County Lines Exploitation: London

Ronnie Cowan Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Joan Ryan]

Absolutely; so much more needs to be done. Let us remember that county lines are somewhat below the radar: we might know about them, but the response to the Twitter reports about missing children in Enfield caused something of a public panic. The public do not know about the issue, so there is not enough pressure to introduce policies to deal with it. Drug dealers like nothing better than operating in the dark, under the radar. Young people especially may not recognise their exploitation.

It is clear that we need to understand the creation, recruitment, opportunities, risks and scale of county lines so much better if we are to address the issue. I therefore urge the Government to commission comprehensive and rigorous research to pull together up-to-date police and local authority data to achieve that aim. After all, how can we hope to tackle the problem unless we understand its true scale? As the NCA’s head of operations for drugs and firearms threats, Vince O’Brien, says:

“This is a national problem…there is still no national response.”

Gangs are aware of the intelligence gaps. County lines activity is exposing the challenges of dealing with offenders who operate across police force boundaries. Part of the problem relates to police forces’ ability to work together.

Operating across county lines is a fantastic business model for the gangs, because they are opening up new markets and operating below the radar. They have no competition at the early stages of their operation, and very low overheads because their business is based on using vulnerable children and young adults as slaves. In Enfield, a young person who is absent from school may be regularly reported as a missing person, but in Essex the same child could be deemed by the local police to be a street drug dealer or to have been forced into street prostitution. It is very likely that the two police forces could be operating in isolation from each other. Which is responsible for taking the lead? Do we need cross-border crime squad teams, like the old national crime squads?

Progress can be made by improving how Departments and other agencies share data. In spite of the lack of national leadership on the issue, councils across London, led by Islington’s lead member for children and families, Councillor Joe Caluori, have taken proactive steps to understand the county lines that originate in their own boroughs. They are working together to cross-reference data and identify areas where further information and action are required.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) may want to go into this in greater detail, but police in Lewisham have also done innovative work by looking at the numbers of missing young people over the previous 12 months, identifying those who may be at risk of exploitation and uploading their information to the police national computer. That means that Lewisham police will be contacted if any of those at-risk young people comes into contact with another police force, which will build a fuller picture of the scale of county lines activity.

I welcome the Government’s implementation of new drug dealing telecommunications restriction orders, which allow the police to shut down phone numbers used for county lines drug dealing. However, while that is an important step forward, how much disruption will it actually cause? How long does it take for a county lines dealer to simply get another phone and begin sending drug offers to their original contact list? A lot more needs to be done to address the problem at its root.

I am concerned that major questions about county lines remain unanswered. The county lines model is being changed all the time. We know that social media are used to recruit children and young people, but do we know enough? Is there enough research and is it moving at the right pace? There also needs to be a much stronger focus on prevention. By the time the police become involved, it is often too late to prevent irreversible harm from being done to a vulnerable child or young adult, or to ever extricate them from the world they have become involved in.

All Government agencies and local authorities need to be able to recognise and act on the warning signs for victims of county lines exploitation. That requires proper funding from central Government, but the reality is that health, social and children’s services are being pushed to breaking point by the Government’s austerity agenda. In Enfield, the Government have slashed £161 million from the council’s budget since 2010, and the council is required to make a further £35 million of cuts by next year. Immense pressure is being placed on Enfield’s public services at a time when they are already struggling to support a rapidly growing population. How do we expect councils and other agencies to implement strategies to prevent county lines exploitation, when their resources are being cut year on year? I ask the Minister not to simply pass the buck to local authorities by telling us about raising the precept. Hard-pressed Londoners cannot make up the funding gap, and nor could raising the precept. That is not a solution and should not be put forward as one.

Home Office guidance states that tackling county lines will involve working with groups such as voluntary and community sector organisations, providing meaningful alternatives to gangs. What we need is meaningful actions; warm words just will not do it. The stark reality is that the Government cut £387 million from youth service spending across the country between 2010 and 2016. Government cuts to London councils have slashed youth service budgets by £22 million since 2011, leading to the closure of 30 youth centres and the loss of at least 12,700 places for young people. If the Government are serious about tackling county lines exploitation, there needs to be greater investment in youth clubs for children and teenagers and in children’s services across the board.

A standout example of best practice to tackle county lines in London is Project Denver, an initiative piloted by the Met’s Trident gang crime command unit in Enfield between October 2016 and January 2018. The project’s objectives are to dismantle one of the most violent county lines gangs in London, to identify vulnerable people who are at risk of exploitation, and to prosecute the gang members responsible. The team assigned to the initiative is made up of specialist Trident officers and local police from Enfield and other affected forces, working alongside Enfield Council and other councils within and outside London. So far, 20 operations have taken place, leading to more than 100 arrests and the identification of more than 50 vulnerable children and adults. The gang has now largely been dismantled. Formerly one of the most harmful gangs in London, it is now ranked outside the top 20.

[Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)]

I am interested in what the right hon. Lady says, but there is a slight problem with her argument. Every single time the police intervene and take down one gang, another is only too willing to step into the void. That gang will use increasing violence, because that is how these people operate: the more violent they are, the more territory they control. Every time we pull down a gang, another will step in until we get to the root of the problem: the illegal market.

[Joan Ryan]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman’s points that we must get to the root of the problem and that these gangs operate in a violent manner. However, I do not think that we can leave them in place; we would be abandoning children and young people to their mercy. We need a much bigger, better-resourced operation based on national intelligence about how county lines operate. That may then help us to address the root causes of the issue.

[Ronnie Cowan]

I think we are trying to achieve the same thing and we are genuinely both looking after the interests of these young adults. However, if we regulated the marketplace, we would take away all the power from all the criminal gangs and all their production, distribution and selling of the product, and therefore they would not need these couriers to do the job for them. I am talking about re-regulating the drugs market at the top level, which would immediately take all the power away from the gangs.

[Joan Ryan]

I understand what the hon. Gentleman is proposing, but I do not agree with him and that would not be the solution that I would look for. I do not believe that it would necessarily solve the problem, because violent gangs would either move on to some other product or would want to sell the product at extortionate profits, whether it was legal or otherwise. We see the sale of illegal cigarettes all the time, yet cigarettes and smoking are legal, so I am not sure that I can agree with him. However, I thank him for his intervention.

[Ronnie Cowan]

rose—

[Joan Ryan]

I will allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene again shortly.

I want to finish what I was saying about Project Denver, because when we have an example of something that works, we should pay it some attention. One of the fundamental problems is poverty and the lack of care for exploited young people. We know how effective things like Sure Start were and we know how effective neighbourhood policing, which has been decimated, was. We know what some of the solutions are, without having to legalise class A drugs.

The gang that I was talking about has been largely dismantled and it has gone from being one of the most harmful gangs in London to being ranked outside the top 20. Earlier this month, as part of Project Denver, two drug dealers from Enfield were convicted of human trafficking offences under the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which was the first case of its kind in the UK. Those men were operating a London-to-Swansea county line and they had trafficked a vulnerable 19-year-old woman from London to a house in Swansea, where she was being held against her will, in order to supply class A drugs.

The successful prosecution of those two men shows what can be achieved when police forces, local authorities and other agencies share data effectively. But make no mistake—this work is resource-intensive. It cannot be done successfully unless there are the necessary resources. At the moment, if police forces and local councils put resources into this work, they have to take them from somewhere else, and under the pressure of funding cuts everything is a priority right now.

I believe that Enfield police and the Metropolitan Police Service as a whole are doing a good job, under immensely difficult circumstances, to keep Londoners safe. However, since 2010 the Government have axed more than £600 million from the Met’s budget and in the next three years they plan to cut several hundred million pounds more. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, has warned that further cuts to the Met’s budget would lead to the loss of 3,000 officers, which is 10% of London’s police force, by 2021. That would mean that London had just 27,500 officers, which would be the lowest level in 19 years, at the same time as London’s population is growing.

The latest figures, which are from December 2017, show that Enfield—just one London borough—has just 504 officers, which is 48 fewer officers than the borough’s target strength. The police are operating with one hand tied behind their back; they simply do not have the officers to do the job. That comes at a time when knife crime in Enfield has risen considerably; it rose by 48% in the last year alone. If the Government are intent on continuing to cut the Met’s budget, what hope is there for vulnerable children and adults who are being exploited by county lines? Do those people not matter? The Government should be under no illusion as to how resource-intensive county lines operations are. The Met must be given the resources it needs to tackle county lines in London.

County lines exploitation is a major issue for London and the UK. As the Prime Minister has said, modern slavery is

“the great human rights issue of our time, and…I am determined that we will make it a national and international mission to rid our world of this barbaric evil.”

Well, Prime Minister, county lines exploitation is modern day slavery, and it is now three years since the National Crime Agency published its first assessment of it. Since then, the police, children’s services and other agencies have called for a national strategy to end this exploitation of vulnerable children and adults. On 19 January 2017, which is almost a year ago to the day, a cross-party group of London councils wrote to the Home Secretary to press the Government to implement a national strategy. So where is it?

The Government must show national leadership on this issue. We urgently require a national strategy to ensure that consistent practice in tackling county lines is applied across all local authorities and police forces in London and throughout the country. We cannot allow more vulnerable children, young people and adults, who currently are all too often invisible to the police and child protection services, to fall between the cracks. The Government must make tackling county lines exploitation in London and across the UK a priority.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) on securing this debate and making a very powerful case in relation to tackling county lines and some of the many issues that come with that.

More observant Members will know that Colchester, despite being Britain’s oldest recorded town and its first capital, is actually 60 miles from London. Although the subject of the debate is county lines exploitation in London, county lines have a far wider reach and impact, as we all know.

Traditionally, although every town and city across our country has been affected by the scourge of drugs and knife crime, they have largely been the preserve of our capital and our major cities, where the vast majority of those particular types of criminality has been prevalent. However, what we are increasingly seeing, partly because of a saturation of the market in London and in some of our other major cities, is that drug dealers and the gangs that peddle these disgusting substances are moving further afield to sell their wares and operating county lines.

I represent a seat in Essex and traditionally we saw such activity taking place in some of the towns on the outskirts of London, but more recently—certainly over the past two and a half years—we have seen criminal gangs are moving further and further out from London, to towns such as Colchester and even to towns further afield, because of the opportunity that such new markets present.

The right hon. Lady made a very powerful case about county lines and why we have to tackle them—in particular, because of the young people involved. In my constituency, we have seen an increase in county line activity. Those listening to this debate outside Westminster Hall may not understand what a “county line” is, and it is important that we actually spell out what it is. It is a network of mobile phone lines that are bought and sold like franchises—[Interruption.] Perhaps the right hon. Lady did explain: I may have misheard. But it is important that the public have an understanding of what county lines are, because, as she rightly said, they often go under the radar and people do not understand how easy it is—particularly for young people—to be sucked in and trapped by these drug gangs in the conveyor belt and cycle that the county lines operation represents.

County lines are phone lines bought and sold, like franchises or small businesses. Often, the people who own them are never involved in touching drugs at all, but they increasingly use young people to spread their networks up and down the country.

In Colchester, we have seen an increase in knife crime, which is hugely regrettable. However, what is really interesting about that increase, and it is why this debate is particularly important, is that predominantly both the victims and perpetrators of knife crime have not been from our town. They have not come from Colchester; they are from London. On one particular night, we had six knife attacks, and every single one of the individuals involved—both the perpetrators and the victims—was from London. They were part of rival drugs gangs who were coming to Colchester to sell drugs, and bringing with them the knives, the intimidation and the violence that come with that activity.

We have also seen an increase in cuckooing. I know that the right hon. Lady touched on this issue, but it is important to spell out what a scourge on our society cuckooing is. Cuckooing is where a drugs gang, often operating through a county line, will come to a town such as Colchester and pick on a vulnerable person, whether that is someone with mental health issues, someone in social housing, a prostitute or someone who is already addicted to class A drugs. The gang will operate from that person’s property, which is often social housing, using that base to exploit that individual or individuals to sell their drugs from the location over the course of a week or two.

An individual came to my constituency office absolutely petrified. He was clearly a class A drug user—he was perfectly honest about that—and he said, “I have had people come to my flat. They came with a gun. They took over my flat.” First, they offered him drugs, which he of course accepted; he was addicted to heroin. He said, “It has got to the point where they will not let me back in my flat. They have taken over.” He was too scared to go back to the flat, because they said that they would kill him. He came to me, and I gave the only advice I thought I could give, which was to go to the police. He went to the police station and he was subsequently arrested, because they went to the flat and found a large quantity of class A drugs. Despite that perhaps being a regrettable outcome, it was probably the best and safest place for him at that point in time. Cuckooing is becoming a major issue because it is happening more and more frequently.

[Ronnie Cowan]

What we are seeing here is that a person with a drug addiction went to the hon. Gentleman looking for help and the best outcome he could find was to be arrested.

[Will Quince]

That is not quite what I said. I said it was the safest place for him because the police were able to take action. What advice should I have given to an individual coming to my constituency office who said an individual with a firearm had taken over his property? What action the police chose to take was up to them. That is not my job as a constituency MP; my job is to protect the individual and other individuals living in my constituency when I hear a report of a firearm. The issue is for the police.

On the wider issue of cuckooing—this is not a party political point; we all agree that we urgently need to tackle this issue across the country—what worries me most is how these drug gangs operating county lines are targeting the young and some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I mentioned that these cases often involve prostitutes, those with mental health issues, those in social housing and class A drug users, but often there are families involved in that scenario, too. Just because someone is a class A drug user, that does not mean they do not have children in the property. If a drug dealer operating a county line comes to a young person’s property and threatens them and their mother, I would not blame that young person for taking action to protect their parent, especially if they are young and vulnerable. That is why it is important that we take a long hard look at how we treat these young people and how we intervene.

I take all the points that the right hon. Member for Enfield North made on support services. We have to do more to put support services in place. Where we identify those young people—I take her point about missing people—who are vulnerable and are involved, or in danger of being involved, in a drug gang or a county line, we have to intervene, but we have to be clear about the action we want to take. It is important that we do not criminalise those young people. We should treat them as victims, because it is dangerous to criminalise them.

I predict that the Minister will say that if a young person is involved in a serious crime—especially a crime that affects another person, such as a stabbing—it is absolutely right that the criminal justice system takes full effect. However, if a young person has clearly been a victim and has been exploited and used as a drug mule carrying drugs about their person, as the right hon. Member for Enfield North said, or has been dealing drugs—it could even be a case of modern slavery—it is important that we send a clear message to that young person that we want to help. We should say, “We will intervene. We want to ensure that we get you back on the path to being fully involved in society.” We should not set them off down the wrong path, which is the danger in labelling them a criminal. What kind of message does that send out? When they are an exploited, vulnerable victim, what path does that set them on for the rest of their life?

We have to be careful how we treat young people in particular. To be clear, drug gangs are increasingly using children as young as eight, nine or 10, potentially entrapping them with gifts such as trainers, phones and other things, at which point they feel completely owned by that individual or drug gang. Sometimes it is worse—sometimes it is physical violence against them or a family member who they love. The point is that we have to intervene and offer them some kind of hope and a way out of a horrific situation.

I am passionate about tackling this issue, and I am keen to work cross-party to ensure we put in place the right measures and make support available, particularly to those young people to help them get out of that potential life of crime. I know the Minister is equally passionate because we have had so many conversations about it. First, I urge her to encourage police forces to work far more closely on the county line issue. We need to get police forces outside London to work far more closely with the Metropolitan police in London, where sadly a lot of the county line activity emanates from. We need to put in more resources to tackle the county line issue. The Government recently put in just under £300,000, so they are taking action, but there is more to do. This is a growing issue that is largely going under the radar. Secondly—potentially this is more of a Justice issue than a Home Office issue—when we intervene and find those young people who are victims, are being exploited and have gone through the most horrific experiences, we should look at them as victims, not criminals.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the contributions of my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince). Both Members spoke with a huge amount of sense, obvious compassion and a clear understanding of the issues. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) on securing the debate. She made a characteristically well-informed and engaging speech, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport said, was thoroughly excellent.

I agree with my right hon. Friend that there should be a co-ordinated national approach to tackle the running of drugs along county lines and that we need to review the way in which we deal with children, young people and vulnerable adults who get themselves caught up in such activity. I also believe that we need to consider tougher sanctions for those directing and driving such activity and to ensure that the Crown Prosecution Service, the police and local authorities have the resources and powers that they need to tackle the problem.

I first learned about the phenomenon of county lines drug running about four years ago, following a visit to my advice surgery by a distressed mother. I can picture her now: she was a woman living three or four roads away from my home in Lewisham; she was originally from Sierra Leone, and spoke limited English; and she was in a state of desperate confusion. Her teenage son had been arrested the previous day in Portsmouth. I asked, “What’s he doing in Portsmouth?” She did not have an answer, but she was scared stiff about what was going on, and what she feared had been going on for a while but could not describe. She was crying out to me, as her Member of Parliament, for help.

The mother said that she could not cope. She talked about strange men hanging around her front door, and the fact that her son would disappear for short periods. She did not know what he was doing, and she asked me to help her find out what was going on. Her son was involved in running drugs from Lewisham to the south coast. There are currently 317 under-25s from Lewisham believed to be involved in that activity, of which about 200 are of school age. They are supplying drugs in 19 different counties. That is 200 school-age children from one London borough out of 32, so the problem is not insignificant.

Last year, as a result of a two-year operation involving the police and the local authority, 174 arrests were made, including 22 key adults. A number of the individuals who were arrested are still awaiting their criminal justice outcomes, but so far 121 years of prison sentences have been handed out collectively. Some 23 kg of class A drugs were seized, with a street value of £4.5 million. Lewisham Council, thanks to the leadership of officers such as Geeta Subramaniam and elected councillors such as Janet Daby, has taken a proactive approach to tackling the problem. Some of my colleagues have spoken about the sorts of measures that have been taken. Those people at the council are determined to stop the involvement of children, and let us be clear that some of the individuals involved in this activity are children. I get the sense, though, that they are frustrated.

[Ronnie Cowan]

I may be putting myself on the line here again, but I refer the hon. Lady to Neil Woods, who was an undercover police cop and drug officer for 14 years. He put his life on the line to fight against such people. He probably knows more about cuckooing, county lines, and the production and distribution of drugs than all of us put together. Neil himself estimates, having worked for 14 years and put people away for thousands of years in cumulative prison terms, that he disrupted the supply of class A drugs by a total of two hours across his entire career. I am not saying that we should not be trying to do it, but how we are going about it clearly is not working.

[Heidi Alexander]

I have some sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman says, because I think that what happens in prison to rehabilitate offenders and to take them off the path that they are on is just as important as how many years they spend there. I am not sure at the moment that the system operates correctly, so I have some sympathy with his point. However, the point I am making is about the scale and significance of the activity in one part of London, and the action that is being taken by the local authority and the police to try to tackle it. As I will come on to say, that is very difficult in a time of constrained resources and with the funding pressure that the Metropolitan police and local authorities such as Lewisham are under.

As I was saying, I get the sense, from talking to police and council staff, that they are frustrated in trying to tackle the problem. A number of years ago, there was an operation called Operation Pibera, in which the local authority, in conjunction with the CPS and the police, tried to bring charges of trafficking under the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Unlike Enfield, they were not successful in securing those prosecutions. They wanted to bring those charges because the sentences associated with that sort of conviction would be longer than for the other lesser offences with which the individuals could have been charged.

The guys who are in control of the activity and who are luring, and sometimes coercing, children, teenagers and vulnerable adults into getting involved should feel the full heat of the law. They are people who will stab someone who wants to get out of doing the drug running. They are taking advantage of kids and adults with mental health problems by, in effect, getting them to do their dirty work. It is despicable, and rather than simply going for the low-hanging fruit of charging the individuals found with the drugs or the money on the day, there needs to be a mechanism in place to hold the guy at the top responsible.

As I understand it, the Modern Slavery Act was drafted primarily to deal with problems around individuals forced into sex work and domestic servitude. The running of drugs along county lines is different. Some of the underlying principles may be similar, but I would be interested to know whether the Minister agrees that it might be sensible to review whether amending the Act could make it easier to bring successful prosecutions, to ensure that those calling the shots on the county lines are held responsible.

It has been put to me that one of the changes that might be considered is changing the law to require the police and the CPS to prove, in relation to drug offences committed by, for example, teenagers on the county lines, that they were not being exploited, but were knowingly and willingly involved in the activity. The Minister would need to consider that issue in the round, but I would be interested to know whether she is looking at amending the Modern Slavery Act in any way. I believe that some 14-year-olds will know exactly what they are doing, but others will be victims, and we need to take our responsibilities to those children and young people seriously. Just because they might not be cared for, that does not mean that they do not matter.