Gangs and Serious Youth Violence
Debate between Lyn Brown and David Lammy(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) on holding it. I know that, behind the scenes, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) has been quietly campaigning in the Tea Room for such a debate because of the concerns in her constituency. It is fantastic to be joined by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who has huge experience of these issues and has continually brought them, certainly during my years in Parliament, to the House’s attention.
This is where I start: the issue is not new. In a sense, it is very important not to have this debate as though this is a year zero moment. We have had this problem for several years. Problems with young people getting caught up in crime, particularly in urban and deprived areas, are absolutely not new. Those at home over Christmas who landed on the show “Dickensian”, an adaptation of many of Dickens’s books, and those very familiar with both “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” will know that we had gangs in London. We had groups of young people getting up to criminality in London, and above such gang activity was usually the adult activity running the gangs, so these issues are not new. I was born in the period just after the huge public concern about mods and rockers congregating in different parts—
Mr Lammy
I notice that the Front-Bench Opposition spokesman is absolutely aware of that. She is ever so slightly older than me. At that time, there was real concern about gang activity in seaside areas or in urban areas of the country. The debate in this House about young people and crime and about gang activity is not new, so what is new? I think that the level of violence is new, the age profile is worrying and the geographic spread feels out of control.
On the age profile, the Met police says that its matrix—its central way of recording who is caught up in what it describes as gang activity—had a total of 3,459 individuals at the last time of publication in May 2014. There were 500 individuals under the age of 18: two 13-year-olds, 21 14-year-olds, 71 15-year-olds, 138 16-year-olds and 268 17-year-olds. There were also 356 18-year-olds, while 55% of the total were aged 18 to 22. Something is going on, and it is something we should be very worried about.
Any Members with significant housing estates in their constituency will talk about the arrival in this country of a phenomenon, which we often associate with America, of young people—teenagers—running drug activity on behalf of older individuals.
Riot Compensation Bill
Debate between Lyn Brown and David Lammy(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
If it is okay with you, Mr Speaker, I would like to associate myself with your kind and apposite remarks about Harry. My sympathies go to his wife Gill and all those who mourn him. My friends on these Benches are in real shock and great sadness at his passing.
I rise to speak to amendments 1, 2 and 3, which have been tabled by the hon. Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood). I shall also speak to amendment 8, which has been tabled by my excellent right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy).
Amendment 1 would ensure that victims of rioting had at least 42 days in which to make a claim for compensation and then a further 90 days in which to submit the necessary evidence. We support that amendment. The Bill is about supporting riot victims, and in order to do that we need to give them adequate time to complete claims for compensation. Can any of us imagine trying to rapidly process a legal claim when our papers have been destroyed, we have no access to our home or business, and our life has been completely and utterly turned upside down? That is exactly the situation in which many riot victims found themselves in 2011. That situation was made all the more difficult by the fact that so many of the victims were unaware that they were entitled to compensation. They needed the time to get their affairs in order.
In 2011, the Home Office appeared to recognise that a short time limit on claims was unfair, and extended the time limit from 14 to 42 days. Amendment 1 gives us certainty that any future victims will be guaranteed at least 42 days in future. That has to be right. The amendment also provides an additional 90 days for victims to gather the necessary evidence to complete their application for compensation. Three months’ breathing room seems entirely appropriate, given the total upheaval that can be wrought to businesses and individuals by the kind of rioting we saw.
My right hon. Friend—the magnificent Member for Tottenham—spoke movingly in Committee about some of the challenges faced by his constituents in 2011. Many had English as a second language, some had their health devastated by the riots, and all had their daily routines completely shattered. They desperately needed more time to put their lives back together before they could deal with compensation claims. I congratulate him on raising the issue of time limits in Committee. If the House accepts amendment 1 today, he will have played a vital role in ensuring that any future victims of rioting are not left in the lurch, as his constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) were.
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend will know, perhaps more than anybody else in this House, the juxtaposition between shopping centres such as Westfield, where there is big business, and small businesses, which in a constituency such as hers are often run by people newly arrived in this country, making the very best of their lives. Her experience in this matter needs to be recorded.
Lyn Brown
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right—the businesses that were affected in my constituency were small businesses along the Barking Road in Canning Town and, indeed, some in Green Street. As he rightly says, they are not like the businesses in Westfield that have massive resources behind them to enable them to make the claims, clean up quickly and get on with their economic lives.
Amendments 2 and 3 would ensure that victims were entitled to compensation for costs incurred as a result of having to seek alternative accommodation. We support those amendments too. Families should not be pushed into severe financial difficulty because their homes have been rendered uninhabitable by circumstances way beyond their control. Some families affected by the 2011 riots were not able to live in their homes for months, and some for years afterwards, putting them in severe financial difficulty. That was particularly the case in the private rented sector, but it also applied to some homeowners. We all know how expensive short-term rented accommodation can be, particularly here in London. It is only right, therefore, that that should be accounted for in the compensation awarded. I therefore urge the House to accept amendments 2 and 3.
Finally, let me turn to amendment 8, which would ensure that any money claimed in compensation for emergency relief in the immediate aftermath of a riot did not lead to a reduction in the amount of compensation a claimant might receive. It is shameful that this sort of deduction was made in 2011. We support the amendment, because people putting money into charity buckets to help their neighbours through the turmoil of rioting do not expect the compensation due to those victims to be reduced as a result of their kindness. I am not surprised that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North reports that his constituents were aghast that their donations led to a reduction in the compensation doled out.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham also argued in Committee, I thought convincingly, that we do not want to discourage big businesses from helping out small businesses with which they share a high street. Deducting payments as a result of charitable giving would have precisely that unwelcome and rather unpleasant effect. I urge the House to accept amendment 8 so that, in the unwelcome event of future riots, the police and charities can work together to help communities, rather than treating support as a zero-sum game.
I heard what the hon. Member for Dudley South had to say on that matter, but I now look forward to hearing from the Minister on these issues, because I am sure he is going to make us very happy today.
Riot Compensation Bill
Debate between Lyn Brown and David Lammy(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker; I was sat quite comfortably, waiting for the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) to perform his usual tour de force to the Chamber, and thought I had more time.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) on bringing the Bill before the House. I was saddened to hear that his popularity has declined. I hope that it does not spoil his Christmas. I was rather worried to hear the story about the rogue squirrel. As a city girl who has only just started to experience these creatures in her back garden, it has made me a little more wary of coming into contact with them.
The riots that blighted many of our cities and towns in August 2011 were a truly destructive event. More than 5,000 crimes were recorded in just a few days, five people lost their lives and it has been estimated that the material cost of the London riots alone was over half a billion pounds. That material cost has fallen on the public, local businesses, the police and the taxpayer during a period of harsh economic conditions.
As we have heard today, the existing legal framework for compensating the victims of riots has proven to be inadequate. It is therefore right that we consider carefully how the financial burden of any future riot events should be shouldered.
The House has heard that there is an established principle that the police are liable for damage incurred during riots. There is an implied contract between the public and the police: the public will respect the authority of the police and, in return, the police will secure law and order for the public. It has been contended that when riots break out and property is damaged, the police have failed to keep their end of the bargain and are therefore strictly liable for damages incurred.
As we have heard a number of times today, that principle is enforced through the Riot (Damages) Act 1886. It was perhaps inevitable that a 130-year-old piece of legislation did not prove to be up to the task of handling the aftermath of the 2011 riots, which were as widespread and destructive as any we have seen for a generation. The language of the Act, as Members have said, is archaic, defining riots as
“persons riotously and tumultuously assembled together”.
That sounds like a decent football match.
Lyn Brown
No, we are doing quite well.
The 1886 Act pays no consideration to what are now important questions for any legislation dealing with insurance and compensation. For understandable reasons, there is no mention of motor vehicles. There is no consideration of interim compensations for victims while claims are being processed or of the new-for-old replacement of damaged goods, and there are no powers for the police to delegate administering the compensation process to experts in legal claims. As a result, in 2014, three years after the 2011 riots, victims were still waiting for over £40 million of compensation to be paid out. This is an inordinately long wait for compensation. The existing legislation has therefore been shown to be not fit for purpose, and so the hon. Member for Dudley South is doing the House a favour today.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) for his work on this issue. His constituency was hit as hard by the 2011 riots as many others, and he has worked tirelessly highlighting the difficulty that locals have had in receiving the compensation that they should be entitled to. He used the Freedom of Information Act to show that three years after the riots, 133 victims in London had yet to receive a penny in compensation from the police. Just 16% of the requested compensation had been paid out at that point. These victims of rioting must feel badly let down considering that the Prime Minister had promised they would not be left out of pocket. Without his tireless work and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), I gently say that I doubt this Bill would have been before the House today.
To be fair to the Government, being even-handed on a Friday, they have recognised the problems that people have had in receiving compensation. They commissioned an independent review of existing legislation chaired by Neil Kinghan. The Kinghan review was published in September 2013, and it made a series of recommendations. It recommended that the principle that the police are strictly liable for damages incurred during riots ought to be maintained; that legislation ought to protect insurers so as not to deter people from taking out insurance policies, or to inflate the cost of insurance; and that payments to insurance firms should be limited to businesses insured with an annual turnover of less than £2 million. It suggested that legislation should allow the police to delegate the administering of claims to a body made up of insurance professionals rather than the police having to take on that complex administrative task themselves. A further important recommendation was that allowance be made for compensating at the cost of replacement goods—old for new—as is the case in most modern insurance practice. The review judged that new legislation replacing the 1886 Act would be necessary.
The Government ran a consultation exercise after the publication of the Kinghan review, and the Bill before us, as we have heard, has the support of the Government and takes up many of the review’s recommendations. This includes a number of provisions that are uncontentious but nevertheless important, such as including cars within the scope of compensation and providing for interim payments. Given the clear need to update the legislation that governs riot compensation, we welcome this Bill and believe that it ought to move forward to Committee, where it can receive further scrutiny.
While we support the principle that the police ought to be strictly liable for damages incurred during the course of a riot, it is important that our police forces are not asked to promise a blank cheque. It is impossible for police forces to plan and budget for the possibility of having to compensate victims of riots without some understanding of the likely costs to be involved. This is particularly true when our police forces are still absorbing the 17,000 police officer cuts from the previous Parliament. It might be Friday but this is not politics-free.
To deal with this problem, the Kinghan review originally proposed that insurers would be able to claim only for businesses with an annual turnover lower than £2 million. The Bill instead places a £1 million cap on the total claim that can be made, and removes any reference to company turnover. The Association of British Insurers estimates that 99% of commercial property claims for material damage from the August 2011 riots would have been fully covered by this new £1 million limit. The Home Office makes similar estimates, and the impact assessment that accompanies the Bill suggests that just 19 of 1,988 impacted businesses would wish to claim over £1 million in the case of large-scale rioting. This appears to be a significant improvement on the turnover-based model suggested by Kinghan. According to the ABI, only 33% of commercial property claims for material damage during the August 2011 riots came from businesses with a turnover of less than £2 million. There were serious fears that the £2 million turnover limit would have therefore created a disincentive for large businesses to set up in areas that they would possibly consider to be susceptible to rioting, and that some businesses would be left unfairly out of pocket. These details need to be looked at very closely as the Bill moves through Committee, particularly as the £1 million limit represents a departure from the recommendations by the Kinghan review and may have an impact on insurance premiums. I want to ensure that the Government are taking seriously the competing interests of the insurance industry, businesses, the police, and the public finances.
Another area of concern that we will pursue in Committee is what constitutes a riot and who decides when a riot has taken place. At present, the Bill empowers police and crime commissioners to determine whether there has or has not been a riot, which they must do in accordance with the definition of a riot provided by the Public Order Act 1986. It is the budgets of police and crime commissioners that will ultimately be hurt if they do judge that there has been a riot, so we might, in effect, be allowing the police to mark their own homework. This was raised by Mark Shepherd of the ABI, who has called for
“a more independent determination of when a disturbance is a riot”.
That might be appropriate given the quasi-judicial nature of the decision.
My final area of concern is that the Bill does not cover loss of trade for businesses, loss of rent for landlords, or the cost of alternative accommodation needed in the wake of a riot. These are all instances of what insurers call consequential loss. Many of those most severely impacted by the 2011 riots would therefore not have been be fully compensated through the provisions in this Bill. That is particularly true of businesses with small capital holdings who rely on trade that has been disrupted by rioting. This needs to be carefully looked at during the next stages of the legislative process so that we can provide the most equitable deal possible between the police and the community in the unwelcome event of future riots.
The current arrangements for dealing with compensation after riots is clearly inadequate, and a new framework is required. I look forward to going through the details of the Bill to make sure that we can have a system that commands the support of the public, business, and the police alike. That will mean looking carefully at the caps on compensation, the process of determining when a riot has taken place, and the clauses setting out which losses are, and which are not, eligible for compensation. We must make sure that we try to minimise the numbers of people who fall victims of future riots, as, unfortunately, so many did in 2011.