Knife Crime

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sarah Newton)]

I welcome the debate, and pay tribute to the work done by the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) over the summer recess. She has obviously not had a holiday at all, but has spent a huge amount of time living up to the clear commitment that she made during the general election campaign, when she said that she would do everything she could to stamp out knife crime in Croydon. I am delighted that she has shared all her learning in the House this evening. I am also grateful to the wide variety of colleagues on both sides of the House who have stayed behind, and have made such important contributions.

I entirely share the hon. Lady’s passionate determination that we should do all that we can to stamp out the appalling knife crimes that we have been seeing. She talked about the horrendous instances in her constituency; however, this is happening far too frequently, not just here in London but in other parts of the country. I welcome the creation of an all-party parliamentary group, which will enable me to work with the hon. Lady and other Members, sharing local experiences and the work that we are doing nationally so that together we can try to make the differences and changes that we all want so much to see.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

The Minister has said that she would be happy to do everything to stamp out the growth of knife crime. Does that include reversing the cuts in police officer numbers that we are seeing in constabularies around the country? In Suffolk, for instance, in one of the least policed areas in the country, the number of officers has been cut by 300 over the past 10 years.

[Sarah Newton]

Of course resources are important, but let us be clear: the Government are not cutting the money that goes to police forces. Since 2015, their money will have been going up in cash terms, especially if they use their precepting powers. It is not fair to say that we are cutting that money. Police officers—police leaders, with the police and crime commissioners—make the operational decisions. It is the Mayor of London, working with the Metropolitan police, who decides how London is to be policed and how communities are to be kept safe. Of course the Home Office has a role to play in supporting them, and, since 2016, our modern crime prevention strategy has focused on the reduction of violent crime, including knife crime. That strategy is very clear. When we meet the all-party group—in the few minutes I have got this evening, I cannot do justice to the breadth of work the Government are doing to bear down on this issue—I will, with officials, explain to the hon. Member for Croydon Central and other members of the APPG across the House who want to come along our strategy and the actions that we are taking now. As the hon. Lady says, the Home Secretary announced a whole series of measures that we are about to consult on, and of course her contribution to that will be very welcome.

[Mr Reed]

The Government have directly reduced funding for youth offending services and indirectly reduced funding for early intervention and family support through the cuts delivered to local government. This has become so severe that those working in youth offending services can no longer devote the time necessary to prevent young offenders from reoffending, so we are still seeing reoffending at extremely high levels. That is putting those young offenders at risk and risking future victims. Will the Government look again at these very short-sighted cuts which are not only causing such damage to young people’s futures, but will cost more in the long run because of the consequences of the crimes they commit?

[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—