Sarah Jones
Main Page: Sarah Jones (Labour - Croydon West)Department Debates - View all Sarah Jones's debates with the Home Office
(5 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberYes, and I thank my hon. Friend, who has been particularly persistent about locking away bladed products or sharp knives. We absolutely keep that point under review. We have had a good response from the retail industry thus far, but we will of course keep the pressure up, and I am extremely grateful to him for his contribution to that.
Liability under our amendments in lieu attaches only to companies that enter into arrangements to deliver bladed products. A delivery company could choose simply not to do so. Our amendments therefore provide the flexibility that the hon. Member for Sheffield South East described, so that if a seller does not enter into an arrangement with a delivery company, the provisions in the Bill that prohibit delivery to residential premises of a bladed product will still apply. A seller in those circumstances will not be able to send a bladed product to residential premises and the product will have to be collected in person at a collection point, which at least gives small and medium-sized businesses the choice over how to conduct their business. We believe that these amendments will help to address the concern behind the Bill and achieve the aim of stopping young people and those under 18 having access to these products through online sales when they should not have such access. I very much hope that our amendment will meet the approval of the House.
Let me turn to knife crime prevention orders. It is vital that the police have the powers they need to prevent knife crime and to protect the public from the devastating effects of violent crime on our streets. It is frankly already too late when we prosecute young people for knife crime. If measures are available that might help to steer children and young people away from carrying or using a knife, we should not hesitate to put them in place. That is why the Government have introduced, in short order, knife crime prevention orders in the Bill. The police made that request of us at the very end of the summer last year, and we were pleased to insert the provision into the Bill in the House of Lords. These are civil orders aimed at young people at risk of engaging in knife crime, people whom the police call habitual knife carriers of any age and those who have been convicted of a violent offence or an offence involving knives.
Will the Minister confirm that although these are civil orders, if they are breached they become criminal, and that 12-year-old children could end up in prison for two years? Will she also confirm that not a single organisation, from the magistrates and local government to charities, lawyers and anybody involved in youth offending teams, supports this change? They all think that we are acting too quickly and need to take more time looking at the implications before introducing it.
I am about to come to the framework for these orders, because I am conscious that in an ideal world we would have had the measure in the Bill when it was first laid before the House in the early summer last year. However, the police came to their view and alerted us to their thinking at the end of summer, and although we have frankly acted pretty quickly, we could not by definition have put the measure in the Bill before the police asked us to. We are doing this in response to the express wish of the police; in fact, the Mayor of London wrote to the Home Secretary in December asking that the orders be inserted in the Bill.
I do not know whether the hon. Lady has had a chance to speak to the Mayor of London, but the reason we are introducing these orders is that we want to try to help local communities to tackle knife crime. They are one measure. We do not pretend that they will solve all knife crime, but they are about preventing young people from getting ensnared in criminal gangs or getting into a situation where they think that carrying a knife will protect them. This is about trying to wrap services around those children before they become criminalised.
I know that concerns have been raised about the age at which the orders can be imposed. The orders apply from the age of 12 upwards because the police tell us that the age at which people carry knives is getting younger. We also know from hospital data that younger children are victims and perpetrators. That is why we have chosen that age. If we are serious about tackling knife crime on our streets, the measures that we take must apply to young people and children.
I am very grateful to the Minister for doing that, but I hope she will reflect on this.
I will be supporting the Labour amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) tonight, which are well tailored. The Labour proposal requiring this House to vote on a report on the evidence from the pilot is a good compromise; it is an example of this Parliament working together to make sure that what we do is evidence-based. The good thing the Minister could do if she goes down my route is proceed with my anti-blade contracts while those pilots are going on, because an anti-blade contract does not need to bother this legislature.
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) and I agree with much of what he said. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) put his finger on it when he said that these knife crime prevention orders are a roll of the dice. That is absolutely the point we all want to make, and while I completely disagree with the conclusion he has come to, this is what we are doing in this House: we are rolling a dice and there might be unintended consequences that we do not know yet. That is what I want to speak about today. I shall speak to the amendments I added my name to: 7, 9, 10, 12 and 23.
I chair the all-party group on knife crime, and yesterday we hosted an event on knife crime prevention orders. We heard evidence from the Magistrates Association, lawyers, academics, charities and youth offending teams who work with children and young people involved in knife crime. There was resounding agreement: they all want to stop knife crime and protect young people, but they all believe that these orders are not the answer. I think they are a knee-jerk reaction to a moral panic and they risk exacerbating, not diminishing, the problem. Lawyers, magistrates and youth offending teams are all in agreement that, far from being preventive, as the name of the orders suggests, the orders will have unintended consequences that could criminalise a generation of young people and actively work against the Government’s stated aim of reducing knife crime.
This final stage of the Offensive Weapons Bill is the first opportunity MPs have had to have our say on whether or not these orders should become law. This is indicative of the Government’s approach of late: rushing through ill-thought-out plans so they can appear to be doing something without actually listening or engaging with experts or allowing parliamentary scrutiny. No real consultation took place other than some rushed consultation within the police—although we heard yesterday that even the senior police representative for children and young people was not asked about these knife crime prevention orders.
As far as we can tell, the orders are the result of a few behind closed doors conversations between the Home Office and a few senior Met police. They have not comprehensively been thought out, and they were not a part of the Government’s own serious violence strategy. This is not the proper way for the Government to create laws, and it is an example of how bad, ineffective policy is created.
As we have heard, these are civil orders that would be placed on children as young as 12 who are suspected of carrying a knife. They could place severe, lengthy and potentially unlimited requirements and restrictions on the person subject to the order. If the requirements are not all met, a breach will be punishable by up to two years in prison. We have a situation in which somebody—a child—who may never have carried a knife and never have broken the law will end up with a criminal record and potentially a prison sentence for an order placed on them just on the basis of probability, rather than a criminal standard of proof. This leaves room for subjective decisions being made and for many young people to feel unfairly targeted.
The Government should be seeking to draw people away from the criminal justice system, not pushing children into it. And for solutions to be effective, they need to target the underlying cause of the behaviour. Sending children to custody does not work and is not an appropriate or proportionate response. Vulnerable young people must have access to education and employment so that they have routes away from drug gangs and the like. Criminal records and other criminal sanctions will disrupt lives and further marginalise young people, locking them out of mainstream society and exacerbating the root causes of violence. Children and young people have told our all-party parliamentary group many times that many are picking up knives out of fear. They feel that it is a necessary form of self-protection because everyone else has one and the police are not there to help them. Knife crime prevention orders will not deter children from picking up knives. They would rather be in prison for carrying a knife than be stabbed to death.
Another thing that was clear from our meeting yesterday was that the orders are neither necessary nor new. Magistrates and lawyers who are involved in children’s sentences have not called for more sentencing options. There are already intervention options available that could be promoted and developed. Many youth offending teams have programmes to address knife carrying, and if they had the money to do more outreach, they could help more children in this way. Conditional cautions can place requirements on children and young people, such as having to see their youth offending team and attend education programmes. These have lower reoffending rates than other more punitive responses, and they deal with behaviour outside the court system. Likewise, there is the triage system, where a young person who is arrested in a police station can be directed to appropriate intervention without being unnecessarily over-criminalised.
The similarities between knife crime prevention orders and the old antisocial behaviour orders are clear. The author of the Youth Justice Board report on ASBOs told us yesterday that they were disproportionately used on children and that they were breached in over two thirds of those cases. The use of ASBOs petered out over time because the courts and other agencies became increasingly concerned that they were counterproductive. Children had come to view them almost as a badge of honour and to define their identity around them. ASBOs were actually encouraging the behaviour they were designed to discourage. Over a nine-year period, more than 5,500 children were sent to prison for breaching their order. The bottom line was that they were not effective, because the kids kept coming back.
A number of other concerns have highlighted how little time has been given to the detail of these orders. Who will monitor them? Who will be responsible for reporting breaches? It seems that charities running programmes with young people would be expected to tell on their young people if they did not turn up. That would betray all the trust those organisations had carefully built up and would undoubtedly affect engagement. If the orders are imposed on the basis of probability, will not the victims of crime be more resistant to going to the police in case they get an order slapped on them, too? If school exclusions are already a big problem and a driver of young people becoming involved in violence, what impact do the Government expect the orders to have on access to education? A school will not want to take on a child who has been issued with a knife crime prevention order.
Finally, young black boys are already disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and there are real problems with trust and community relationships with the police. The imposition of restrictive orders such as these, especially when someone is only suspected of carrying a knife, will feed into those young boys feeling disproportionately targeted or harassed by police, their feelings of marginalisation and alienation, and their feeling that they are being treated less fairly than others by the justice system. This will be a major setback.
In 2010, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), described ASBOs as a
“top-down, bureaucratic, gimmick-laden approach”.
She said that they were
“too complex and bureaucratic…they were too time consuming and expensive and they too often criminalised young people unnecessarily, acting as a conveyor belt to serious crime and prison.”
The Government should listen to that now. They should also listen to the wide coalition of professional bodies and organisations that have come out against these orders. They should listen to concerns raised by the Joint Committee on Human Rights and to the Justice Secretary himself, who has highlighted a lack of evidence that the orders will be effective. They should also look at the evidence of what works to tackle violent crime. They should consult, and they should work out the actual impact of the policy before imposing it.