Offensive Weapons Bill (First sitting)

Paul Scully Excerpts

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

[Stephen Timms]

Thank you very much.

[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

Q I have four questions, so perhaps I can aim one at each person rather than going through everyone. Mr Owen, you are absolutely right to say that education is key to stopping knives. Clearly, by the time someone has a knife, it is too late. Stop-and-search and sentencing are important, but they are part of a whole, as you say. Notwithstanding what Mr Poynton said about custodial sentences and people knowing people who did not go to prison after committing two offences, what is people’s awareness of custodial sentencing? You said it is not really a deterrent. Is that just because they think they can get away with it, so they are going to do it anyway? What is the level of awareness that they might get caught?

Rob Owen: I think there is generally a very low level of awareness. If we twist this slightly, to stop this happening and effectively break the cycle of offending, in our view, you need to inject into that person’s life a credible caseworker who they can relate to and who will go that extra mile to start sorting out pragmatic issues. Often they revolve around the family situation. We are not talking about nuclear families here; we are talking about multiple siblings—many of them failing at school and being failed by school—who are very well known to social services and to nine-plus Government agencies, but there is no one in that person’s life who they actually want to engage with.

I suppose the great trick with these individuals is to put someone into their very complicated lives who they actually believe in and can see is on their side, and who is enabled to do something about it. We always talk about going the extra mile, but if you are trying to help someone with a housing situation and you go down to the homeless persons unit, it will take you five or six hours to advocate through that glass. Several times you will get back a piece of paper saying, “You brought the wrong form. Come back again tomorrow.” If you leave that to the client, it is never going to happen. You often need someone there with the right skills and the right determination, and who that client believes in, to start changing their attitude from, “I’m not going to engage in school.”

You need to get in place someone who is the right role model who will actually start changing their perceptions. The point about aspirations is interesting. Lots of young people who are very vulnerable want the trainers and so on, and they think the easy way to get them is by dealing drugs. The reality is that they earn less than they would do at McDonald’s, and they have a threat to their life. Education is about having someone in their life who they believe in and can engage with. A lot of people are put into their life but they do not want to engage with them, so it is a complete waste of time and makes things worse. That is the reality.

[Paul Scully]

Q That is a very interesting point about what they might earn at McDonald’s, because often the attraction, as you say, is that they think they can earn a couple hundred quid a day by dealing drugs, and you will find it hard to encourage them to get a normal job like most people, but you have turned it on its head.

Rob Owen: The reality is that if you are a youngster who has been offered a couple hundred quid to do county lines, going off to poor old Margate, they know where you are going and that you have drugs on you. Someone will come and take the drugs off you, often at knife point. You now have a drug debt. The cost of a life is about £800, so if you have a debt bigger than £800 and you cannot pay that back, your family is threatened. They threaten to rape mums or sisters as well, so there is a drug debt and threats of violence. They are effectively in bonded labour.

The glamour of going “out county”, or whatever it is called, disappears when they have to spend time in a crack den as a 10 or 11-year-old, with people vomiting and needles everywhere. They look down on the junkies. It is not as though there is a relationship there. They are cuckolding vulnerable people out in the sticks to use their premises, and trafficking young kids to deal the drugs from there. They are not making any money out of it because often they have a drug debt. They are being forced to carry packages of drugs internally. If they cannot get them out at the right time, they are sometimes pinned down and people will use spoons to force it out of their backside—girls and boys. The reality is not that you are earning lots of easy money. The reality is sadly very different. They do not believe that from someone who is a well-meaning probation officer, youth worker or whoever it is; they need to hear it from someone who has actually been there and done it.

[Paul Scully]

Q Absolutely. Thank you very much; that was very powerful. Mr Poynton, I am interested to hear a little more about the 75%—the non-gangs—because that is a huge figure. Is there a sense of profile? Why are kids not only carrying knives, but then using them? Is it just for protection around schools, or something like that?

John Poynton: That was a Metropolitan police figure. I do not think that we have got to the bottom of why 75% of young people who are not known gang members, and are not on the gangs matrix, are carrying. I think it alludes to the fact that young people do not feel safe. We know from research that young people do not have the cognitive ability to make clear adult decisions and recognise the consequences of their actions until they are 23 or 24.

For us, putting ourselves at risk of being caught with a weapon just does not make sense, but it does not work like that for young people who are very much in their development phase. That is why we, as adults, cannot have clearcut ideas about what should put someone off. There is definitely an element of young people not feeling safe and then potentially carrying weapons in order to feel safe, or vulnerable young people are being coerced into carrying weapons for others who are more ready to perpetrate or deal and use them.

It is about looking at how we get to the bottom of this. For want of a better analogy, there is no one silver bullet answer; it has to be about a really clear package of support for these young people. As Rob has clearly said, they are known to so many agencies, but often they are not engaging with them. Key workers, youth workers and case workers are often very good at working with all those agencies and advocating on behalf of those young people. If a young person does not have the ability to put two and two together, and work out what the consequences are, we need to look at their network, both professional and family, and all the underlying issues to make sure that we help and support them to make those decisions.

This cannot be about telling young people, “Do not carry weapons.” We know that telling a young person not to do something will not work when they feel or know that their peers are doing it anyway. We have to work with the whole network, the whole peer group and the families, and we have to do so much earlier. We must not look at this simply as an offensive weapons issue, a knife crime issue, a corrosive substance issue, a gangs issue or just a county lines issue; all violence is joined up.

I think we need a health approach to tackling violence, because then we would be getting early intervention and helping parents to teach their children at the earliest age how to make good decisions and how to develop good decision-making skills. It is too little too late to wait until my team is working with them when they have been stabbed. That is an incredibly powerful, reflective, teachable moment when a young person is on a bed in a resus bay in a hospital A&E department. I would be very happy for Redthread to be put out of a job by a much earlier, broad public health approach work that educates parents, peer groups and professionals.

[Paul Scully]

Q Thank you very much. Mr Green, I was wondering about the types of knives used. Do you have any thoughts or findings on whether different types of knives are used between gang members and people who are carrying them for personal protection? Are they the same sorts of sources—shoplifting, as you were saying?

Patrick Green: I do not—that is the honest answer. Domestic knives seem to be more popular because of ease of access. Lower-level knife carriers tend to talk about carrying domestic knives. As young people drift into more offending, they tend to get bigger knives, for want of a better expression, because they are now competing with somebody else who has a knife, so they need to have something that provokes a level of fear. So yes, there is that runaway train, and that is why there is the attraction towards zombie knives.

[Paul Scully]

Q Is that where zombie knives and machetes manifest themselves?

Patrick Green: They have a fear factor. If you have got a bigger knife than the other guy, you have a higher standing. We should be aware that the funnel is getting quite tight at that point. Very few young people who carry zombie knives are those who St Giles and Redthread engage with right at the end. They are probably involved in some level of criminal activity such as drugs. They carry them more to protect their occupation than for perceived safety.

[Paul Scully]

Q I am not sure whether you will know this, Mr Owen. Knives are obviously easier to conceal, but has the use of guns changed with younger people in gangs?

Rob Owen: What I am hearing is that it is an arms race. As I said before, London gangs are looked up to by more regional gangs, so they now want to upgrade their arsenal. There is not at the moment a great use of firearms, but I am sure it will increase and start to ratchet up. Sadly, the people who are caught with the weapons, particularly pistols and so on, are not the people who will use them; there will be a young girl who has been asked to look after it and it is found under her bed. There is a lot of coercion with weapons. It is complicated.

[Paul Scully]

Q Mr Shah, you said that you broadly agree with the list in the schedule. What is the context of the materials? How do they manifest themselves in household products? What kind of products are typically used?

Jaf Shah: This is largely anecdotal, because we do not have a lot of hard data, but my understanding is that many young men literally just walk into hardware stores, the local shops, where they can buy drain cleaner. That seems to be the most common type of product—there are fairly well known brands—that will do some damage. Some of those products contain pretty high levels of corrosive content. I have proposed that the manufacturers think about reducing the concentration of some of the more dangerous products and think about the viscosity of the liquid itself so that it is less easy to fling at someone. There are a range of other potential measures that can be examined by the industry and by the guys who produce and sell the products.

[Paul Scully]

Thank you.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

Q I do not think I need to register the fact that I chair the all-party group on knife crime and John is close to the secretariat. This has been a really interesting morning. You are painting an accurate and vivid picture of some of the challenges. I want to ask a couple of questions about education and health, which we have talked about quite a lot. The statistics on people who come to hospital, having been stabbed again and again, and who then have an intervention are incredible: they do not come back. It works. How many major trauma centres have this amazing service and how many have not? What interaction have you had with the Department of Health and Social Care? Does it fund anything? Does it interact or engage in this agenda?

On the education side, everything you said chimes with what I have seen. In Croydon we had 60 serious case reviews of youth violence, and in every single case each of the 60 kids was outside mainstream school, so there is clearly a pattern there. What specifically do we need in terms of resources in schools? We have not touched on policing in schools, which is one aspect that may or may not be worth mentioning. What engagement is there from the Department for Education on this, and indeed from Ofsted? We talked about Ofsted potentially having a greater role. The question is about what traction you are getting from other Government Departments.

John Poynton: Shall I jump in and answer the first part? Redthread hosted a symposium of all of the hospital-based violence intervention programmes in the country—Victoria kindly opened the conference for us last week. That is a conference of only about eight existing hospitals, but there is a growing number of emerging interested hospitals. We had colleagues come from Glasgow and Edinburgh, from across Nottingham and Birmingham, and also from London, who are delivering hospital-based programmes, such as those at Redthread, St Giles and the Royal London.

There are 23 major trauma centres in England and Wales, four of them in London. The four in London have hospital-based violence intervention programmes embedded within them, between Redthread and St Giles. Redthread is working in Nottingham and is launching this month in Birmingham, so there are a number—I will let you do the maths. A number of other major trauma centres are interested, but it comes down to the resource question.

There is brilliant and innovative commissioning from police and crime commissioners, from the Home Office’s tackling crime team and the Mayor’s office for policing and crime in London, where commissioners are recognising, from the policing and criminal justice side, that we cannot arrest or enforce our way out of this problem. They are looking at where they can innovate and spend their money. But there is not match funding coming from other Government Departments—from the Department of Health and Social Care, from NHS England, from Public Health England or from the Department for Education.

The only way for us to be able to have hospital-based violence intervention programmes, where we know that we will be able to wrap around a comprehensive package of support in this teachable and reachable moment for young people, when they are victims of violence and they are most reflective and open to breaking their cycle of violence, is to have a clear cross-Government match-funding approach. We know that the Department for Education needs to be on board with this because, as we have talked about, perpetrators and victims of violence are very likely to have dropped out of mainstream education.

Coming from a family of teachers, I am not saying it is just about putting more responsibility on classroom teachers and headteachers but it is looking at resources. It is looking at how we support these young people outside of the classroom. There needs to be a clear approach from health colleagues in how they support this. There is advocacy and championing of a hospital-based violence intervention programme from clinicians on the shop floor; from Mr Martin Griffiths or Dr Emer Sutherland or Dr Asif Rahman, to name a few clinical champions in London hospitals.

There is funding in kind in ensuring that there is space for youth workers, caseworkers to be embedded in those hospitals, but there is no financial resource coming from the top down. As I have advocated, this needs to be an approach that is not just about knife crime or gangs or just about corrosive substances. This needs to be moving down to looking at a foundational approach to all forms of violence. There is a very clear example model for us to take a closer look at in the way that sexual assault referral centres are commissioned. Those are clearly accepted to be commissioned jointly by criminal justice and NHS England. That is one form of special commissioning from NHS England, where it jointly match-funds with its justice colleagues. That is an example that could be looked at in match funding in order to find the resource that we need to ensure that we can work with the victims.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Paul Scully]

Q I know you are the London lead, but do you do that in Croydon?

Trish Burls: Yes, we do.

[Paul Scully]

Q How does it work?

Trish Burls: On the whole, very well. The vast majority of retailers—both bricks-and-mortar and online—are law-abiding, very decent people who want to make this law work and want to make the place safer. It is an unusual retailer that will not abide by that, although we do have one or two who refuse to put their knives behind the scenes.

[Paul Scully]

Q What do you do? Do you walk around and check them, or is it feedback?

Trish Burls: All our knife retailers in Croydon have been visited. Together with a member of the police, they have signed a formal agreement whereby they agree to store their knives safely and not to sell to under-18s. As I said, that is a voluntary agreement; we cannot force them to put them behind the scenes.

[Paul Scully]

Q How do you envisage policing the corrosive substance aspect of the Bill?

Trish Burls: Up to now, corrosive substances have not been enforced at all by our team. There is going to be a large resource issue that will no doubt have an impact. I am sure that Ben will be able to tell you about that in a moment. We anticipate as a local team—the Croydon team—that before this becomes law we will roll out a very similar agreement, whereby we try to raise awareness and educate, so that people are aware of it before it becomes law. We will roll out a responsible retailer agreement on acids pretty much along the same lines as the one on knives. Then, when it becomes law, the requirements are hopefully already embedded in people’s minds.

[Paul Scully]

Q Ben, do come in. You presumably would also need specific training. It is pretty clear what a knife is, but for a corrosive substance you need a bit more technical knowledge presumably.

Trish Burls: Absolutely.

Ben Richards: What I would say is that some areas are very different depending on what their local priorities are. Some areas will not have those voluntary agreements in place. Likewise, as the changes come in, there will not be that preparation for taking action in their local area, because it will not be seen as a priority at all. It is the decision of each local authority to make those preparations how they see fit.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Q A couple of quick questions. First, the Bill seeks to make it an offence to sell corrosive substances. Is there a need also to make it an offence to supply without consideration corrosive substances to under-18s—for example, a 19-year-old buying a corrosive substance on behalf of a younger sibling, or someone else?

Andrew Penhale: The trouble is, what constitutes a supply? A mother buying bleach for a son who is 17 and moved into his own flat would constitute a supply. Once you move into the domestic setting it becomes rather difficult to police in a neat way. There are offences that could be committed if, for instance, somebody purchased a corrosive substance with a view to an offence being committed. You would need wider evidence of that, but we could prosecute that now.