Knife Crime

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mike Hill]

I absolutely agree. If anything, the petition opens up a debate about that whole subject, including prevention.

The petitioners’ call for mandatory tariffs of 10 years for possession and 25 years for the use of a knife may be seen as excessive, but there can be no doubt that, in the mind of the general public, the courts need to play their part in preventing the proliferation of knife-related criminal activity and, frankly, the murders that occur on our streets day in, day out.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his very good speech. I completely understand the public’s feeling that there should be longer sentences—I have heard that many times—but in 2015 the Government introduced a two-strikes policy, which means anyone over 18 who is caught twice gets a minimum six-month jail term. Despite that change, knife crime has rocketed. The number of people who are imprisoned for knife offences has increased at exactly the same rate as the number of people who commit knife offences, so that has had no deterrent impact at all.

[Mike Hill]

I agree and I thank my hon. Friend for her contributions as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime. She is correct that we need to find some real solutions. To go back to my earlier point, the demographic of those involved in the increase in knife crime tends to be those who are under 18. There needs to be a rethink about custodial and preventive measures.

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[Andrew Rosindell]

I agree. I made it clear a moment ago that I do not agree with what the Prime Minister said about cuts in police having no link to crime. However, I do not want to get into a battle today about resources from Government, or whether Sadiq Khan has not allocated as much as he should and the rest of it. We can argue about that but today is not the day. I hope we can agree that both the Government and the Mayor have a duty to allocate as many resources as they can to fighting crime, particularly in inner city areas, but also in outer London areas where crime has recently been rising. We should work together, because the public are losing patience. If we turn the matter into a political football they will not thank us. They want all of us to work together.

The week before last I raised with Sophie Linden my idea of getting rid of bureaucratic, inflexible ward boundaries and creating proper community police, with understanding. Unfortunately she did not say she would go down that route. I said, “Well, can Havering be an experiment, at least?” She did not agree, so I am disappointed, but we need to look at ways to channel resources to the best possible effect.

[Sarah Jones]

I agree that we need to look across politics to find the solutions. I just want to ask the hon. Gentleman to consider what organisations say about knife crime prevention orders. There is great concern among magistrates, lawyers, youth offending teams and a lot of charities. In fact, I have not found a single organisation that thinks the orders are a good thing—that they could be a replacement for antisocial behaviour orders, which the Prime Minister got rid of when she was Home Secretary. Actually, they will not work, and we could end up putting 12-year-olds who had committed no crime in prison. I agree with the intent, but will the hon. Gentleman look at the detail, and at the question whether more work is needed before the orders are brought to our streets?

[Andrew Rosindell]

Absolutely. I will certainly do that, but I am sure that the Minister could respond in his closing remarks. It is important that whatever mechanism we use is effective, not counterproductive. We all need to consider that.

I want to highlight the great success of the Police Scotland violence reduction unit, which has halved the murder rate in a 10-year period. Members will know that it worked closely with partners such as the NHS, education and social workers. However, its work went ahead in conjunction with a no-nonsense approach to those who crossed the line. I think that is what we need. I hope that we can replicate that in Greater London.

Low-level offences must be policed proactively, to challenge the culture of criminality and antisocial behaviour. That is why supporting the police is not just about resourcing. It is also about making sure they have the powers to get on with the job and be effective on the ground. I get deeply worried, as I am sure other hon. Members do, when I hear from constituents that they believe low-level crime such as shoplifting and burglary no longer gets taken as seriously as it should by the police. The Offensive Weapons Bill, which was introduced last year, will make it harder for young people to buy knives and acid online, and that is good. However, the public are wary of legislation that gives a tough narrative but leads to minimal action against violent offenders who will simply be more innovative about getting access to dangerous weapons.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Ind)]

I thank the Petitions Committee and the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) for bringing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez) and to hear what she had to say. Ryan Passey, Christina Edkins and Jaskaran Kang, young people from Dudley, were tragically murdered with knives. Last year, Yasir Hussain and Christopher Harm both lost their lives. Elsewhere in the Black Country last year, Reagan Asbury and James Brindley were both tragically killed on nights out. Our hearts go out to their families and friends.

People in Dudley are furious about the increase in knife crime. They want tougher action and more police on the streets to deal with it. The responsibility obviously lies with the people who go out with a knife and then use it, but we would not have needed a crystal ball to predict that cutting the number of police officers, huge cuts to neighbourhood policing teams, the closure of youth centres, sports projects, community centres and other organisations that keep young people off the streets, and sending fewer people to prison would mean that crime—tragically, violent crime—would increase.

It is shocking to read the results of an investigation in today’s Express and Star:

“Less than one in three criminals arrested with a knife in the West Midlands are sent to prison”.

The paper is completely right to describe the situation in the west midlands as a knife crime epidemic, with the number of cases up 20% over the last year. The points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) are completely right, of course, but how can it be the case that criminals are being spared jail despite committing dozens of offences? According to media reports this weekend, one dangerous offender was convicted 21 times for possession of a knife without being sent to prison and another committed 33 assaults before eventually being jailed for the 34th.

West Midlands Chief Constable Dave Thompson has declared knife crime across the region an “emergency”. He has implemented extensive stop-and-search powers in Birmingham following a spate of fatal stabbings. The force said that it had stopped and searched 408 people using its new powers over four days earlier this month, arresting 24 people and seizing 14 weapons.

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is highlighting the situation in the west midlands. Does he agree that the proportion of people who are being sent to prison for knife offences had doubled in recent years? We lock up more people than any other European country. About 400 children are serving life sentences or sentences of more than 14 years in this country, compared with just two children serving life sentences in the rest of the EU combined. Although I absolutely understand my hon. Friend’s point and his frustration, at a national level we need to accept that we put a lot of people in prison and so should carefully consider whether we increase that number.

[Ian Austin]

I commend my hon. Friend for her work with the all-party group. I understand her point but, in the end, if someone has been caught with a knife 21 times, or has been convicted of 33 assaults, I think they should be in prison. Frankly, as I will talk more about in a minute, there should be strong sentences and tough deterrents. Of course, we also have to have all those other things going on in society to prevent people from being sucked into crime, as she has talked about in the all-party group and I will go on to talk about as well.

When people use knives and behave violently there should be tough sentences. Society needs to send out a strong message that that is completely unacceptable. Although the number of people being imprisoned might have gone up recently, it is fair to say that it certainly fell in the previous few years under this Government.

According to Ministry of Justice figures, 1,182 people were cautioned or convicted by the West Midlands police for the possession of a knife or offensive weapon in 2018, but just 347—29%—went to prison. That represents a 7% drop on the previous year and is under the national average. Across the region, 326 knife criminals were handed a community order, 256 were given a suspended sentence and a further 99 were fined or discharged from court without a sentence.

One in four criminals cautioned or convicted were children. It is a tragedy that children are going out with knives.

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[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Davies, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) on having secured a really good cross-party debate, in which we are agreeing on a lot of issues. I wish that my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) had been my teacher; I had not realised that he was a teacher for 20 years, and I feel that I would have listened a lot more in school if he had been teaching me.

It is right for us to pay tribute to the family of Jodie Chesney, who Members have spoken about being from their area. I also want us to think about the people who have died in my constituency: Kelva Smith, Andre Aderemi and Jermaine Goupall, three people who lost their lives recently through knife crime. I am not going to talk about the need for funding, because we have established that, and I think we all agree on it. I will just say that there is a need to fund not just youth work and education, but housing. I currently have a mother and her eight-year-old daughter in my office who have been refused housing by everybody, and are completely destitute; we are desperately trying to get them somewhere to sleep tonight. Those wider issues massively impact on the life chances of our children, and we must never forget about them.

I will focus on sentencing, which is what we are debating. This issue is too important for us to not look at the facts about what impact sentencing has. We know that knife crime is at epidemic levels, with over 100 knife offences a day. Fatalities are at the highest level on record, with 285 people dead last year, and knife crime has gone up across virtually every area and police force in the country. Young people are disproportionately affected: 39 young people were killed last year, the highest level for 10 years, and according to NHS figures, there has been more than a 50% increase in stabbings of teenagers. More than 1,000 teenagers were admitted to hospital with stab wounds last year, and we know that many others do not go to A&E because they are scared of what might happen.

People are rightly concerned about this national crisis, but my view is that dramatically increasing sentences for knife offences is not the answer. We cannot enforce our way out of this problem by increasing sentences. We already have a tough regime for knife offenders, which has been getting tougher over the past decade. As I have said, we lock more people up than any EU country, and 400 children are in prison serving life sentences or sentences over 14 years. The proportion of people being sent to prison for knife offences has almost doubled: in 2010, about 40% of people caught with a knife were given a custodial sentence, but today, the proportion of knife possession offences receiving a custodial sentence is closer to 70%. Last year, more than a third of knife offenders received an immediate jail sentence, and in 2015, the Government introduced their two-strikes policy, which I mentioned earlier. That policy means that anyone over 18 who is caught twice gets a minimum six-month jail term. Despite those changes, knife offences have risen from 25,000 to over 40,000 since 2013. Contrary to what might seem to be the case, the evidence shows that tougher sentences do not deter people from committing crime.

Four main factors go into sentencing decisions: punishment, deterrence, public protection and rehabilitation. We are debating all those factors today. To begin with punishment, people who commit knife offences—particularly attacks on other people—absolutely need to receive strict punishments, but those are already available under the law. The types of punishment we are debating are not proportionate or appropriate for the vast majority of knife crime, particularly as those involved are disproportionately young people. The majority of children carrying knives are extremely vulnerable, and it is increasingly evident that many are being criminally exploited, groomed and coerced. Punishing them with punitive sentences risks turning this generation of young people into a generation in prison.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Will my hon. Friend give some details about why some of those young people are carrying knives—details that she will have picked up through all her work in this area? I know there has been lots of coverage of that point in some of our news media, and fear seems to be the main reason, but I wonder whether my hon. Friend could give some more details.

[Sarah Jones]

I could, and I could speak for far too long about that issue. It is not possible to say “all young people carry knives for this reason”: everybody has a different story to tell. In many of the tales shared by the young people who I have met, vulnerability is given as a reason, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right that fear is another. We know that knife crime is contagious. It acts like a disease; it spreads. As I have seen in Croydon, if some people in a school are known to be carrying knives, others will start to carry knives. That results in situations in which people are not in gangs and are not dealing drugs, but are carrying knives because they feel that they need to, so when there is a fight, instead of using their fists, they use a knife. There is a raft of issues involved; we have already talked about involvement in drugs and gangs, as well as violence in the home and in the family during a child’s early years. All kinds of things lead to people carrying knives, but fear is definitely a big one.

Turning to deterrence, a large body of research on knife crime over the past few years shows that simply setting longer sentences does not deter crime, as the Minister knows very well; I am sure he will talk about that. Research consistently shows that, if anything, it is the certainty of being caught that acts as a deterrent, not how severe the sentence is. A recent evidence review concluded that lengthy prison sentences and mandatory minimum sentencing cannot be justified on the grounds of deterrence. For sentences to be a factor in deterring crime, people need to know what the punishment for the crime is and then make a rational choice about whether to offend. However, awareness of sentencing is very low, and many people involved in knife crime—particularly young people—do not act rationally. People who have been in and out of prison for carrying knives have attended meetings of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, and they say that prison is not a deterrent at all: it is a break from the streets, somewhere they can be safe for a while before they have to go back.

Public protection is very important; we must of course keep the public safe by making sure that dangerous people are not on our streets. Home Office research found that a 15% increase in the use of custody would be required to produce just a 1% decrease in crime, and as we have talked about, our prisons are already overflowing. Surely it would be better for the Government to build on their recent £100 million boost to police funding and set a strong new basis for police funding in the autumn statement, in order to deter people through policing on the streets, rather than funding a huge increase in custodial sentences that would lead to a very small decrease in crime.

When it comes to rehabilitation, we know that dealing with children and young people outside the formal justice system is more effective at reducing offending than punitive responses. Involving a young person in custody makes them more likely to commit crime in the future. Young people who spoke to us at meetings of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime talked about prison as a training camp, as the things that their colleagues could teach them were likely to increase crime, rather than reduce it. As the Minister also knows, conditions in prisons do not lend themselves to positive rehabilitation. Young people can be locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, and research has found that they face

“hunger, denial of fresh air, cramped and dirty cells, strip-searching, segregation, the authorised infliction of severe pain, uncivilised conditions for suicidal children”

and bullying and intimidation.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I apologise for interrupting my hon. Friend’s excellent speech, but I would have thought that part of the problem with rehabilitation is the recidivism of repeat offenders. Does she have an opinion about the part played by our now poorly functioning privatised probation service, through which offenders are probably not being rehabilitated as well as they should be?

[Sarah Jones]

I absolutely agree. There is a cycle. Surgeons in King’s College Hospital say that they are seeing the same children coming back again and again. The prison system says that the same children are going back time and again. There is the same cycle of going into prison, coming out of prison, committing a crime and getting stabbed. That is awful, and we need to break that cycle and get children and young people away from the situation they are in.

In terms of the four factors considered in sentencing, the evidence is just not there for harsher sentencing in this area. I will not talk about the public health approach and what we should be doing on prevention, but I want to highlight some work done in my borough of Croydon that paints the picture of where we need to go with our young people. Croydon completed what I think is a landmark report investigating the cases of 60 vulnerable adolescents. Those 60 children had all been involved in serious cases of violence or exploitation. Five had lost their lives. Three had been convicted of murder. One third of the boys had been victims of knife crime and three quarters were involved with gangs. More than half the girls in the cohort had been victims of sexual exploitation.

Of the 60 people who had been deeply involved in violence, half were known to children’s social services before the age of five. We knew who these children were from the very beginning. In all the cases, there were many interventions by the state, but they did not work. The state was involved in crisis management—when something happened, there was an intervention, but the state did not do the right thing to help those children.

Half those 60 children had witnessed or experienced domestic violence. We know that violence breeds violence. It is learned behaviour. If children see it in the home, they do it later on in life. Three quarters of the children had a parental absence on the father’s side, and a quarter had an absence on the mother’s side. There were many parental issues around drug or alcohol misuse and mental health funding. A third of the children had already been excluded by the time they left primary school, and every single child who was later convicted of a crime had been excluded from school.

I will not talk more about what that says, other than to say that they are vulnerable children growing up in difficult situations. That does not excuse the crime at all, but in so many of the cases I have come across, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator is the luck of the fight. It is not right to categorise some children as the evil ones perpetrating the crimes and some as the victims, because there is often crossover. In some cases, people are being harmed when they have absolutely nothing to do with anything, but in other cases, they are all in a difficult situation because they are all vulnerable. I would argue that putting them in prison for longer is not the answer. In Scotland, they are putting far fewer young people in prison and focusing on the ones who are there. In the youth offending prison, they are giving them lots of training, teaching them to read and write and giving them education and skills, and that has to be the right approach for the long term.

This is a national crisis. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling put it correctly when he said that the Government need to come together to tackle the issue. In terms of this debate, sentencing is not the answer; many other things are.

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[Sarah Jones]

Interestingly, knife crime prevention orders are not part of that strategy. A lot of the organisations that I have spoken to suspect that the orders were partly a knee-jerk response to show that the Government were acting, and that they were never part of the strategy that the Minister is talking about, which is comprehensive in its diagnosis—if not in setting out a solution.

[Rory Stewart]

I will come back to knife crime prevention orders. The interesting thing about this debate is that although we all share a horror of knife crime, not everybody in this Chamber agrees on the particulars, such as knife crime prevention orders, sentence lengths or whether courts should have discretion. In a sense, the debate in this Chamber is a reflection of the debate among the public.

The core question is which of the dozens of suggestions in the serious violence strategy will make most difference as quickly as possible and be most effective. There may be many individual initiatives that are fantastic at a community level, but others may be even better, and those are the ones that we need to focus on. I want to focus on four areas in particular. The first is sentencing—this is a debate on sentencing, and I am here as a representative of the Ministry of Justice to talk about sentencing. It is true to say that following on from the 2015 two-strike rule, more people are now going to jail for knife possession offences, and they are going there for longer. My hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez) raised the question whether we have got that balance right, and it is a difficult balance.

The hon. Member for Gedling, a very experienced ex-Policing Minister, asked exactly how these exceptions are defined. They are defined quite closely. Some 82% of people found in a double possession will find their way towards a sentence. Who are the 18% who are not getting sentences? The guidelines stipulate very clearly what the mitigating factors are and lay them out. In extreme cases, it could be somebody with learning difficulties, mental health problems or a serious medical problem, or it could be somebody who has co-operated with the police—all these things are mitigating factors that might lead to someone not receiving such a sentence.

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[Rory Stewart]

The answer is that we have just published a victims strategy, and we are investing more in victim support—more than £90 million a year—as part of a broader spectrum of support. We now have £200 million going into a youth endowment fund, which is directly driven by the strategy and responds to the public health approach pioneered in Scotland. We have another £22 million going into an early intervention fund to respond to the stuff that we have been talking about in relation to schools and families.

That brings me to effective law enforcement, where my hon. Friend the Member for Romford is pushing us. He makes a very interesting point about the way in which community policing does or does not overlap with ward boundaries. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) also spoke in some detail about community policing. We need to balance that with very specific stuff on knife crime, which means ensuring that there are plain clothes officers in hot spot areas. Hot spot areas are central. In Peterborough, we discovered that taking a hot spot approach, getting the right data and finding where the problems are coming from reduced violence by 37% without displacing it to any other area, so hot spot policing is central.

[Sarah Jones]

The Minister is making a very thoughtful speech. Although we do not agree on everything, he is talking a lot of sense. A piece of work on that has just been done in Croydon. There are 10 areas in Croydon where most violence outside occurs. It is in the places we would expect, such as outside the supermarkets. He is absolutely right that targeting them with effective policing would be an incredibly sensible way to spend public money.

[Rory Stewart]

The answer to everyone in the Chamber who spoke about law enforcement is that community policing plays a part. There is a 10 am meeting of the violent crime taskforce every day in Lambeth, where it gets the intelligence from the previous 12 hours about where people have gathered and where the weapons are moving. It then targets its intervention for the day. It has its own team of uniformed officers who back up the plain clothes officers on the ground. They go in and do weapons sweeps and community weapons sweeps. They use section 1 orders to go after individuals and section 60 orders to go after geographical areas. They go after habitual knife carriers. They conduct searches with search warrants, based on drug suspicion in houses. By doing that, and through Operation Sceptre, through which we have 42 police forces across the country doing this at the same time for week-long periods, we are able to hoover up astonishing quantities of knives.

The community part is the real key to that, because it is the local community leader, the head of the local boxing club or somebody who wants to speak for the community who is out there doing the community sweep, finding the knives concealed in hedges and cars. That is far more effective than police officers just doing it on their own.