Tackling Knife Crime

Sarah Owen Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered tackling knife crime.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Paisley. I applied for this debate after the recent sad death of Humza Hussain in my Luton North constituency. Humza was just 16 years old. Let me repeat that: he was just 16 years old. He had his whole life ahead of him, but he was stabbed by another young person and killed outside his school.

Over the past few weeks, people across Luton have been shaken by these events, and many people in the town rallied around all the families involved, but especially Humza’s parents, when they received the worst news a parent could ever possibly receive. My heart goes out to Humza’s family and people in Luton North who have been affected by this tragic death over the past few weeks. Today, I hope to be a strong voice for them in Parliament. I will work with whomever it takes to end this situation in which our young people are carrying knives because they are involved with things in their life and they see it as the only way out. They see carrying a weapon as the only way to feel safe. What makes this even more tragic is that it did not need to happen; every death caused by a knife is avoidable. It just takes the political will and targeted resources to stop it. Unfortunately, we have instead seen a rapid rise in knife-related crime over the past few years across the country, and Bedfordshire is no exception.

Figures from the Commons Library tell us that in 2010 there were 397 offences involving a knife in Bedfordshire. By last year, that number had climbed to 530—an increase of over a third in a relatively short space of time. It is important to say that this is not just young people; it includes knife crime committed by adults in domestic settings, as well as on the streets.

This is against a backdrop of 11 years of central Government gutting funding for our councils, forcing what few services we have left to operate on a skeleton budget or close altogether. In Luton, one of the biggest towns in the country by population that does not have city status, we have seen police officers having to operate with the budget of a rural police force. There is no single cause of the recent rise in knife offences, but in a debate like this it would be wrong not to remark that the kids who had their services closed and gutted 10 years ago are now the young adults left without aspiration, left without hope for the future, who are now falling into crime and being targeted by criminals.

Our local newspaper, Luton Today, launched a campaign after Humza’s death a few weeks ago encouraging people to “Bin Your Blade”. This is a campaign that my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) and I were keen to endorse, because we both want to do all we can to tackle this problem. Most people in our town want to do something about it as well, but we need support from the Government to help us to do that.

This is not a party political issue. Helping our young people make the properly informed decision not to carry a knife should not be party political. Getting knives out of our schools should not be party political. I am sure that the Minister will at least be able to agree with that.

Before today’s debate, I spoke to a brilliant officer at Luton Borough Council, Dave Collins, whose passion, after a 30-year career working on these kinds of offences, shone through. Dave told me that the public and media narrative about knife crime is often unhelpful and tends to paint a very incomplete picture. That has been echoed by many organisations working to tackle this issue, including the charity, London Youth.

Figures from Barnardo’s show that over a fifth of offences involving a knife involve somebody under 18. Last July, a quarter of Barnardo’s frontline workers said that they had supported a young person who they thought had been coerced, deceived or manipulated into criminal activity; 15% said they thought the first lockdown led to more children and young people becoming involved in serious violence and exploitation. That is exactly what it is: criminals exploiting our young people. This is a safeguarding issue. Young people, who might have experienced the trauma of early family violence, neglect or adverse childhood experiences, are put on a path at an early age—no longer with the youth services or safety net to help them break out of that cycle.

Public Health Wales research reveals that adults who experienced adversity like this in their early years are 14 to 15 times more likely to be a victim of violence or a perpetrator than those who did not. Those children are also more likely to be excluded or off-rolled by schools. From a young age, they are told that they are “naughty kids” and put on the “too difficult to deal with” pile. We have seen that pile grow over 11 years with the marketisation and academisation of our schools. When that happens, youth services play an invaluable role in reaching young people who are otherwise disengaged from statutory services.

However, spending on youth services has been cut by Government over the past decade. A freedom of information request by the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime and violence reduction—chaired, with real commitment to the issue, by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), who is a staunch campaigner on this issue—revealed that local authority funding for youth services was reduced by 40% in real terms between 2014-15 and 2017-18. It is absolutely no coincidence that, after 11 years of cuts to those services, we are seeing a rise in exploitation and these kinds of offences.

The rise in knife crime is a direct result of Government policies, neglect and austerity, all of which are related. We have seen the mistrust of police that stop-and-search fosters among black and minority ethnic people across the country. In Bedfordshire, official figures show, black people are three times more likely to be stopped and searched, with some 70% of those stops resulting in absolutely no arrest whatsoever.

Young people in Luton are scared and often do not trust the authorities or the rest of society to protect them. We have seen that a style of policing that breeds mistrust is compounded by overstretched forces that have been held back by cuts for 11 years. Rather than policing that works with communities to prevent crimes like this, we have seen an increase of 33% in knife offences, as I mentioned earlier.

Community policing and trust take the investment of both time and money, which are two things that our police forces have been starved of. I repeat the call to the Minister, from, I think, all of the MPs in Bedfordshire, for our region to be funded to city levels and not as a rural area.

For all the brilliant hard work of Bedfordshire police in getting another knife or gun off our streets through Operation Boson, more will continue to be fed in, unless the cycle is ended. Although enforcement is important, if somebody is already carrying a knife, by definition it is already too late. We should be working with people from a young age to stop them picking one up in the first place.

In the spirit of cross-party working, I welcome the funding that the Government have given to Bedfordshire for enforcement and the violence reduction unit. However, these crimes are still happening. Our local youth services and our council need the Minister’s support to tackle this.

From conversations that I have had with people in Luton North over the past few weeks, I have a few questions to put to the Minister. What extra funding can he make available for youth services? I am not talking about services that just tackle crime but services that prevent it and that truly invest in our young people. The pandemic has added fuel to the fire of a crisis in mental health services across our country—and even more acutely among young people. What are the Government doing to tackle that? Will the Minister commit to approaching the issue of knife crime in a way that seeks to prevent it, rather than just fight it—an approach that deals with it as a public health issue and gets to the root cause of the problem?

Will the Government end the short-term approach of the past and really invest in early-years support and funding from a primary age for families at risk? Will they give schools the funding necessary to be able to support children to stay in education as long as possible and to support families through that process? Will they commit to looking again at the funding formula for Bedfordshire police, which covers my constituency? As it is, that force is currently funded as a rural force, yet Luton North has very little in the way of rural crime.

The final question I give to Qazi Chishti, the imam at Jamia Islamia Ghousia Trust in Luton, who said last week: “Knife crime has become one of the most widespread issues affecting not only our community but the UK as a whole. It affects not only the lives of the victims and perpetrators, but their families and communities. In the 40 years I have served my community, I have presided over the funerals of three young men who were the victims of knife crime. Each one has remained with me. Unfortunately, knife crime has only increased over time and it is now rife within our communities. The most recent attack left a family and an entire community in shock and pain. A barely lived life was lost and another will be lost to prison. The Government must take steps to tackle this issue. More must be done for those living in areas with high levels of knife crime. I urge the Government to fulfil its promise of tackling this issue and ridding our communities of this.”

Is the Minister able to tell me, Imam Chishti and the entire community of Luton North, that he will fund and take the necessary steps to give our young people hope and better opportunities than picking up a knife? I will work with whoever it takes in Luton North and across our town to end this problem. The will exists in our community to fix it, but we need the support from people in power and those with the purse strings in this place to make it happen.

Without a big, comprehensive plan to take on what is an all-encompassing issue for our communities, the Government risk just tinkering around the edges and allowing this form of exploitation to grow even stronger roots. It simply cannot go on. No parent deserves to be on the end of that phone call, hearing their child has been killed. No other child deserves to have their life ended before their time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Owen]

We have covered a lot of ground during these 90 minutes and I want to touch on a couple of points.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) made a point about funding being too short term. It was great to hear the Minister reel off the pots of funding that have suddenly been made available, but that is reactionary and short-termist. What happens next year and the year after? Children deserve to be invested in, which was the point that my hon. Friends the Members for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) and for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) made so eloquently. We are talking about children and they deserve a future that is much brighter than the one that is currently on offer from this Government.

When it comes to tackling poverty, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East said it perfectly: if we tackle poverty, we tackle crime. Our shadow spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), said precisely what the police officer had relayed to her: austerity and deprivation are a perfect storm for criminals.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) eloquently pointed out the importance of investment in youth services. Those are essentials, not additional extras. They should be an essential part of every young person’s life growing up.

I thank everyone for their heartfelt, thoughtful and intelligent contributions. I am surprised that the Minister was by himself representing the party of Government, given that we know that knife crime and serious and violent crime have increased in every single force over the last 10 years. We should all tackle this matter together, across the political divide. I know the problem cannot be solved in this room in 90 minutes, so is the Minister willing to meet me and colleagues from Luton North to tackle the issue and continue the work that is going on, but in a long-term and strategic fashion, not in the short-term and reactionary way that has failed children time and again?

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tackling knife crime.