rights of victims in the criminal justice system. Do you have any thoughts on the Victims’ Commissioner’s suggestions that all victims of serious crime should be entitled to an independent advocate? Do you think that would be welcome to help them to navigate through the criminal justice system? Obviously it is quite a complex environment, and often their rights are quite diminished in the wider system.

Andrew Penhale: First, I think it is really important that the victims’ views in the criminal justice system are taken into account. The Crown Prosecution Service has a victim’s right to review system, which requires us to go back and explain our decisions, but also to review them where the victim disagrees. That process is already well established. Whether there is a place for a separate advocate is, again, for a wider debate rather than for the Crown Prosecution Service.

[Paul Scully]

Q I remember going down Sutton High Street with a couple of anti-knife crime charities last year, walking down some of the big department stores and some of the smaller stores as well, looking at the displays and at how easy it is swipe a knife, frankly. Are there any regulations or recommendations that trading standards is able to use at the moment with shops?

Trish Burls: We have local responsible retailer agreements on knives, which echoes the Home Office’s established voluntary agreement on the storage and sale of knives. These are local; it is not national. There are no regulations that prohibit the way in which a knife is displayed, whether that is via a shop doorway or for open access. We rely very much at the moment on retailers’ good will and common sense.