Organised Crime: Young People’s Safety

Ronnie Cowan Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans, and to speak on behalf of the Scottish National party. I thank the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) for securing the debate. What we have heard about county lines is undoubtedly alarming—the sheer scale of the problem should give us pause for thought. According to one estimate, 46,000 children in England and 4,000 teenagers in London are being exploited. The National Crime Agency notes that the evidence gap means that the true scale of exploitation remains hidden.

Reports have highlighted the link between violent drug gangs and the exploitation of vulnerable people in the north-east of Scotland, particularly around Aberdeen, Fraserburgh and Peterhead. In line with what has been discussed in the debate, the experience there is of the threat or use of violence to exert power, particularly on vulnerable young people. In my constituency, drug deaths have more than doubled in the past decade.

The interconnected drug market that exists throughout the UK means that it is in all our interests to share best practice about how to combat this destructive force and to identify where Government policy is ineffective. That is a key point, because it is precisely our drug policies that have gifted a lucrative market to organised crime gangs who have the money, power and expertise to thrive in such an environment. The trafficking and exploitation of young people is simply an extension of their power.

Understandably, we seek vengeance. We want to see those responsible for the violence and abuse—those who exploit these vulnerable young kids—locked up, but experience tells us that whenever we incarcerate somebody for dealing, pushing or distributing, there is always somebody else in the background to step forward and fill their boots. Neil Woods was an undercover policeman for 14 years. In his book, “Good Cop, Bad War”, he outlines how he put his life at risk, day in, day out, with the aim of locking up drug dealers. Neil reckons that his actions locked people up for thousands of years, and disrupted the supply of class A drugs for a few hours.

Yesterday, there was a well attended meeting in Committee Room 10—better attended than this debate, unfortunately; where are all our fellow MPs? Most people there were serving cops or police and crime commissioners. A common phrase, repeated throughout that meeting, was, “We can’t arrest our way out of a drugs war.” That is from serving law enforcement agencies throughout the United Kingdom. We need solutions, not retribution. I understand it—if one of my kids was sold a tab at a music festival, and that tab could kill them, as we have seen time and again, I would want to hunt down the person responsible and nail them to a wall. That might make me feel good, but it would not stop the distribution, and it would not help the next parent going through the same agony that I had just been put through.

Anyone’s Child is an organisation set up by people who have lost loved ones to the drug war. Its stance is not retribution but that we need to change the legal framework and our drugs policy if we are ever going to make things better. I fully agree with Anyone’s Child and Transform that if we regulate the drug market, we will remove one of the financial incentives to enslave young people. That will also enable authorities to identify those children as victims of modern slavery, rather than criminalise them and drive them further into a criminal underworld.

In becoming involved in a life of crime, even unwillingly, those children are learning to become intimidating and violent. They have to, because the scariest dealers do not get informed on. We must be honest in recognising that that development is a direct result of the police pursuing those children. The more we try to clamp down on the drug problem, the more the violence will escalate. That is the reality on our streets. Indeed, the Home Office’s 2010 drug strategy recognised the unintended consequences of enforcement.

I completely agree with former undercover drugs detective Neil Woods, the chairman of Law Enforcement Action Partnership UK, who said:

“How do people think these kids get recruited? Do people imagine that they just get randomly approached by dealers or cold called asking them if they fancy a life of crime? They are recruited through the cannabis market with the most promising youths being recruited for a County Line, dealing heroin and crack. By regulating the market we separate the link between organised crime and teenage consumers.”

Neil Woods clearly understands that disrupting the supply chain is not enough. A drugs market in flux is a drugs markets of aggressive competition where violence and intimidation will become more common as competing interests try to maximise more lucrative profits. Expendable young people who are enslaved within the system will not benefit from even more violence and turbulence.

Neither are we helping children caught up in county lines by employing them as so-called child spies. That practice casts moral ambiguity on the UK Government at a time when they are criticising the exploitation carried out by others. I am at a loss to see how we can reconcile the UK Government’s responsibility to protect minors with simultaneously exposing them to abuse rings for the sake of intelligence gathering.

Do we fully understand the long-term physical and mental ramifications of using young people in that way? Is there a clear code of practice on how children’s welfare is protected while working with the police or security services? How does an authorising officer weigh the intelligence benefits against the potential impact on the juvenile source? A report published by the House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee suggests that the UK Government do not have satisfactory answers to those questions.

I am encouraged that the Scottish Government take a different approach to combating violent crime. As was mentioned earlier, a peak of 137 murders in Scotland prompted the formation of the violence reduction unit. By taking a public health approach to violence, the VRU and the Scottish Government have made significant headway in preventing such crimes. Instead of driving young offenders into prisons, they offer them alternatives—training, mentoring and employment opportunities—thereby breaking the cycle of reoffending. Since 2007, violent crime has almost halved in Scotland and crimes involving a weapon are down by two thirds. That did not happen by accident.

Likewise, I would like our drugs problem to be reclassified as a public health issue and regulated, as I mentioned earlier. If we were to take that road, it would reduce the burden on law enforcement and the NHS, and the saved funding could be invested in treatment, rehabilitation and harm reduction instead. By taking the approach that I have highlighted on violent crime and drug addiction, we can make significant strides against county lines.

We should not be handing the market to violent criminals, and we should not allow the economic conditions to exist that incentivise gangs to exploit children. Legalising and regulating will put the Government in control and drastically reduce the illegal exploitation of children. Finally, I put on the record my appreciation for the work of Transform, LEAP UK, Release and Anyone’s Child, which continue to produce invaluable research.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Security and Economic Crime (Mr Ben Wallace)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I thank the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) for securing this debate. I take the issue incredibly seriously, as do my colleagues. As the Minister for Security, my portfolio covers what we have just seen in the Chamber—the GRU, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism. However, the part of my portfolio that scares me the most, which I know I will see in my neighbourhood, my friends’ neighbourhoods and my child’s school, is serious organised crime.

One has to be very unlucky to be a victim of terrorism. One has to be even more unlucky to be a victim of an espionage event. The scale of organised crime and the empowerment of those networks in the past few years poses a threat not only to our young people of all classes through grooming, the growth in the use of drugs and the fuelling of that growth, but to all our communities. County lines have enabled crime to be exported into large parts of the United Kingdom that never had violent crime or serious organised crime. They might have had the local dealer or the local burglar, but they have never had the type of organised violence that is now wreaking havoc on their streets.

I heard the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), whom I have known over the years. He was a Home Office Minister in 2008, I think. What he said was incredibly pertinent. It was a well-crafted speech, if nothing else, and as ever I will horrify my officials by not reading my well-crafted speech or quoting endless facts about fund Y or fund B. I have been in this House long enough to know about listing funds—I have listened from the Opposition Benches to other Governments doing it. I am happy to write to Members with the list of funds for communities.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that, to fix this problem, we will need to drive integration both horizontally and vertically. We need to integrate the community response, the local authority response, the healthcare response and the voluntary response with the vertical driving together of local policing, regional policing through the regional organised crime units, and national policing. We will need to do that to get some of the very serious gangsters at the top and bring to bear, where we can, the weight of the state to weaken them. That is not often going to be driven by the experts—the experts know what to do and are just all in different buildings in different parts of Government. It takes a ministerial drive.

One of the weaknesses in our system—I would be interested in whether the hon. Gentleman agrees—is the length of time we as Ministers have to drive the system. It might be one year in the Home Office. I have done this job for two years, and I happen to have a background in counter-terrorism. I went through all those lessons in counter-terrorism in the early 1990s in terms of sharing intelligence, ensuring we tackle permissive communities and supporting communities in distancing terrorists from that support base. I happened to start at a run, but I have been here for two years and who knows how much longer.

One of the strengths we have in our system is to drive through, to knock heads together and to box clever within Whitehall, but it is a challenge. How do I get the DCLG—I forget the new name; it is too long now they put an H in front of it—or the Cabinet Office to do something? How do I lobby the Chief Secretary to the Treasury that something needs to be done? We can sit here and talk about cuts and I can talk about debt, but it is also about priorities. If Opposition Members were on the Government side of the House, they too would be having discussions about priorities and where to spend money. We have to have stability.

The great thing about the work that the hon. Member for West Ham has done is that it is more collaborative. The way she has gone about tackling and highlighting the threat of county lines is an example to us all. We are all trying to find a solution collectively, both locally and nationally. If I may, I will address her points rather than those of other Members because of the short time available. She eloquently set out her asks.

First, there is an ask from me on social media and communication. What has accelerated county lines? What has gripped? Organised crime has existed for many years. Violence has existed in some pockets. What has accelerated county lines is social media and secure communication. There is à la carte drugs-buying from people who are posted. Sometimes they are groomed and abused, and sometimes they are willing. They go to other towns and boroughs and people order drugs à la carte through WhatsApp and Instagram. That is communicated safely to the drug barons and the drug buyers with end-to-end encryption. People can buy anything. There is an incredibly good documentary by a girl called Stacey Dooley on BBC—it is about kids buying drugs—that brings the issue home. She went to WhatsApp to show the research, and they would not even answer the door. The fuel on the fire has been that safe environment.

[Ronnie Cowan]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Wallace]

I do not have time. I remember Labour introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which is where Labour brought in youth covert human intelligence sources. It was not a Conservative thing—it has been going on since 1999. When I was in the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National party did not oppose it either. Using young people as CHIS has been around for many years.

When we introduce legislation to try to seek ways into encrypted technology there is often a knee-jerk reaction from the likes of Liberty, and too many people go along with it. Legislation is vital if we are to get into the top of those drug gangs and find out what is going on. The head of a cartel was arrested in Glasgow, I think last year. He had military-grade encryption to order directly from cartels in central America. He even distributed to the cartels and then distributed drugs back into Glasgow. We have to tackle that because that has been part of the fuel.

We also have to tackle education. What do we need to spot? It is the cuckooing and the vulnerable people. It is about educating local people, especially those in the leafy suburbs who have never seen it, and who do not know that a young person who has suddenly appeared in a flat is the victim of trafficking. Human trafficking leaks into the issue. There are nail bars up and down the country often manned by Vietnamese people who take only cash. Those people are trafficked 99% of the time, but in middle-class areas everyone still goes in to get their nails done. No one says, “There’s something odd here.” It is in plain sight, and we are working with our local authorities—the regional organised crime units are also working with them—to improve spotting the signs.

On reducing violent crime, I asked my officials to go and see an interesting project in Glasgow. I do not pretend that there have not been cuts to police, but in Glasgow, even in environments where there were falling police numbers, knife crime incidence has been massively reduced, which shows that working better together can sometimes make a significant difference. Some great work has been done in the Scottish Government on tackling that, which is important.

It leaks into the wider grooming piece. I see it in Prevent and in counter-terrorism. It is the same method whether it is sexual exploitation, crime or whatever. We have to take on the social media. That is why we are consulting, including on introducing regulations in this House. I went slightly freelance at one stage and said, “The polluter can pay.” If we have to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on police, I know where I would get that money from. They need to step up to the plate. There is the technology and we can do more. We have to tackle grooming and put people in the category of groomers. They are not glamorous. They are the same as paedophiles. They are dirty little rotten groomers who are sacrificing young people.

I saw a very successful Merseyside operation that was brilliantly done. It goes back to how we are pursuing the organised crime. As the hon. Member for West Ham said, I want to see the bad guys at the top get it. A brilliant operation was done in Merseyside where county lines were coming up into Lancashire. The police went top and bottom and worked with local authorities. Good police forces have something called local organised crime panels. Chief Constable Mike Barton in Durham has used local authorities on a regular basis. On such panels are the Environment Agency and representatives from local government. A whole load of government agencies are on the panel, saying, “If we can’t arrest them for X, we’re going to make their life a misery. We’re going to do them for fly-tipping, and then we’re going to publicly expose them and take the glamour off them.” That is happening, and with good results. Other areas could follow suit better. Some do and some do not.

I totally agree with what was said about witness protection and having a trusted system. I worked in intelligence. If no one picks up the phone, we are flying blind. No matter how many neighbourhood policemen and women we have, if people are doing it in their bedrooms on secure comms we need someone to pick up the phone and to trust the system. That is really important.

This year and next year we are going to move witness protection away from the regions. It will be administered in the regions but it will be nationally co-ordinated by the National Crime Agency. However, the Met police has not opted to do that. I urge the hon. Member for West Ham, as a London MP—this is about working with everyone—to have a word with the Mayor of London about whether that is the right way to tackle it. Some of the biggest exporters of county lines are London into the regions and Merseyside into the regions. I can say that because my home plain is Lancashire. Between the two, we need to think with our Mayors about how we can tackle some of that permissive society—some of it is permissive.

It is not just the raw victims—there is a hard edge, which is why we sometimes have to use youth as CHIS. I can write to the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) with the many safeguards that we put in place around that risking. It is overseen by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, Lord Justice Fulford. It has been in existence since 1999. Sometimes—very rarely—we do it. We have to do it if we are to penetrate where encryption is used, and some of the county lines where it is not. It is not something we want to do, but sometimes it is useful and we have to do it.

I would be delighted to take up the case of Ashley and Nathan if the hon. Member for West Ham and I could have a meeting. How they have been treated is outrageous. That is not the message we want to send, and I will do everything to ensure that they are given the support that they should be given. I had experience of settling people who were under threat of death if they were caught, and some of them tragically were killed.

Finally, the hon. Members for Gedling and for West Ham asked what we are doing on the organisation to tackle crime. Some 128 tonnes of class A drugs were snatched last year. Thousands of people were arrested by the NCA and 628 guns were seized. As with the Contest strategy, which started under Labour and has been refined with mistakes learnt from and driven into the fingertips of Britain, we have got to a place over the last few years where the policing response is in the right place. We have regional organised crime units, we have the National Crime Agency above that and we have local forces. If somebody goes to visit their local regional organised crime unit they will see that collaboratively such units are bringing to bear some very good resource. I am happy to facilitate that for whoever wants to go.

The Met are not in the ROCU—it chooses to do it separately. I have lots of faith that the Met has the resource—it has much more resource per head than we do in Lancashire and Merseyside—but there is a plus and a downside to that. It is well worth exploring with the Mayor of London whether he thinks that that is the right apparatus. The regional crime units can bring specialists and specialist surveillance. We often find that county lines cross county borders and constabulary borders. That is why the regional organised crime units work. My one in the north-west is based in Warrington. I will visit it again, and regularly. I have been around all of them in the country. Part of what they do is about gathering better intelligence, as the hon. Member for Gedling said, and mapping organised crime groups. Individual forces have been pretty weak at finding a common denominator. Cumbria claims to have more organised crime groups per head than Merseyside or some other parts of the country. That is a bit different, so we have to improve the intelligence.

I am happy to facilitate visits to the NCA where we can. With the upskilling and the changes that we implemented last year to conditions to make them compete better, we are getting much better capability. We are starting to deliver and bringing to bear purely intelligence-led collaborative working. I am not deaf to concerns about neighbourhood policing or cuts to the police. I know that there have been cuts to the police—I do not deny that. We can sit here and argue all day about why that had to happen and whether our priorities are right, but I recognise that we have to do something about it and we are going to try. Certainly it is about prevention as much as arrest. That is true of so many crimes, even this one—we cannot arrest our way out of it. I will not go down the long path of legalisation, but we have to keep empowering local authorities. I will send hon. Members the lists of what we do in local authorities.

One thing that I see from my desk at the Home Office—the hon. Member for Gedling will have seen this—is lots of people not bidding for funds. Colleagues understandably come and complain, and I say, “But your force or local authority didn’t actually bid into it.” I am very happy to share that with anyone if they come and say that they have seen the fund and no one has got it in their community. I can find out about it, and we will go together. We will go to Brighton and say, “Why didn’t you bid for it?” Not everybody can have the funds, but it is interesting that there are some who always bid and get them and some who never bid at all.

Mr Evans, I will sit down now and let the hon. Member for West Ham wind up the debate.