Serious Violence Strategy

Marcus Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). I listened intently to her discussing the challenges that they have had in Scotland and the progress that has been made. As she rightly identified, that does not mean that the problem has been completely resolved. There is clearly always more to do.

I welcome the serious violence strategy, which Ministers have put forward in response to a problem that has been bubbling under the surface in this country for some decades and is again manifesting itself with tragic consequences. Tragically, there have been 40 deaths here in London in just the last few months.

Ministers are right to identify four themes in the strategy, but I want to dwell on the misuse of drugs and the illegal drug industry, which has become embedded over the decades, not just in London and the big cities, but in towns across the country. I represent Nuneaton. It is just about the largest town in Warwickshire and is extremely well connected in the middle of the country, just up the road from Coventry and Leicester and not too far from Birmingham. It is on the edge of Warwickshire, where it meets Leicestershire, but is also close to the west midlands in terms of policing.

There is a significant issue with cross-border crime that will not have passed the Minister by. It is not uncommon in my constituency for a tenant, particularly in social accommodation, to be befriended by an individual who then suddenly moves into the property—it is known as “cuckooing”—and very soon there is a satellite drug-dealing den in that property. They then befriend others in the community with inducements—cash and other things—who end up hooked on drugs and beholden to their suppliers. This is a critical issue to some other crimes that my constituents are concerned about.

My constituency has recently seen a spike in burglaries because of the illegal drugs industry and the use of illicit drugs. That extends to further organised crime and the taking of car keys in burglaries—the aggravated burglary where people are challenged in their own homes for their car keys—and all because some of my constituents over the last few years, although not wealthy, have started to do reasonably well. They have worked hard and now have nice cars and nice things, and they feel threatened by people hooked in locally who end up working for highly organised criminal gangs who want to take that new Jaguar or Ranger Rover and ship it abroad for a fraction of its value—still a significant amount of money.

Tied into this is the challenge presented by the tragic loss of life. I mentioned the 40 people killed in London recently. A few months ago we had an altercation in my constituency between two groups where a man lost his life. He had several children, who have now been left bereft as a consequence. Other people who have nothing to do with these challenges can also get mixed up in tragic situations. I will cite the case of a 20-year-old man in my constituency, Morgan Hehir. In 2015, he was on a night out with friends. They were walking between one pub and another and decided to take a shortcut across a park. They were followed by three men who, regrettably, set upon Morgan and his friends. Morgan was tragically stabbed with a steak knife, and died at the scene. It is very regrettable that some of these people know no boundaries. In this instance, the men even went to the extent of stealing Morgan’s phone and his wallet while he lay on the ground, either dying or having already died. That just goes to show the lengths to which some of these people will go, and how low some of them will stoop. As Members can imagine, Morgan’s parents have been devastated, his friends have been devastated, and the community has been left devastated.

The issues that we have talked about involving county lines feed into other massive social challenges that we face in our communities. For some months I have been working on a steering group with an organisation called P3, which was commissioned by Warwickshire County Council to support rough sleepers as an outreach organisation. It has become increasingly obvious to the steering group that the majority of the small but significant group of rough sleepers in my constituency are in that position because they have lost tenancies, generally in the social sector.

A frequent scenario is that people move in with someone who has a social tenancy—not always of that person’s own volition, because vulnerable people often feel threatened and do not feel able to throw out others who come to stay with them—and those people, often in a flat, end up making life hell for the other tenants in the block. At that point, the tenants who are having to live with the antisocial behaviour are likely to contact the local authority or housing association, and the holder of the tenancy often loses it as a result. It is apparent to me that many people have held two or three tenancies from a local authority or other social housing provider and have lost them because of the actions of others, which is clearly leading to a wider social problem.

So far we have all talked about things that are depressing, but I now want to talk about something that I find quite uplifting within the difficult situation that we face. One of the biggest problems is putting across to young people, in an educational way, that dabbling in drugs, getting hooked on drugs and hooking up with people who are involved with drugs is bad news, and they should avoid it at all costs. I have recently been heartened by the work of an organisation in Warwickshire called Street Aware, which was started by Councillor Richard Smith, and whose programme director is a lady called Donna Williamson. The organisation works with and trains young people in the issues surrounding drugs and the problems caused by them.

Those young people—they are unpaid, but they want to make a difference in their communities, and I pay tribute to them—then go out to schools and speak to school assemblies. They are speaking to their peers, so it not like one of us going and speaking to young people in a school where we are seen as just people in authority: what do we know? They speak to their peers on the same level, and make very clear to them the difficulties that they will get themselves into if they become involved in drugs. I commend Street Aware, Councillor Richard Smith, Donna Williamson, and those young people who are doing such a good job for our communities. I was recently delighted to attend a National Crimebeat Awards ceremony at which Street Aware scooped second prize for its work for local communities in Warwickshire.

We need more education: we need more education about drugs, and we need to support organisations such as Street Aware. We also need to be doing the same in respect of knives. As the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West said, one of the key planks of the success we have seen, particularly in Glasgow, has been making people aware of the problems that will be caused if they carry knives and use them. Quite often these young people will not want to use a knife, but if they are being threatened and told by somebody who they are running drugs for that they must carry a knife, they will feel compelled to do so, and if they get into a situation where they are challenged and they panic, they might well use that knife without thinking, only to realise afterwards that the consequences for the person they have attacked and for themselves are massive. Using a knife is likely to blight their life as well as that of the person it has been used against.

We must also do more to help young people to engage with society. There are people who engage very well, such as those who play football, go to athletics clubs or attend the Scouts, but there are others who do not get involved in any community activity at all, and we need to look more carefully at how we can get them engaged.

I also welcome the measures in the strategy to do with the police. I welcome the extra support my police in Warwickshire have received recently, and I am glad to say that my police and crime commissioner, Philip Seccombe, is employing an additional 50 police officers in Warwickshire. That might seem a small number to Members who represent city communities, but Warwickshire Police is the second smallest police force in the country and 50 officers represent an extremely important resource. We should also look not just at how many police officers we have got, but how we use them. That is important because many of the offences we are talking about are cross-border crimes; they do not recognise administrative barriers. We must ensure, therefore, that our police forces—whether West Midlands, Warwickshire, West Mercia or Leicestershire—are all working together, sharing intelligence and working with the local authorities in their areas, and that in turn the local authorities and other services are passing intelligence between each other.

[Sarah Jones]

I serve on the Select Committee on Home Affairs and we went to see the National Crime Agency to talk about county lines. The NCA made the point that these crimes are not just cross-border within this country, but are cross-border across Europe and the world. One of the worries about Brexit that the NCA expressed was that at the moment we can arrest people, follow people and collaborate with other countries, and if we do not get that sorted when we leave the EU, we will be in big trouble.

[Mr Jones]

The hon. Lady is right from the point of view that the world has in recent decades become a very small place, and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) eloquently pointed out—as did my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Economic Crime—there are places from which people can send things through the post right to somebody else’s door; they no longer need a long distribution chain with items changing hands. The Prime Minister has been clear about this country and its exit from the EU and about wanting to maintain that information-sharing, working with other countries in the EU and beyond. Although we are leaving the EU, we are still very much part of Europe and we want to continue to work with our European partners to ensure that we support and assist each other in reducing the amount of crime.

[Mr John Hayes]

In the absence of the Security Minister, and speaking as the ex-Security Minister, I can tell my hon. Friend that that co-operation is very much part and parcel of how this Government and all Governments operate. Much of it is international, and it is not limited by the European Union. The Five Eyes community is an example of such co-operation. The chances of that co-operation stopping are very slim indeed, because of the mutual interests that lie at its heart.

[Mr Jones]

I understand what my right hon. Friend says. He has considerable knowledge in this area of policy, and he is absolutely right to say that the will is there to ensure that, on leaving the EU, this country will continue to be a partner of other countries within the EU in tackling the challenges that we all want to deal with.

I welcome the early intervention youth fund that the Government have announced. Our police and crime commissioners, being embedded in their communities across the country, are ideally placed to use that funding to work with local authorities and other partners, whether in the not-for-profit sector or the private sector, to deliver programmes to engage young people and pull them away from gang culture and from communities where they might be vulnerable. I certainly welcome that.

I also welcome the strategy that has been put forward today. This debate has given me the opportunity to put on record a number of my concerns about keeping my constituents safe, and I hope that, through today’s debate, through the work that the Government will do on the strategy, and through the additional measures that the Home Office is taking, particularly in its work with the Treasury, we will be able to tackle some of the underlying issues that have been bubbling under the surface. As I have said, we really must get under the surface to tackle them.