Serious Violence

Sajid Javid Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sajid Javid)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered serious violence.

We cannot ignore the rise of serious violence. Already this year we have seen seven fatal stabbings on London’s streets. I have met families of victims and seen at first hand the devastation that brutal violence can cause. I have seen police on the frontline working flat out to make our streets safer, and we must of course all do that we can to help them.

As Home Secretary, my No. 1 priority is to keep Britain safe. To do this, I am tackling serious violence head-on. As the threat has increased, so too has our response. I have listened to expert advice and acted wherever and whenever I could. I have been relentless in this mission so far, but it is clear that more must be done to stop this senseless slaughter; for the sake of all our young people, we are determined to deliver. That is why we published our serious violence strategy last April. We set out a tough law enforcement response that made it clear that this alone was not enough.

The strategy placed a strong focus on prevention and early intervention, preventing young people from being drawn into violence in the first place. It stressed the importance of a multi-agency response, with education, health, social services, housing, youth services and others all playing a part. The strategy also pinpointed the importance of tackling the drivers of serious violence, including the changes in drugs markets. Changes in the way drugs dealers operate and the rise of county lines gangs are fuelling the brutality on our streets. Social media also play a part, with gangs taunting each other online and ratcheting up tension and the risk of reprisal attacks. The strategy addressed those and other risk factors, such as exclusion from school. It set out our plans to do all we can to reduce serious violence.

We are delivering on the commitments we made in the strategy, and we are doing much more. I would like to take this opportunity to update the House on some of the progress we have made so far. First, we are tackling the root causes of violence and investing in our young people’s future. Our early intervention youth fund of £22 million is already supporting 29 projects in England and Wales, and more than £17 million has already been allocated to projects delivering interventions to young people at risk of criminal involvement, gang exploitation or county lines. The remainder of the money has been earmarked to help young people over the next two years. Indeed, our investment is increasing, with an additional £200 million for the youth endowment fund.

Secondly, we are taking a multi-agency public health approach to tackling violent crime. Cracking down on serious violence will take the whole of society: everyone has to play a part, so in October I launched this comprehensive new approach. This was underpinned by a package of measures including the youth endowment fund and the independent drugs misuse review. We will consult shortly on a new statutory duty on all Government Departments and public agencies to tackle serious violence. This will ensure that the whole of the public sector is playing its part to the max, working together on serious violence with everyone treating it as a priority.

Thirdly, we have introduced the Offensive Weapons Bill. We are taking a tough law enforcement approach to ensure that those who turn to violence have nowhere to hide. The Bill will close the net around violent criminals by giving the police more powers to tackle knives, acids and firearms. It will make it harder for young people to possess and purchase these dangerous weapons. The Bill will shortly complete its passage through the House of Lords.

Fourthly, I have announced the introduction of knife crime prevention orders. I have been clear that I will not sit back and wait another decade for the current cycle of violence to end. We continue to look at what more we can do, so no options are off the table if they can save lives. The police asked for this extra tool, so I intend to introduce these orders through an amendment to the Bill. Some people have expressed concerns, and I understand that. They have suggested that the orders are designed to criminalise young people, but that is absolutely not the case. The orders will be preventive, not a punishment. They will enable the police and other agencies to help those who are most vulnerable to carrying a knife to escape a life of escalating violence.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Does this mean that when a person has a knife crime prevention order placed against their name, a police officer will be able to come along and check that they are not carrying a knife, just in a random way?

[Sajid Javid]

I would not quite say that it will be in a random way. The orders can be placed only with the permission of the courts. A police officer will suggest that an order is placed on an individual, but the courts will independently oversee that. The orders can carry a number of restrictions. They will be used, for example, in cases where the police believe there is a high risk of an individual being drawn into carrying knives and even using them, perhaps because he or she has been hanging out with the wrong kind of people, including those who have already been convicted of gang membership, carrying knives or serious violence. The measures will allow the police to ensure that the order is being observed, but I would not use the phrase “in a random way”.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my right hon. Friend for letting me intervene again to rephrase my question. I do not mean stopping someone in a “random” way, but in a checking way to ensure that the knife crime prevention order is working and that, if the police are worried, they can stop the person and just check him or her.

[Sajid Javid]

I agree. My hon. Friend puts it appropriately. It is worth taking this opportunity to emphasise that the whole purpose of the order is to prevent people, especially young people, from being drawn into a life of crime in the first place. It is a preventive measure. The police have asked for it and it is supported by the Mayor of London. The serious violence taskforce has discussed it with experts, and it should be considered carefully by the House.

Fifthly, we are doing what we can to dismantle county lines—a horrific and often highly violent form of criminal child exploitation. We have provided £3.6 million to establish a new national county lines co-ordination centre. This will enhance intelligence sharing across the country to ensure that vulnerable children are being identified and safeguarded, and we are already starting to see some good results. Since the centre became fully operational in September, it has carried out two separate weeks of co-ordinated national action, resulting in over 1,100 arrests and 1,000 individuals safeguarded.

Sixthly, we are supporting the police response to serious violence. We know that the demands on police are high, and rising violent crime is stretching them even further. That is why we are giving them the support they need, raising police funding by up to £970 million next year, including council tax. I am delighted that police and crime commissioners collectively plan to strengthen their forces as a result and are consulting on plans to use their additional funding to recruit 2,800 officers. This will help to fight serious violence on the ground. It represents the biggest uplift in police funding since 2010, yet it is notable that some Members did not vote for the settlement.

We continue to back Operation Spectre—co-ordinated national police action on knife crime. The results of this latest drive speak for themselves, with over 1,000 arrests and more than 9,000 knives already taken off the streets. In addition, last year I announced £1.4 million to support a new national police hub to tackle gang-related activity online. It will be fully operational from May, focusing on disrupting criminality and referring content to social media companies to be removed. These companies must be prepared to do much more, and I have already been very clear that I am prepared to legislate if they do not play their part.

Finally, we are acting to tackle the drivers of serious violence. As part of our public health package, I launched an independent drugs misuse review to investigate how the trade is fuelling serious violence. Earlier this month I appointed Professor Dame Carol Black to lead that vital work, and I take this opportunity to thank her for her efforts.

I hope the importance that I place on tackling serious violence is very clear. I have no greater priority than saving lives, providing peace of mind that our loved ones will be safe when they step out the door, and making everyone feel secure on our streets. I have set out our approach and the range of work that is under way to try to achieve those aims, how that has been stepped up since I became Home Secretary, and how we will continue to strive to do more. This Conservative Government are clear that this senseless violence must stop, and we will do everything in our power to make sure that happens. I commend this motion to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I have worked with the Home Secretary and the Minister on these issues, and I am grateful to them for extending an invitation to me to the serious violence taskforce.

[Sajid Javid]

May I take this opportunity to thank the right hon. Gentleman for his membership of the serious violence taskforce and the hugely important contribution he makes?

[Mr Lammy]

I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that.

This is a very serious issue. Over the almost 20 years that I have been in public life, very sadly, I have had to comfort far too many parents who have lost their children to violence. In fact, when I reflect on my career one day, and this is an apposite day on which to say this, as a member of the serious violence taskforce moves off in a different direction—I am of course thinking of the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna)—it is right to say that two cases stand out in my mind. The first is the young woman, Pauline Peart, who, at the beginning of my political career back in 2003, was shot in a car in my constituency and lost her life. The other was on bank holiday last year, when a young woman, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, was also shot and killed.

It is right to say that that event sparked the current national concern about violent crime in our country. At that point, there was a lot of comment about the murder rate in London overtaking that of New York. I do not think we are quite in that place, but it nevertheless caused tremendous alarm. I think it was because it was a young woman who found herself in those circumstances, just having walked out of her home with a friend to go a newsagent’s, and lost her life, that it caused such concern on that public holiday.

I guess the important thing in such a debate—this subject is probably the one I have spoken about more than other subject in this Chamber and in this House—is to ask: is the situation getting worse, is it stable or is it getting better? My judgment is that we have not got over the problem, and the situation feels significantly worse over the last period than it has done in the past. I have seen other spikes. I recall the spike back in 2008, and I remember that Ken Livingstone was the Mayor of London, but lost his post in part because crime became a very central issue in the campaign. There have been spikes over this period, but we are clearly in the grip of something at the moment.

I want to reflect briefly on some of the contexts of this spike and the national concern. The first is that, once upon a time—when I started, we talked about yardie gangs and Operation Trident had just been set up—I really thought this problem, which we had imported almost from downtown America, would go. It does not feel like that today; sadly, it feels almost a permanent feature of our urban life, and of course it has spread to areas that are very different from my own constituency. That is the first context that is very disturbing.

Why is that? We tend to focus on the violence and on the knives and the guns, but the real issue that drives much of this is not the knives or the guns. It is drugs, money and demand, as well as the increasing quality of cocaine across our country and the drop in price of that product. It is prolific, and I was first struck by how prolific it is when sitting in Highbury magistrates court behind a young man—I think he was 17—who had been arrested for trafficking that drug on county lines, and I was staggered that he had been arrested in Aberdeen. What was my young constituent doing in Aberdeen, when I have never been to Aberdeen? I wish that I had been to Aberdeen, but I have not been there. I thought, “Why was he there?” He was there because it turns out there is quite a rich market for cocaine in Aberdeen. There is a middle-class life, with some money and some spend, and like a lot of places here in London and a lot of parts of our country, cocaine is particularly rife.

I welcome the review by Dame Carol Black that has been announced. This does open broader questions about drugs in our country, about the war on drugs and its failure, about our position and the repositioning of public policy on drugs, and—I have to raise this with the Home Secretary—the successive cuts in our Border Force. If we want enforcement on drugs and not to relax our position—although I think that is highly unlikely for cocaine—we have to police our borders.

When I met people at the National Crime Agency recently, they explained that they cannot possibly prevent the vast majority of drugs from coming into this country, although they do their best. Our Border Force is seriously stretched to police the market that is coming across the Atlantic, up through Spain, or across from Holland.

Drugs are the first major issue, and then it collides. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the Opposition spokesman, has raised this, and I hate it being such a partisan issue, but there are real issues at a local authority level. Local authorities set the strategies for youth. They set the strategies for youth violence. They do it alongside the police—we turn to the police so often—but much of this falls to local authorities. My sense—I got around a lot when I was doing the review for the Government on the disproportionality of the criminal justice system for black and ethnic minorities—is that it is patchy across the country. It is not just patchy in terms of strategy and approach, but in terms of resource to address some of the problems, so investment in new services is important. It certainly means that issues such as how the pupil referral units are working and how alternative provision is working are central to this discussion.

The subject has come up in the serious violence taskforce and I remain concerned about the amount of young people who are effectively excluded from school, who are not getting an effective education and who are falling into the hands of adults who are exploiting them. That takes us to another issue: how do we address not the young people but the grown men who are exploiting them and trafficking them across the country? Is the law robust enough to send the message to these modern-day pimps—because that is how we should describe them—who are exploiting these young people in this way? The frustration is that we can go back quite a number of years, back to Dickens, and there will always be adults there to exploit young people. We have to bear down very hard on them.

The other colliding force affecting all young people across our country is of course social media and technology and, in this context, some of the rabbit holes down which young people can go in relation to particular types of music and particular types of violence. My concern is that much of that remains heavily unregulated and voluntarily policed by the industry. We have to do more to protect young people. It affects all young people. We see it in terms of suicide, anorexia, bulimia and those sorts of mental health issues among young people. In this area, it has a bearing on some of the increase in violent crime as well. I look forward to continuing to work with the Home Secretary, but there are issues with funding. It does not all fall to the police. The local context is important, and I am very concerned about the rise in drugs in this country, the rising market and the need to fully grip what we, as a nation, are to do about it.