Offensive Weapons Bill (Ninth sitting)

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I rise to support new clause 1 and new clause 25. The suggestion from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham regarding data on acid attacks is very sensible. It will help build public confidence in this legislation if, as hoped, it helps to reduce such attacks. If the legislation does not bring down the number of attacks, it is essential we know that. The main area I want to focus on, however, is new clause 25.

Since I set up the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime last year and began working with my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford on her Youth Violence Commission, it has become clear that the drivers of youth violence are seated far more deeply in our society than simply the accessibility of weapons. We can all agree that tightening up the rules around online knife purchasing, restricting certain types of knives and restricting the sale of corrosives is the right thing to do and we applaud the Government for it. However, we also need to take a step back and look again at the problems we are ultimately trying to solve: the growth in acid attacks by and on young people; the continued increase in knife crime across the country; the age of knife carriers getting younger and younger; and the culture of fear that we know exists among a generation of our young people. Without new clause 25, this Bill makes no real attempt to answer these questions. It seeks to address symptoms without looking for the cure.

I am concerned that by prioritising online knife purchasing in this Bill, the Government are overemphasising its role on teenagers carrying knives. Of course, the death of Bailey Gwynne in 2015 was a horrible and avoidable tragedy—even one death from this loophole is one too many. Aside from Bailey’s death, the only evidence cited in the Government’s impact assessment for the Bill comes from anecdotal reports from the police, trading standards and Members of Parliament about teenagers accessing knives online. It does not appear that the Government actually spoke to young people themselves—and particularly young people who carry knives—about why they are doing so and how they are accessing these weapons.

The summary of consultation responses makes no mention of speaking to young people directly, but the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime has spoken to young people who carry knives. We brought 16 people from across the country to Parliament to meet MPs and peers to talk about why they carry knives. These young people had either been convicted of knife offences or had been victims of knife attacks and, in some cases, both. When asked about their reasons, one young person specifically mentioned online retailers, saying that it is

“so easy, yesterday at Amazon, I swear to go 30 seconds from the homepage to checkout to deliver to my house, about 20 seconds, literally.”

It was very clear from the rest of the young people where the majority of them had got their knives. Let me quote a few of them.

“What’s the knife, it’s just a trip to the kitchen then you can literally just grab it.”

Another young person:

“It’s really easy and you have only got to go to your kitchen drawer and there is a knife”.

Another, asked by an MP where he had got his knife, answered: “Out of the kitchen.” Another young person:

“In Camden, everyone’s going to have one—they put it in a sock—and everyone has one.”

I worry that the Government are focusing too narrowly and ignoring the reality that, for most under-18s, accessing a knife is as simple as walking into their kitchen. That is why new clause 25 is so important. If a young person is getting to the point where he or she is trying to buy a knife online, we have already failed them somewhere down the line. If that same young person is faced with tougher restrictions on online purchasing but still feels the need to carry a knife, as we have just heard, they can simply get one from their kitchen. That is not to say that this legislation is not worthwhile, but we need to think bigger and new clause 25 is the start of that.

The all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, the Youth Violence Commission and a host of experts from Scotland to Chicago have all said that the Government must now treat youth violence as a public health issue. A proper public health approach would treat knife crime like an epidemic. We know that violence breeds violence, so we need to tackle the problem at source while immunising future generations against it. We need to recognise that some young people are more at risk of early criminality than others because of their environments, and we must address those environments, changing the social conditions that lie at the root of youth violence.

--- Later in debate ---

Home Office officials spent months examining evidence from across the world. We know that drugs are a major driver in this violence. The Home Secretary is hosting an international conference to look at international efforts to tackle the very dangerous drugs that we know are the drivers behind this serious violence: drugs such as cocaine that are not produced in this country and have to be imported. We have looked at practice across the board. We have spoken to healthcare, teaching and social care professionals. It has been a gathering experience. We may not label it in the same way as the all-party parliamentary group, but we are clear that this is about a joined-up approach.

[Sarah Jones]

The Minister has talked to education experts. Does she agree that the increase in exclusions is driving some of the youth violence problems we are seeing?

[Victoria Atkins]

It concerns me greatly. Edward Timpson, a former Minister of State for Vulnerable Children and Families at the Department for Education, is doing a big piece of work. He is conducting a review of alternative provision and the vulnerabilities that may be posed by children being in PRUs. We are very much looking into it just as we are supporting the work of charities such as Redthread and getting youth workers into A&E departments in the major hospitals—they are seeing an increase in young people coming in with serious stab wounds. They get those youth workers into the A&E department to act as a friend to those children at the teachable moment, as they call it, as well as staying with them while they are in hospital recovering from what often turns out, sadly, to be major surgery. We help children through knife crime through the anti-knife crime community fund, and support many charities, including larger ones such as the St Giles Trust, that have specific projects dealing with the issues in specific parts of the country.

I was most concerned to hear the concerns of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley about inconsistencies in delivery and policing. We introduced the system of police and crime commissioners in the coalition Government to try and draw accountability for policing closer to the communities served by police officers. The title is deliberate. Although policing is an important part of the brief, the “and crime” part is also an important part of their responsibilities—the prevention of crime, how they help victims in their locality and so on. If there are concerns about the consistency of delivery of services, I hope that we would all go to the police and crime commissioners and ask them what they are doing. It is our role as parliamentarians to hold them to account, just as they hold us to account.

The College of Policing has been a major step forward in terms of professionalising policing and giving it the status it deserves. These are public servants who often put their lives at risk to serve the public. We want to give them the recognition and status that their day-to-day activities deserve. The purpose of the College of Policing is to achieve that, but also to help spread best practice. The hon. Lady will know that a great deal of work is being done on, for example, county lines. We set up the National County Lines Coordination Centre because we recognise that, while major urban centres may have experience of gang activity, rural areas probably do not. We want to tackle that new phenomenon by helping the police draw together all their experience and intelligence, and ease the lines of investigation between forces.