Knife Crime

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer)—I know that I am not meant to call him that, but he is genuinely a friend—on securing this debate. He, our colleague the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and I have discussed how to deal with knife crime, which is a problem nationally, a problem in London and a particular problem in the borough that the three of us represent. I will take each aspect of the problem in order.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to the debate. The issue of knife crime tends to be shovelled away because the media too often see it as a spat between members of different gangs; it only ever breaks the surface when somebody they cannot pigeonhole is abused or murdered, as in the terrible event that happened recently in the hon. Lady’s constituency. I pay tribute to the victim’s family for their behaviour and their demeanour—our hearts go out to them. Yet somehow the media’s game always seems to be, “As long as it is not people we think are important, it is acceptable.” I will cite some figures later to suggest why that is the case.

Violent crime is increasing, not just in London but across the country. It exacts a terrible toll on our most disadvantaged and impoverished communities. The London murder rate has reached the highest level for a decade, with stabbings and shootings often linked to gangs and the supply of drugs. People often say that a lot of it is not related to the gangs, but even when the gangs are not directly involved, the gang culture on our streets has a massive effect on young people’s behaviour, even if only defensively. Many who are not involved in the gangs end up being bullied or coerced for not wanting to be part of the process, and sometimes they succumb and find themselves trapped. The gang culture is sapping away at some of the best of our young people; they are exchanging their future prospects in return for short-term gain, or what appears to be gain.

In London alone, more than 25,000 incidents of serious violence were recorded across the 32 boroughs in the 12 months to the end of June 2018. Most of those incidents were completely unreported to the general public, except maybe in the local area. In my borough, Waltham Forest, the number of knife crime offences was 27.34% higher than in the previous year. This is a growing problem. Intriguingly for the three of us who represent the borough, the increase in knife crime in Waltham Forest is significantly greater than in the Metropolitan police’s service area as a whole. We have a local problem, a city-wide problem and a national problem.

Violence against the person has been on an upward trajectory in the borough for several years. Since 2010, there have been an average of 525 violent crimes per month, but there has been only one month since April 2015 with fewer than that. That is a shocking statistic that tells us what a daily event knife crime is. I saw that at first hand when I went out recently with a police patrol—I am sure many other hon. Members present have done the same. It was on a Friday afternoon, not a Friday night; everyone assumes that things are all right in the afternoon, but in the space of three and half hours we attended one shooting, two stabbings and a knife threat to a family.

The police said, “This is not prime time—it will really kick off after you’ve gone.” That tells us just about everything we need to know. We went at speed up and down the borough—from one end of my constituency to the bottom of the constituency of the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead. I swear to God: it was an eye-opener. I did not think my eyes needed opening, but I was wide-eyed by the time we had finished.

Commentators too often say that London is a city of 8 million, with 19 million annual visitors, so the level of violence is a problem but not a crisis. I have read articles that say, “Yes, we are awfully fussed about this, but it is contained.” That is shocking. Tell that to the families whose children have been damaged or murdered, or to the communities that have been blighted.

It all comes back to the point about culture, because the gang culture blights whole areas. Shops do not open in areas where the gangs operate significantly, because they come under threat. Kids who go there come under threat, too, so the streets become less occupied and people are more worried about going there. There are families whose children are being bullied and are frightened to go out, because they know that they will meet a gang member who will tell them that unless they get involved, something will happen to their families. People disappear from public spaces, and parts of our city end up deserted by decent people because they are frightened and worried. Even if they have not seen anything, hearsay tells them that things are going on in their area.

The point of challenging knife crime is not just that we are worried about violence and crime, but that we are worried about our communities not thriving as they could—their economies are bad, jobs are going and all the rest of it. We need to see the issue in a wider context, because it is about the health of a city.

A decade ago, the Centre for Social Justice, an independent organisation that I am part of, set up a programme to investigate what was going on in cities and look at what had gone right elsewhere. Its report, “Dying to Belong”, was about the nature of the people who end up locked into gangs. We commissioned its authors to look at cities that have had the problem, possibly for longer than London: they went to America and looked at Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Boston and even New York, and then they came back and looked at Glasgow and Liverpool. The Glasgow experience was particularly interesting, and so was the Matrix project in Liverpool; it was perhaps not as comprehensive as the Glasgow model, but it had some similar and very interesting outcomes.

What came across constantly from those visits was that the cities that have successfully controlled their levels of gang activity, and thus violence and violent crime, have all used a two-pronged process. First, policing needs to be absolutely and conclusively co-ordinated with the local area. I accept that the word “consent” is bandied around, but it is more a case of co-operation, understanding, shared intelligence and a sense of where and who to police.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the loss of neighbourhood policing has had a major impact on the situation he describes? The sense of communities working with the police has been shattered.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Yes—I will come on to that point. It is about intelligence on the streets, both for the communities and the police, and the operational matter of how to target policing.

What came across from Boston and Cincinnati was particularly interesting. Their gangs were very similar to London’s: they tended to be multi-racial in the sense that, unlike in Los Angeles, they were postcode gangs drawn from whoever lived in the community and reflecting the balance of people in the community. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire led to a 63% reduction in youth homicides. The level of violence is different in American cities, mostly because of firearms, but the overall suppression as a result of the operation is staggering. The figures have continued to reduce and have remained low because it is a permanent process. It is not about the police arriving in a borough, targeting people for nine months and then going somewhere else; it is constant, perpetual and part of the community.

The interesting point about the findings and the recommendations of that report is that, too often, we just focus on one or the other. I want to come to the comment made by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). Since the report was published, too little of it has been implemented around the UK. There was lots of talk. I talked at length at that time to the Labour Government—it was published under the last Labour Government. There was lots of interest in wanting to take it forward, but the issue comes down to the activity of the cities and the boroughs themselves—they have to want to take the decisions. There are issues for the Government, which are clearly to do with funding and organisation, but there are also issues to do with the local areas.

In the areas where they did pretty much next to nothing about the issue following the report, and carried on in the same way, some 700 young people have been fatally stabbed and shot. I believe those are 700 young people we could have saved, had we operated across the board, comprehensively. The level of co-operation, co-ordination and joint activity is a problem for London, with its 32 boroughs.

I had very interesting dealings with Waltham Forest Council at the time. It is a Labour-controlled council, and has been for some time, but the reality is that it was more important for us to work together to try to find a way through. At that time, to its credit, it implemented much of what the report was about: it brought the Glasgow people down, looked at the report and thought about how to act on it, and it set up an organisation and enhanced support in communities. For a time, the level of violent crime in the borough reduced. It was a good record, and I was proud of that. It was not my political party, but I was proud of the fact that we could get something done—it showed me that the report could work.

Since a while back, the pressure has come off and there have been other distractions, and this whole issue of where the Government funding went and how the boroughs reacted came to life. The point I want to make is that if the changes are not permanent, everything comes back. We see that now in Waltham Forest. I am not by any means attempting to be critical; I just simply make the point that this is not the first time.

The process in Glasgow that has been persistently and constantly maintained contains a number of things. The city was once dubbed the murder capital of Europe: someone below 22 years old in Glasgow was literally more likely to die by being stabbed than through a road traffic incident. That was unlike anywhere else. That is how terrible it was. The films of some of the gang violence going on in the city at the time were really concerning. As a result of the consistent activity in Glasgow, there has been a 46% fall in violent offences, a 73% fall in gang in-fighting and an 85% fall in weapon possession. They call it a health programme, because they talk about the community work at the same time, and co-operation with the health department and the intelligence that is necessary. It is not just about policing.

If it had just been about policing, there would have been a moment when they had reduced the level of crime, but that could not have been sustained forever, because there would have been no stoppage. As they said, they needed to get to the younger kids in the gangs and take them out of the gangs, into remedial work, through community groups and other groups that work to change educational outcomes and that get them re-stabilised—perhaps there is an unstable family, or a family who are threatened and need to be moved. All that has to happen at a community level and be led at the bottom, and it requires us to ask how we focus in on the necessary funding—not just across the board, but in the areas most greatly threatened by gang violence. It is perhaps time for us to ask whether specific areas and councils need a more targeted approach to support them.

Too often, that sort of process is effectively forgotten. I mentioned two cities in the UK that genuinely set about the process, but in all the rest, on all the visits I have been on, the work is patchy. As a result, we thought we needed to look at that report again. I say that as a member, as others are, of the Government’s violence taskforce, which is very helpful for presenting the case to the Government. I genuinely do think the Government are now seized of the need to resolve the situation.

The things that need to be done are not rocket science and they are not new. Although we talk about county lines and the way the drugs trade is changing and stretching out from London, in the end it all comes down to gang activity. If the young kids are able to be in the gangs, the gangs can operate. If the gangs do not have the young kids coming into them, then they die. The guys at the top of the gangs cannot operate without the runners and the young kids taking stuff from A to B, collecting the money and doing all the legwork, away from them. Those are the young people they need and they are the ones they threaten, so the community-level approach of stripping those young people out of the gangs is vital.

The police can target the top of the gangs, take them out and put them through the criminal justice system—throw the book at them—and police them on the streets and do their stop and search through intelligence-led processes. However, as the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead said earlier, the reality is about getting the young kids out. It is about them leaving the gangs and taking them out. It is not even early intervention—it is after the event. Even when they have gone into the gangs, we have to bring them out, take them away and get them through other work. Where that is done, as it has been seen and done in those cities, almost immediately the gangs begin to fold in on themselves. It does not matter who is running them—it does not matter if we are talking about the Mali Boys or whoever—the truth is that, at the end of the day, the top guys in these gangs do not operate if they do not have the young kids running and doing the work for them. If we can get to them, it strengthens the policing activity.

We cannot police our way out of this. We need organisations such as those I visited in south London, such as XLP and London Gang Exit, or Gangs Unite up in our area, Key4Life and Growing Against Violence. There are lots and lots of groups who do fantastic work in changing the nature of what goes on.

I have a very simple message. All the patterns and strands of work—from aggressive but targeted policing, through community work and the council working together, all rely on something very important. This is the last strand of what I was talking about, and it is in the book we published.

It is absolutely vital that all the Government agencies and local government agencies sign up to working closely together. Too often in the past, that has not happened with some Government Departments. I say this regretfully, but having talked to the areas that have addressed this issue, I think the most difficult Department to get involved in the giving of intelligence is the Department of Health and Social Care. It holds its intelligence very carefully and worries about it going out. In many households, the health visitor is the first person they will have in and the very last person they will eventually chuck out if they are worried about life. Health visitors hold a wealth of information about the problems of certain families. We need to find a way to use that intelligence.

We talk about early intervention. There are a wealth of signposts when it comes to kids who are excluded from school or playing truant, or families who we know are dysfunctional or already have problems or criminal activity in them. When I went to visit the programmes up in Glasgow, they pointed out to me that too often the courts are simply unaware of the kind of street that they are about to place the kids back into, or the worries about the families. More than that, they talked about why young people in certain areas will not travel to work and take jobs: if the normal map is overlaid with the gangs map, it is immediately obvious why. The young people will not cross the gang areas because they are frightened about crossing, being seen and getting caught.

Cross-party, throughout the Government and local authorities, and through community groups, we have to make a real pledge that we are not going to let this problem go on any longer—that in my borough and others, we will now work together. If money is required for funding, we must find it and make sure it is targeted. We cannot make political capital out of this issue. We have a duty to ensure that the next generation that comes through are not blighted by the times of the last.

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[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) on securing the debate, which highlights the tragedy that is affecting so many of our communities, as reflected by the speeches today. I will talk about the impact on Hackney and what the Government need to do. I warn the Minister that I have some very direct requests for her to answer, hopefully today.

From November 2017 to today, there have been seven gang-related murders and three other murders in Hackney. I choose those dates because, prior to that, there was a two-year period when there had not been a gang-related death. Since October last year, there have been eight stabbings, including, most recently, that a 50-year-old man on the streets of Hackney last night.

We can quote the statistics as much as we want, but this is all about real human lives. Too many of us have had to visit families whose lives have been devastated and who will never live the same life again because of the loss of a child—their child, an actual child in their household. I have chosen not to name my constituents today; they have to live through enough pain as it is, and I am aware that there may be media scrutiny of what we say today.

I will quote from one constituent, who I spoke to recently, whose son was stabbed eight times in an ambush in Hackney on 7 November last year. After she visited him in hospital, she said:

“When he started to speak to me I felt physically sick and wanted to vomit. I told him I was feeling sick and he said it’s okay, I’ve been sick so many times since arriving here, just sit down…He told me he was ambushed and knives were coming at him from all angles. I thought that was it, he said. I didn’t even know these guys. They just ambushed me and started stabbing me.”

Her son underwent surgery to his legs, chest and arms, and both his hands will need plastic surgery, but she said:

“I’m blessed that I am a mother who can say thank God my son is alive.”

Despite that horror, that young man is alive today, but with life-changing injuries after such an horrific event. His mother went on to say:

“I have serious concerns and really don’t know where to turn for support and advice.”

I address the Minister when I say that this woman speaks for so many, whether it is youth workers, teachers, families or friends of those young people. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) said, where do they turn to tell someone about what is going on?

After we had the riots in Hackney—a slightly separate issue from what we are discussing today—there were a good number of community events, where people talked about what had happened. I do not want to go down that route too far, but what was apparent was that people in communities know who the vulnerable children in their midst are. They know that, but they are not sure where to take that information or who can help. They are sometimes fearful of the intervention of authorities, who can come in and do things to people. We all know of case conferences where a vulnerable young person has eight or 10 adults in a room all talking about them, but not necessarily talking with them.

In Hackney, we live with the problem—sadly, all too often. The Hackney Integrated Gangs Unit works on a regular basis with 150 gang nominals at any time. A number of the factors now affecting Hackney are also affecting other boroughs, including gang youngers getting involved, sometimes because the older perpetrators are in prison. That underlines the point about early intervention that many colleagues have talked about. Many children as young as nine and 10 are getting involved; we need to get early intervention in place, and I will ask the Minister about that later.

County lines grooming has been working. There is a danger that we conflate knife crime with county lines and gangs. It is not necessarily all related, but it is like a Venn diagram, with an obvious overlap. To illustrate the effects on very young people in my constituency, I spoke to a youth worker who told me about a young boy who was about 10 years old who had been given a gun to look after by some older men. The gun went missing, and he was told he owed them £3,000. Clearly, he could not find that, and he was going around asking anybody he knew if they could lend him the money. I do not know what happened to him, but that is one of the ways that gangs groom young people.

These young people need support and intervention; policing is one way to do that. It is worth highlighting that, in Hackney, we have lost one in four police officers since 2010. We are now linked with Tower Hamlets as one borough command unit, and we have not lost any more police, but there has not been any increase, so the savings have not materialised as additional people on the street.

In my intervention on the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), I mentioned that neighbourhood policing is vital. I remember the days when there was such distrust for the police in Hackney; neighbourhood policing helped to break down those barriers because people knew who they could talk to, or they could make a call to somebody anonymously. I have been on doorsteps on a number of occasions doing a roving surgery, and people have said, “I have to tell you something, but don’t tell the police. I don’t want them to know my address, because I have a teenage child, and I’m frightened that if the police come to the door, they will be targeted.” It is palpable fear.

On one side we see that fear, and on the other we see an increase in brazen behaviour. Only last June I went to a small community event. If I had arrived five minutes earlier, I would have been in the midst of teenagers arriving on bikes, pulling out machetes when they recognised someone and marauding through a group of toddlers and mothers, with only a couple of men in the environment. That did not make the headlines, because those people were not living their lives on Twitter or social media; they were just frightened in the moment.

As I arrived, someone was on the phone telling the police. For the next nearly two hours that I was there, not a police officer turned up. Obviously, I have raised this with the police, and I will not go into the detail—they said they were seeking the perpetrator. But what message does it send to our communities when we do not have enough police to go and get the evidence? People were willing to be witnesses, and between them they could probably have identified the perpetrators. What the young children there go away with is that something like that happens and the police cannot even attend. I have heard a number of tales of young people on bikes, with machetes in hand, brazenly going down the street to show that they are in control, because they no longer believe that the police will turn up.

In defence of the police, when they do come, I have seen instances where they know the young people. The remaining neighbourhood police work hard to know the young people, and they try to work with them to protect them. They know what is going on, and there is some good, talented policing going on, but there are just not enough police to do it well. The more police are removed into police stations and blue-light cars, the more the connection with the community is broken, and that is not working. The Minister has to directly address the release of resources; no one can pretend—if they ever did—that it is not going to make a difference to the lives of young people on our streets and the lives of families and communities.

The context, as others have said, is an £850 million round of cuts to the Metropolitan police since 2010. More than 17% of the funding is controlled by the Government, so it is directly in the Minister’s remit to tell us what she and the Government are going to do. The Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, has highlighted real concerns about funding for policing and also about the Home Office’s understanding of exactly what the pressures are on the police—the cost shunting, for example. The police are the blue-light provider of first and last resort. They pick up the pieces when other public services, such as mental health and so on, are overstretched. So the police are doing more with less, and that has a direct impact in the circle of austerity. “Austerity” is a buzzword—sometimes, it is a positive word in the mouths of some Government Ministers—but it is having a real effect. The problem needs to be explained in those terms. We also have the context of cuts to local authorities of around a third— 40% in my own borough since 2010.

I am really weary of this. Hackney is weary, the parents in my constituency are weary, and the young people are weary and afraid. We keep raising our concerns. I have been a Member of this place for nearly 14 years and in elected office for 25. Children are fearful. At an age when they should feel free and be able to roam their streets freely, they are afraid to go out. Their parents worry about what is happening to them when they are out, and are worried that they will not come home. I have met too many parents whose children did not come home, so I understand their worries.

Too often, I meet the parents and families of victims who will never walk through their door again. I meet parents who are burying or nursing their children. I meet teachers in schools mourning a pupil. It is not normal to go to a school’s speech day and have to talk about a child’s death. That happens too often to those of us who are not victims and are not really affected. It is the pupils and young people who are affected. We have all been to too many funerals, as churches mourn one of their own.

At every primary school I visit, the children raise concerns about knife crime and violence in very specific terms. I try to reassure them that what they read in the papers is a small percentage overall, but the fear escalates and reaches every one of them. I visited a youth group in Hoxton where young girls told me about their big fear of knife crime. The UK Youth Parliament’s English group has made knife crime its No. 1 campaign priority. We should listen—and the Minister should listen—to those young people, who tell us what is important to them, and that should be the most important thing to us.

I want to touch on the issue of social media, which my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham raised in her speech. I have been appalled by what I have seen, and I applaud the efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and others who have raised such concerns. I was horrified to learn from a local headteacher that a close associate of a young man currently in prison for the brutal manslaughter of a 16-year-old girl has a following of more than 1 million on YouTube. The videos blatantly talk about violence and gang action on Hackney’s streets.

It is not only YouTube that streams this stuff. BBC 1Xtra—our own public service broadcaster—broadcast a video of raps about stabbing on Hackney’s streets, which I raised with the BBC. In the video, areas are named and rival Hackney gangs called out. I was told that the production team did a careful analysis of the content and that, in this case, they did not think it crossed the threshold. Do they live in cloud cuckoo land? They certainly know nothing about my borough. It was immediately obvious to me, and I am a middle-aged woman, for goodness’ sake—it is not like I’m down there with the kids. I could tell that this was not just innocent stuff. I am meeting the BBC next week because I was completely dissatisfied with its response. Its understanding of the reality and the impact of the terminology and references is really not good enough. We need to work out what we are going to do about this. I know that that is a lot for the Minister to take on, but there must be conversations across Government about what we do about that online presence.

The Mayor of London joined us in Hackney during one of our worst periods of attacks. We met local community leaders, including very good young youth leaders, as well as church leaders, other key people and young people themselves to discuss what we need to do. As I said, we know what is needed. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said, it is not rocket science. In fact, a very long time ago, under a Labour Government—I am not being party political—we began to look at some of the issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) was the Minister at the time, in a position similar to that of the Minister now, and he looked at trying to get that public health issue resolved. As the right hon. Gentleman said, it can be very difficult to get some of that health information into the mix, but it is vital that we do. That was one of the big stopping points. It is important that we have not just an initiative here and an initiative there, but the long-term approach that many have talked about.

Investment in youth work, particularly detached youth work, is one part of that. Since the Mayor of London visited, one of his deputies has visited, and it was really interesting to hear the young people themselves say what mattered to them and what worked for them. The young men and women could see that the diversionary opportunities for nine and 10-year-olds—they named that age group—were particularly important so that they knew they had a positive future that did not take them down the gang route and that took them away from the idea that they needed to carry a knife. It still will not take away the fear, but it gives them a positive outcome.

Going back to the riots in Hackney in 2011, not a single Hackney schoolchild was involved. Our schools are now among the best in the country—some of them in the top 1%. That is probably an enviable position for the Minister, given that her constituency in Lincolnshire is not in the same favourable position. Those young people had purpose and did not get involved.

The Home Office has said it wants to adopt the public health approach, but we need investment in prevention. We need something much more concrete than an aspiration. I am hopeful that the Minister, who is a thoughtful woman, will lay that out today. We know some of the triggers. As others have said, domestic violence or some kind of traumatic incident in childhood has a big impact on the future of young people, often leading to exclusions from school. If young people have a special educational need, it is often not dealt with quickly enough. The fact that they cannot reach an educational psychologist sometimes forces a school to exclude, when we would normally encourage it to keep a child in school. Delay means things escalate and can lead to expulsion and exclusion, so that young people do not get what they need.

There is a whole area of work around what happens in our pupil referral units and the support there for young people, but we do not have time to go into that today. It is good to have a Youth Violence Commission, but we want to make sure that its work is implemented. Early help and prevention is really important, but it has got to be more than just a pithy term. We need to invest early and make sure that those who might become youngers in the gangs are supported so that most of them do not become youngers, but stay as children with hopes, aspirations and the freedom to roam.

Will the Minster put Government money behind this? It is not necessarily a lot of money. It is about how we configure the money that we have got. More money is always welcome. I am not asking her to say, “No, we cannot give more money”—I know that is probably the line she has been told to take by her officials. I understand that she personally cannot sign the cheque, but I am sure she will be lobbying the Chancellor. The Public Accounts Committee has highlighted how the Home Office has too little understanding of the pressures on the police and of the impact of funding, but I know the Minster or her colleagues will reply to our report on that.

What conversations is the Minister having with the Department for Education about special educational needs and other support for vulnerable pupils, such as teaching them resilience, providing mental health support and picking up, as schools often do, a problem at home that can cause other problems? Not all these young people have problems at home, but there is an overlap. What is the Home Office doing to take account of the Youth Violence Commission’s recommendations?

A small amount of money—for example, for an added youth work hour or two, or an extra half a youth worker—can make a huge difference. I am so impressed by the youth organisations that I visit in my constituency. They do amazing work, giving young people somewhere to go and sometimes walking a young person home because they are frightened to go home alone. When I have spoken to young people, very often they want something simple: somewhere warm, safe and dry to do their homework. They are not asking for a great deal. It can make a disproportionate difference in prevention and can increase the feeling of safety so that young people are free to roam.

I want to pay a brief tribute to the hospitals in my area—the Homerton and the Royal London—and the investment in making sure there is diversionary support. I recently spent some time in hospital—not on a visit as an MP; I lived there for a little while—and when a victim of a knife crime came in, I could see the very good impact of the support that wraps round in the Royal London Hospital. However, it is a tragedy that both the Homerton and the Royal London are centres of excellence in dealing with stabbings of young people—they should not be centres of excellence on this. Is that not a tragedy? However, they do good work and should be commended. Every young person who goes in with a knife injury should be properly “wrapped around” and supported. My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) has highlighted that from her perspective as both an MP and an accident and emergency doctor.

I hope that the Minister will heed what the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said about the need for an ongoing process. We have started before, but the process stops and starts again. In the end, a long-term, ingrained approach will be better for everyone, including the taxpayer. I hope that the Minister will be the one who really kicks things off. She knows that if she does, she will have our strong support. If she does not, we will be snapping at her heels to make sure we do not have to visit more families who have lost a loved one.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely, completely right. I have had cases in my constituency, as we probably all have, and I have talked before in the Chamber about the worst case that I had.

A young boy who was black was permanently excluded from school. He was on the route to being diagnosed as autistic, which takes a very long time. Everybody knew that he was autistic. His classroom was turned around over the half-term period, so when he came back to it everything was different. He kind of freaked out: he was violent and was permanently excluded. This child was five—five years old. We appealed the case and won, but for obvious reasons his parents did not really want him to stay in that school, so we found alternative provision. His mother is a wonderful woman, who has the wherewithal to be able to fight the system—get in touch with her MP, and do all the things that people need to do. I just feel for the people whom I do not meet; they are the ones who do not have that wherewithal, so they suffer much more.

We absolutely need to look at education. The Government are looking at the issue. Ofsted is looking at it, too, and the Children’s Commissioner has done great work. We really need to work out how some schools manage to keep these kids and not exclude them, while still running a good school without disruption to the other children in their classes.

I will talk a little about the public health approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead said that there is no magic bullet for these issues, and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) said that of course we know what the solutions are, and we just need to follow what works. I think both those things are true, and we need to be clear about that.

We actually know a lot about what works. Violence is not inevitable; how we reduce violence is absolutely evidence-based. The public health model is a way of reducing violence. When we talk to surgeons such as Duncan Bew from King’s College Hospital, he will say that he is a great advocate for the public health approach. He spends his time putting back together children who have been stabbed. Actually, we should also recognise that there would be a lot more dead young people were it not for surgeons’ improvement in their practices over the years. The survival rates for stabbings have gone up massively and it is a credit to our medical profession that they have managed to do that.

Duncan Bew, this great surgeon who is an advocate for the public health approach, would say that if he, as a doctor, knew that there was a cure for a disease but he did not implement it, then he would be done for medical negligence. Why on earth, then, are we not doing what we absolutely know works—looking at violence as an epidemic? That is what it is. It goes up then it goes down, and it spreads and then contracts. Reducing it is all about interventions. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said—completely rightly—we have to keep doing things, because we can do all the right things and reduce the violence, but then it will go up again.

The public health approach is very simply about interrupting the violence, preventing its future spread and changing social norms so that it does not happen again. It is very clear. The World Health Organisation has done plenty of work on this issue as well; it will give people the seven strategies of intervention, which work. We just need to look at the evidence of that work, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham said, there needs to be more than words. We need to make sure that we actually put the funding in underneath, to ensure that we make all the interventions that we know work.

On county lines, I agree with everything that has been said already. Croydon has a line to Exeter and I have met Exeter police. They say that if they go to the coach station in Exeter and see a little chap getting off the coach with no baggage, that is someone they need to be looking out for. However, one of the issues they have highlighted to me is how we make sure that those young people, when they are picked up by the police, are looked after; sometimes the police will ring the council and the council say, “Well, the foster parent doesn’t want them any more, because they have just been found with drugs. We haven’t got any emergency foster care. Can you just keep them there for a bit?” The police end up with these kids sitting in their office for hours on end while the council tries to find someone to look after them.

[Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend highlights a really important issue. One of the other challenges, of course, is that if a child is outside their own local area, they fall between different social services authorities. They are picked up as an emergency case, if they are young enough, by the receiving area, but ultimately they are not that area’s responsibility. I am sure she will agree that that issue also needs to be looked at.

[Sarah Jones]

Absolutely—I completely agree. Joining up all these services, so that we look after these children properly, is incredibly important.

Youth services have already been mentioned, as have policing and the strong case for more resourcing for neighbourhood policing. When we met a group of young people who had been in prison for knife crimes, some of whom had been in and out of prison over a number of years, they talked about knowing their local community police in the past. They said that that was not the case now.

Finally, I will talk about sentencing—we have not talked about that much—and about what we do with our young people. The all-party parliamentary group went up to Polmont in Scotland last year. Scotland has stopped imposing custodial sentences of less than a year for young people, so it has halved its youth prison population, but it has kept the funding in place for the prison in Polmont. Scotland now has half the number of young people in prison that it had before; those young people who are in prison are there for serious crimes. They are the people with the significant issues.

In Polmont, the funding goes into teaching young people to read and write, giving them apprenticeships and giving them all kinds of skills. The fire brigade comes in and does a course with a load of them on public safety. Local businesses teach them how to do bricklaying or other skills that we actually need outside prison. We met a lot of those young people, who are managing to turn their lives around.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham talked about the fact that a lot of the people involved in knife crime in London are black. Of course, in Polmont the entire population is white, but when we asked people there, “What are the issues that cause knife crime in Scotland?”, they will say, “Sectarianism”—a word that we do not use in London at all. Sectarianism is the issue in Scotland.

It is worth looking at the underlying issues, one of which is that of those young people in that prison for youth offenders, two-thirds come from the 20% most deprived areas. The same poverty underlies all this violence. Furthermore, nearly 40% of them had lived in a family where there was domestic violence, and 75% had experienced a traumatic bereavement. Traumatic bereavements are really significant. A lot of those young people had experienced one, two or three traumatic bereavements—somebody in their family had been murdered, or had died of a drug overdose or in some kind of other accident. Some 50% of them had parents who had been in prison. The issues there are exactly the same as in London.

I want to ask the Minister some questions, although I know that she will probably not have time to answer all of them today. I am interested to know how the Government are engaging with young people on this issue, because, as has been mentioned, young people are at the heart of what we need to do. They are the answer to all these problems. It would also be good if she talked about what more we can do about school exclusions, and how we can share good practice on that issue.

There was a recent report in The Independent that the Home Office is reducing the support available to county lines victims. I do not know whether the Minister can comment on that. Also, does she have any understanding of the proportion of children involved in knife crime, or in any kind of serious violence, as a result of grooming and criminal exploitation? My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham talked about that.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics that came out today showed that knife crime is up by 8%—the highest level on record. We absolutely need to tackle that rise and to be far more ambitious about doing so. I end by saying that our ambition should be nothing less than to be the safest country in the world. That is what we should aim for. To achieve that, we need to increase policing but we also need to look at the underlying causes of violence. As Desmond Tutu famously said,

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

That is the answer.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) on securing this important debate. It has been an excellent debate that has allowed us a lot more space than we usually have in the main Chamber to debate the root causes of the issues and practical solutions. What has been striking has been the consensus around both the causes and the solutions.

My hon. Friend spoke about the profound shift in society and how the structures that used to provide the safety net for young people have been undermined or even disappeared. The hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez) talked about the creation of similar gaps through which vulnerable children are falling because of the failure, particularly of local authorities, to provide services thanks to nine years of cuts. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) talked about the self-same perfect storm of cuts that have created vacuums allowing criminal gangs to exploit very vulnerable children. We heard about the trauma not only for victims and their families, but for entire communities such as West Ham, Walthamstow and Lewisham West and Penge, where people feel afraid to go out to use the shops and attend school, despite the clear resilience of those communities.

The debate has made clear the consensus on finding a public health solution and a whole-system, long-term, trauma-informed approach that targets intervention and has prevention as its absolute focus, providing intervention as early as possible alongside targeted, permanent community policing. It is clear that that kind of joined-up approach simply is not happening at the moment. At Home Office questions, I raised with the Minister the need for mental health referrals for victims of crime. I had a young constituent—he was 17 years old—who was stabbed multiple times last August. He was then targeted by the same gang and stabbed again in September. He is still to receive a child and adolescent mental health services referral. He is without mental health support six months on, after being stabbed multiple times on two separate occasions. That simply is not good enough and shows the failure we are experiencing in the system.

For everyone scarred by this now five-year upward trend of violence, it augurs a personal crisis from which they will never truly recover, with young lives lost, families destroyed and a son or a daughter they will never see again. It is a national crisis. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) was right about that. I served as a special constable 10 years ago in Brixton, which is a high-crime neighbourhood. In my three years, I never experienced a shift like the one he described. Our police are facing demand that they have never seen before. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) said, that is because they are acting as a blue-light service of first and last resort. They are picking up the crises in all our other public services, including mental health and social care. They are having to transport patients with physical illnesses and ailments because the ambulance cannot arrive. She described a case where the police did not turn up for two hours after a machete attack. My jaw dropped. It is thoroughly unacceptable.

[Meg Hillier]

If I may correct my hon. Friend, the police did not turn up at all to that community, on that day or thereafter.

[Louise Haigh]

It was even worse than I said. It is completely unacceptable. As my hon. Friend said, the police do their best when they arrive, but they are so stretched for resources that they are simply unable to provide the service that the public need and deserve.

It is important to set the context for the contagion of youth violence we are seeing. As has been said, today’s crime statistics confirm once again that we are facing a crisis. I am sorry to say that it has been allowed to build as a result of neglect by the Government. Never since records began has violent crime been as high as it is today. Never since records began has knife crime been as high as it is today. The number of arrests has halved in a decade. As statistics today have shown, not only are we seeing a surge in violent crime, but police numbers remain at levels not seen for 30 years. We know that hampers the ability to tackle violent crime, and it does so in two important ways.

First, the fall in police numbers inevitably forces the police to focus their resources on reactive policing and responding to emergencies and crimes once they have happened. That is why we saw so many neighbourhood policing teams merged with response teams, masking the true number of officers lost from our streets. It is thoroughly ineffective, because the policing matrix shows that almost two thirds of successful interventions designed to reduce crime are proactive, rather than reactive.

Secondly, and even more crucially, evidence has shown time and again that local policing increases the legitimacy of police, which encourages the local community to provide intelligence and report crimes. It is beyond doubt that the reduced legitimacy of the police as a result of cuts has led to under-reporting, especially in certain categories of high-volume crime. That legitimacy and support from communities suffering from this epidemic is crucial to any success. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham talked about the need for young people in particular to see the police in a different light, as fellow human beings and members of the same community.

Intelligence-led stop and search will always be a crucial tool in bearing down on knife crime, but the truth is that that tool can only hope to be successful alongside a proper neighbourhood policing function rooted firmly in the community. Policing matters—of course it does—but serious youth violence does not happen in a vacuum; it reflects the environment and the society in which individuals live, learn and work throughout youth and adulthood and the political choices made about who to support. The story of youth violence is at heart a question of vulnerability and is fundamentally a result of twin failures: first, an environment that fails to nurture children; and secondly, services creaking under terrible strain and unable to provide the specialist support that children in particular desperately need. That is the scandal at the heart of this violence, and it is the real price of austerity. We have talked about exclusions, which my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) spoke passionately about. Just 2% of the general population have been excluded from school, compared with 50% of the prison population.

The Children’s Commissioner has shown that 70,000 under 25-year-olds are currently feared to be part of gang networks. Some 2 million children live in families with complex needs, and 1.6 million have no recognised form of additional support. As the Children’s Commissioner said in her excellent report on vulnerabilities:

“We are all familiar with frailty in old age but much less so for children and teenagers...do we know...about children who start school unable to speak? Do we understand how this affects their...progression? Do we realise that an inability to express yourself leads to anger, and difficult behaviour, which is then reflected in rising school exclusions...? Do we know that if this continues...not only does the child’s education suffer but so does their mental health? Do we know that 60% of children who end up in the youth justice estate have a communication problem...? No—we do not know how many children got speech and language therapy last year, or how many were turned down.”

Why do we not know that, Minister? Why are we using evidence dating back to 2002 on the link between school exclusions and violence? Why has nationwide research not been conducted since 2006 on why young people carry knives and use them on each other? The last research was prior to the rise of social media and the consequences of austerity. Why are our services not designed to prevent children with special educational needs or speech and language difficulties ending up in the criminal justice system? Why do hospital-based diversions only exist in a handful of hospitals across the country, while serious youth violence is prevalent in every city? Why have our known successful youth services been denigrated to the point that most young people do not have access to any diversionary activities at all? I hope the Minister will consider carefully the call from my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead for a full inquiry, so that we can consider all the factors in why young people are carrying knives.

The Government’s language on public health has been welcome, but while it is easy to talk, it is much more difficult to take the action necessary to tackle this contagion. That is the task before the Minister and we will all continue to hold her and this Government to account. Despite the challenges posed by Brexit, there is no more pressing or significant a challenge facing the House than the one we have been discussing today.