Policing and Crime

Debate between Seema Malhotra and Vicky Foxcroft

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Seema Malhotra]

I add my voice to that, particularly in the light of the work that the show has done around Feltham young offenders and some of the very complex issues that have arisen in relation to youth crime.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.

Youth violence has devastating consequences for individuals, families, communities and society as a whole, yet under the current Government knife crime is at its highest-ever levels and shows no sign of decreasing. Ten years of Tory austerity and cuts to policing have had a hugely damaging impact. In September 2019, the Prime Minister announced a target to recruit 20,000 new police officers over the next three years. This is welcome, but it is still down on the 2010-11 figures when Labour was last in power. What worries me is whether these will be frontline community police officers. Nothing shown to me suggests that they will be. We need that community policing to ensure that people feel safe in their communities, that there are these strong relationships, and that trust between the public and the police is restored. We need to see them on the frontline of community policing, building relationships with young people, schools and youth services.

But increases in police funding are only the tip of the iceberg. If we are to stand any chance of providing long-term solutions to knife crime, it is absolutely vital that we tackle the root causes of youth violence rather than simply addressing the symptoms. Those root causes are complex and deeply ingrained. I set up the Youth Violence Commission in 2016 after seeing several young people in my constituency lose their lives to youth violence in my first few months as an MP. Over the past three and a half years, our commissioners and core team have gathered evidence from a wide range of academics, practitioners and other experts in the field—including, most crucially, young people themselves. We published an interim report on our findings in May 2018, and our full report, to be launched in March this year, proposes how we should move forward.

First and foremost, the commission believes that we must develop a consistent, long-term public health approach to tackling youth violence. I was really sad not to hear the Minister talk about that during his opening remarks. As referenced by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit is widely recognised as the UK’s most successful example of this. We welcome the fact that similar violence reduction units are being set up in other parts of the country, including London. However, it is becoming more and more apparent that the term “public health model” is being used without a proper understanding of what is required to effect lasting change. As we have learned from Scotland’s success, a public health approach requires whole-system cultural and organisational change, supported by sustained political backing. Anything short of this will fail. Under the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), the last Conservative Government professed to have adopted this approach, but in practice we saw little evidence of it. We now have a new Prime Minister and even less of an idea of whether this approach will be taken seriously. It has to be taken seriously.

Our findings also stress the importance of early intervention. The emotional and economic cost of failing sufficiently to address early trauma is huge. This includes costs incurred through funding statutory services such as those for children in care, meeting the most immediate impacts of educational failure, and income support for young people who are not in employment, education or training, as well as the more obvious frontline pressures such as youth crime and criminal justice.

Moving forward, our goal must be to ensure that the public health approach stays at the top of the political agenda. I hope that the Minister, in her closing remarks, is able to say that this will be the case. We must also push for long-term, sustainable funding that will not be at the mercy of every change in government. As chair of the Youth Violence Commission, I will continue to push for this in Parliament, alongside my colleagues in the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime and the many individual MPs who have brought their own experiences, and those of their constituencies, here to the Commons.

Time and again I hear from constituents who are scared for young people in their families, for their friends, and, sadly, for themselves. Since 2015,1 have seen far too many young lives cut short by knife crime. These are preventable deaths, and we are seriously failing our young people if we do not succeed in finding sustainable, properly funded long-term solutions.