Knife Crime

Ross Thomson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When I was walking around with the local police looking for knives on a local council estate, I talked to them about the impact of the cuts on their job, and they said the impact was very severe and that they could not do the things they wanted to do. For example, one of the things they do not have the resources to do is to go into schools to normalise the relationship between children and the police so that a bit more trust can be built up between them. Such interventions are absolutely crucial, but at the moment they are not happening in the way they should.

I welcome the Mayor of London’s recent knife crime strategy, as well as the work of many colleagues, such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), in setting up the Youth Violence Commission. The Home Office’s flagship scheme on ending gang violence and exploitation is well intentioned, but with just under £100,000 of funding for this year, it does not have enough money, and it also focuses predominately on gangs. It does not reflect the complex reality that has developed during the past few years, and it requires cash-starved local authorities to fund half the cost of the programme if they want it to be implemented in their areas.

I want to press the Minister to give this issue the breadth of focus it deserves. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, has herself said that

“we absolutely cannot deal with this problem through enforcement alone.”

Specifically, I am calling on the Government to develop a coherent, 10-year knife crime strategy that co-ordinates work across departmental and party lines, puts preventive and acute resources on an equal footing, and recognises the interdependent nature of the public services in play. The hugely successful teenage pregnancy strategy implemented by the previous Labour Government resulted in record lows of teenage pregnancy, with a 51% drop over 16 years. Two things characterised that programme: the first was the length of time devoted to it—10 years; and the second was the recognition that no single Department could solve the problem alone.

I will not set out tonight, nor could I, what a 10-year strategy should look like, but I know plenty of people who could help us to write one. I want to highlight four things that must be part of the mix. The first is resources. At many stages of a young person’s life, the help they need is to be shown that they have choices, that getting involved in violence is not the way, that they can have a future and that people care, but such interventions simply do not exist. Such interventions might be in schools, to teach people about positive relationships and emotional responses, or through child and adolescent mental health services. They might take the form of a conversation with a policeman or a youth worker, or someone who can help them to think about their CV and their job options. Funding cuts across our public services—policing, youth work, education and health—have left a huge vacuum that social media and criminal gangs are filling, so we cannot duck the issue of resources or the lack of them. It comes up at every turn when we talk to anyone with first-hand experience of the problem.

My second point is that when I ask young people what has changed over the past couple of years, the conversation repeatedly returns to social media and the online world. Social media is undeniably fuelling an escalation in the cycle of violence among young people. There is a growing trend of documented attacks and threats between rival groups, of violating others and of widespread bullying through tools such as Snapchat and Instagram. We should look not just at hosting sites such as YouTube, but at channels that share and spread this content, often distributing it to thousands of people without consideration of the messages behind it or the age of those viewing it. All this provides the catalyst for an ever more extreme and condensed revenge cycle of violence. The smallest violation can now be broadcast to hundreds if not thousands of people, and it can escalate to face-to-face confrontation in a matter of hours. I urge the Minister to raise this issue with the Home Secretary. The Government have taken a strong approach to extremist content online, but this type of content is in many ways equally alluring and damaging.

My third point is that there are widespread concerns that schools are being overwhelmed by the scale of the issues they face and, as with the police, the spill-over issues of other services not being able to cope. Funding is absolutely key in that respect, but there are also increasing pressures to do with academic attainment. We have to ask whether some schools are bypassing their broader social responsibilities in the drive to make good on their bold claims about pass rates. There is particular concern about some academy chains. Every single agency that I have spoken to over the summer reports increasing levels of managed moves or expulsions, often for children with undiagnosed behaviour or mental health disorders, when the school simply cannot cope or does not want the child there.

Moving children to other schools or pupil referral units is a worrying trend. One organisation described to me the straight line between PRUs and gangs. We should look hard at whether there is sufficient accountability, particularly in academies, before condemning a child to a PRU.

Voluntary groups are an important bridge to young people, but they report increased difficulties in accessing schools. Again, academies seem particular culprits, preferring internal processes and systems to the learned experience and cultural competence that many voluntary sector organisations offer.

[Ross Thomson (Aberdeen South) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this important debate to the Chamber. Sadly, a young boy in my constituency lost his life while at school because another pupil had taken a knife with him. Every parent should be able to send their child to school in the knowledge that they will be safe there. Does the hon. Lady agree that there is some merit in looking at teachers’ powers and whether they should have the right to search pupils if they are suspicious or concerned that there could be a weapon in the classroom?

[Sarah Jones]

It is something that we need to look at. Teachers are overstretched in many ways: many support staff posts have been cut and teachers have to deal with children with special educational needs without the necessary resources. It is therefore hard to give them extra responsibilities for intervening if they believe a knife has been brought into school. However, we have to take action. The 10-year knife crime strategy, which would comprise a suite of actions and many different interventions, is the solution rather than one thing or another. There is talk of screens to walk through to go into school, but to me and many others that is an alarming prospect that we need to try to avoid if we can. However, if people are taking knives into school, we have clearly reached the point when intervention is required.

My final point is that we might look at the growing body of evidence that suggests we should view knife crime and youth violence as a public health issue. There is much good work on that in this country and abroad. The Minister will know that in America, across major cities such as Chicago, Boston and New York, youth violence is approached as a major public health issue, and tackled as an infectious epidemic. That includes interrupting activity at source, with people from the local community trained to intervene and work with young people; outreach workers working intensively with young people for six months or a year; and a programme of community and education activity to shift the norms around behaviour and expectation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Newton]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman that prevention is vitally important—working with young people to explain the risks they are taking if they carry a knife and, once they get into the criminal justice system, making sure they get all the support they need to be diverted from such harmful behaviour. A key part of the announcement we made in July was that we will be doing more work at a community level. We are setting up the new £500,000 community fund to support those very successful grassroots organisations we have heard about this evening, which are key partners for us in the Home Office, such as St Giles and Redthread. I am sure the hon. Member for Croydon Central has had meetings with those excellent organisations in London. We work with and partner such organisations and part-fund them, along with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the Mayor of London, to make sure the services are there, and that we are identifying the most vulnerable young people and giving them the support they need to make different choices in their lives.

Building on that evidence base and what we have learned in London, services are being expanded across the United Kingdom. We have heard about the excellent work done in A&E departments—the “teachable moments” that happen in our major trauma centres here in London. The Government are part-funding the expansion of that into cities around the UK this year. So we are working at pace with determination using the evidence base of what works—a lot of that has been learned in London—to make sure other parts of the country and communities that are experiencing such problems are getting the support they need.

That brings me back to the hon. Lady’s primary ask that we work together across the House to look at both a national and a local response. Since we launched our strategy, we have been building the capacity in the system to understand this very complex issue: it is sometimes driven by gangs, and sometimes by organised and serious crime; and whereas carrying knives and participating in knife crime disproportionately involves young people, people of other ages are involved as well. We have funded a whole series of local and area-based reviews. One was done in Croydon; the hon. Lady might not have had a chance to speak to the chief executive of her local authority or her borough commander about that work, but it was very useful. We have had very good feedback from boroughs and places all over the country, enabling all the agencies in the community—social services, youth offending services, schools and teachers, voluntary groups, communities and counsellors—to share data and build a picture of what is happening in their communities, so that they can properly target their resources to join up those services to support young people in the communities to make different choices.

That work extends beyond the immediate localities to deal with the county lines issues. This sort of crime is being exported out of London, Manchester and Liverpool to other parts of the country, so we are funding not only local area reviews but national strategic reviews. With that better intelligence and data, we are making a real difference by joining up the different parts of the public services with businesses and voluntary sector organisations, which are so capable of working with young people, to restrict access to knives. That work is being scaled up at pace to meet the challenge that we undoubtedly face today.

[Ross Thomson]

The Minister talks about knife crime being exported out of London and other cities; it plagues the whole of the United Kingdom. Education, justice and health are devolved matters in Scotland, but will she commit to engaging with the Scottish Government to look at how we could adopt a consistent approach to dealing with this issue across the United Kingdom?

[Sarah Newton]

I can absolutely assure my hon. Friend that I am already doing that in relation to all the new measures on preventing young people from getting access to knives and on banning zombie knives. We have asked the Scottish Government to do those things. I have not had time to do justice to the huge amount of information that we have been given this evening, but I want to carry on this discussion. I very much welcome the way in which the hon. Lady has presented the debate. This is a nationwide issue that requires all of us in this place to reach out and work with each other to bring an end to these appalling crimes—