Knife crime

Rob Butler Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

It is genuinely a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi). She gave a powerful and thought-provoking speech; I would struggle to find anything in it that I disagreed with, and I suspect the whole House would join me in paying tribute to her for stepping in to help a victim of stabbing in her own constituency. She may well be terrified of blood, but it took real courage to be there and to provide assistance, and she has given us all an awful lot to reflect upon.

It is important to recognise that nowhere is exempt from the harm caused by knives. They are a danger in rural areas just as they are in inner cities. As you may be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, prior to my election to this House I spent many years involved in the criminal justice system, including as a non-executive director of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, as a member of the Sentencing Council, as a magistrate and as a board member of the Youth Justice Board, and it is the young whom I am most concerned about. I therefore congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing this debate, because it enables us to talk about the impact of knife crime on the young in particular.

According to the most recent statistics, a fifth of all knife crime is committed by those under the age of 17, who are legally children. When I was a magistrate in the youth court, I would often find young boys—they were invariably boys rather than girls—brought before the bench for carrying a bladed article. When I asked why they were carrying the bladed article, almost every young boy would give the same answer: they carried the knife for their own protection. It made them feel safe. Astonishingly, the Ben Kinsella Trust has reported that children as young as nine believe that.

Tragically, nothing could be further from the truth. Carrying a knife does not make them safer; in fact, it puts them in far more danger. As well as the threat to their own life, it risks a rapid journey on the path to serious criminality. Put simply, carrying a knife makes someone much more likely to use it or have it used against them, and the consequences can be devastating. We have seen too many awful examples in recent months and years of gangs wielding machetes and children stabbing other children at school.

We all know that prevention is better than cure, so I am very pleased that the Government are committed to tackling the horror of knives on our streets nationally, with an investment of more than £110 million in 2023-24 to fight knife crime, including a focus on 20 violence reduction units and funds for hotspot policing in the most seriously affected areas. I welcome that.

In my own area, there has been considerable success in tackling knife crime, and I put on record my thanks to the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner, Matt Barber, for his focus on that. He has adopted a zero-tolerance approach to knife crime called Operation Deter, which was launched in Milton Keynes in the middle of last year, came to my Aylesbury constituency soon afterwards and is now being rolled out across the entire Thames Valley force area.

Op Deter’s main objective is to make better use of charging and remanding offenders aged 18 and over to court, sending a robust message to anyone found in possession of a knife: “If you are caught, you will be dealt with incredibly swiftly by both the police and the courts.” Overall, since July 2022, Op Deter has seen well over 1,000 arrests, and about half of those arrested have been charged and remanded into custody. The scheme has resulted in approximately 100 custodial sentences in addition to numerous suspended sentences and community orders.

That speedy intervention and no-nonsense approach by Thames Valley police is helping to make Aylesbury safer, with a clear understanding that there is zero tolerance for knife crime in our town. I am very pleased that in some parts of the force area, the local youth offending team is immediately notified when a child is arrested for carrying a knife, and a representative of that youth offending team then attends the police station within 90 minutes to meet the young person, giving them the maximum incentive to engage as early as possible.

I would like that approach to become much more widespread. I recognise that it is resource intensive, but it is important to get help and practical advice to those young people as soon as is possible. That echoes, I think, the hon. Member for Vauxhall’s argument that the reasons young children carry knives are frequently very complex. We need to get a much better understanding of them and tackle the causes. As I have said in this place before, it is not about finding an excuse for those people, but about looking at the causes and trying to tackle them to avoid repetition.

I was very pleased to learn that Op Deter has been highlighted as an example of best practice in a recent “In Focus” report by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, which concentrates on innovative and effective approaches to tackling serious violence. I hope that that article will spur other police forces to look at similar activities in other parts of the country.

In my local area, we also have other initiatives to combat knife crime, recognising that it is not just a job for the police, as other hon. Members have said. I recently attended an excellent community event to tackle anti-social behaviour that was held in Elmhurst and organised by Buckinghamshire Council, the local authority. The neighbourhood policing team there have developed strategies to divert vulnerable young people away from knives that encompass other parts of that community, and their work with children and young adults is very encouraging.

One effective initiative has been the use of three knife amnesty bins—importantly, including one that is not in the police station. It is outside Southcourt Baptist Church, where people feel much safer going to deposit their knives or their bladed articles.

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point; from the learning that I have done through the James Brindley Foundation this point about anonymity and knife bins is very clear. Does he agree that we must continuously seek to create opportunities for safe disposal of those types of weapons? It must be done in the right way, otherwise it fails before it even starts.

[Rob Butler]

My right hon. Friend is 100% correct. More than half the knives that have been deposited in Aylesbury were deposited at Southcourt Baptist Church, presumably because people feel safe. I know that the neighbourhood policing team in Aylesbury are looking for other sites that are away from the police station where they can install knife bins. Of course, the slight challenge is that it must be something that is absolutely secure and where other people cannot get to that bin to access the bladed articles and use them for nefarious purposes, but clearly there are places that can be found and that are successful, and I absolutely endorse what she says about encouraging that.

Another approach Southcourt Baptist Church is working hard on is providing constructive activities for children to help reduce the risk of their becoming involved in criminal activities in the first place. Boxing is proving particularly popular and effective in giving young people something constructive to do with their time, so that they do not risk getting caught up with other people who would encourage them to take part in illegal activities.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making such a powerful speech. He talks about the fantastic work that that Baptist church is doing in his constituency. My first youth club setting was at my church hall. Does he recognise that we need to work with the faith communities to look at an approach to knife crime? For a number of families, their first port of call and the first people they turn to are their faith leaders.

[Rob Butler]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. As I was saying a little earlier, it is about different parts of the community. It is not always the role of the Government or the local authority to provide those facilities, because they do not necessarily set up the right atmosphere for young people. It is interesting that people will go into a church or another kind of faith community, or indeed an alternative community area, because they feel safe and trusted there, not judged. It is vital that everybody recognises that.

To that end, other organisations in Aylesbury are having a positive impact on vulnerable children. Just a couple of months ago, I visited the Aylesbury Youth Motor Project, a special garage that provides vocational training to children. It was inspiring to see the impact on young people of that garage’s hands-on approach to courses and the strong mentoring provided by the mechanics. They are primarily mechanics rather than trained youth workers or qualified teachers, but they are people to whom those particular young people can relate—they trust the mechanics and listen to their advice in a way that they perhaps do not with what we might consider more conventional authority figures. The boys at the Aylesbury Youth Motor Project were very blunt with me: traditional education does not suit everybody, and going to that garage was keeping them off the streets and stopping them committing crimes. I did not have to put those words in their mouths; they told me clearly. Projects like that are incredibly important.

I do not think any of us would disagree that knife crime is a serious blight on our communities. Blades are used by criminals to kill and maim. They have become glamourised, but there is no glamour in death and serious injury, and there is no excuse for carrying a knife. I am very pleased that Aylesbury is seeing success in tackling that menace. I will continue to work with all the groups there to make our town even safer. I encourage Ministers, not just in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice but across the whole of Government, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills said, to look at the work not only of Thames Valley police but of the likes of Southcourt Baptist Church and the Aylesbury Youth Motor Project, because it will take the whole community to stop the scourge of knife crime.