Offensive Weapons Bill (Ninth sitting)

Nigel Huddleston Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

The Government must be honest about the impact, including of police officer numbers, particularly in the light of today’s damning National Audit Office report. Crucially, they must commission research on why young people carry weapons. So little of our debate on youth violence in this place focuses on that. It is vital to understand how to tackle the problem, particularly in allowing us to target interventions and spending where they work. We need to evaluate the outcomes of programmes and ensure that we are genuinely reducing the numbers of young people who carry weapons and looking at the causes as to why they carry them in the first place.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

It is understandable why the tone of the debate has changed today. We have had a very co-operative cross-party approach so far. However, I hope the hon. Lady will not make the mistake of saying that there is a simple answer. I think she was alluding to this at the end of her speech. There are such things as personal responsibility and parental responsibility for serious crimes and we should not ignore that fact. The Government are spending more than £800 billion this year and Government net spending is increasing, but the most important thing we need to consider is that local decisions are being made. I get the hon. Lady’s point about police numbers, but in West Mercia, for example, we had an announcement yesterday of an increase in police numbers of 100. That is because of the choices that individual police and crime commissioners are making. We need to consider local responsibility as well.

[Louise Haigh]

I am not suggesting for a second that this is a simple issue—indeed, I believe I said explicitly a few minutes ago that these are very complex issues. No one is suggesting that a simple rise in police officer numbers will stem the surge in serious violence. That is why new clause 25 covers such a wide variety of the issues identified by the Home Office in relation to the rise in serious violence.

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[Victoria Atkins]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that in 2010 we had to make changes to the Home Office budget, and other budgets in Government, because of the serious financial situation we found ourselves in. We know the reasons for that. We had to make tough decisions, which have been borne not just by the police but by others. We have to live within our means. As we have seen this year, we have reached a place where we have been able to increase the amount of overall police funding, but if we are going to have this debate, let us not forget the reasons why the coalition Government were in that position in the first place. It is not a fair representation.

[Nigel Huddleston]

I hope we do not descend into a party political debate after a very constructive Committee, as I said earlier. The nature of crime and policing is changing. For example, one key area of change is the move to cyber-crime and that kind of challenge. All hon. Members present, by virtue of the fact that we are sat here, have extreme empathy and support for everything that we are trying to do in the Bill, but conflating that into a bigger debate and obsessing about police numbers—important as they are—while ignoring the bigger picture that the nature of crime has fundamentally changed, will do none of us any good.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Last week, the Home Secretary delivered an important speech about the threat of online child sexual exploitation, which is expanding in a way that was frankly beyond our imagination and worst fears five years ago—reports have risen by 700% in the last few years—because mobile phones make it much easier for paedophiles and others to use the internet to film their disgusting images across the world.

On social media in general, the Home Secretary has set out his expectation that the tech companies will up their game substantially in relation to CSE by November. We have also set expectations of tech companies when it comes to drill music and online videos. This month, a social media hub is being set up—a specialist unit within the Met. It is a pilot unit, and if it works we want to expand it nationally. It is about helping the identification of these violent videos—they are calls to violence, let us be very clear about that.

When police officers have reported such videos, tech companies are expected to take them down. There is an interesting debate more generally regarding the role of wider society and, particularly, businesses. I hope that people who run major corporations are having very serious conversations at board level about how their advertising budgets are spent. We know that legitimate, proper, lawful corporations are paying for advertising and, without their knowledge—usually to their horror—their adverts are appearing on the sorts of websites with which nobody in this room would wish to be associated.