Gangs and Youth Violence (2011 Riots)

Debate between Stella Creasy and Steve Reed

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am honoured to respond to this debate, which has been organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), both formally on behalf of the Opposition and as an MP who, like many of those who have spoken today, lives day to day with such issues. If there is one message that the Minister can take away from the debate it is that this is not just about public spending. For many of us, it is the life and death of our local communities, and it is our local young people whom we are concerned about. The contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), and for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) recognise very strongly the need and the genuine concern to get this matter right, not just over the next year or so but over the whole generation.

I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed), who has just been elected. He has a strong passion for this issue and, in his former life, made a tremendous difference to the local community in Lambeth.

I think I speak for everyone when I pay testament to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North who has displayed a persistent commitment to this issue and to getting it right, too. She is unparalleled in her experience and knowledge of, and passion for, tackling youth violence and gang crime.

Like many Members in this debate today, I have cause to reflect on the young people whom we have lost to these crimes in my local community in Walthamstow—whether they be the young people who have been killed or the young people whose lives have been irrevocably changed by being a victim of youth violence. There were 155 incidents in my own borough last year, and a fatal stabbing after a party just this summer of a youth on the cusp of adulthood. That senseless loss of life has to stop. However, it is a question not just of addressing these issues when we are in a crisis situation—when we have riots on our streets—but of the day-to-day work that needs to go on to turn around the cultures and practices that all too often lead to such incidents.

I encourage the Minister to read the work of John Pitts so that he can better understand the nature of the gangs and of the young people whom we are dealing with in these instances. We should not see all young people, or even the reasons why they get involved in gangs, as the same. The Minister needs to understand why we are calling for a joined-up approach and why it is so important to invest not just in policing but in housing, social care and education. He should also look at the contribution that other parts of Government can make.

The Minister may well say that we have had some success in dealing with the issues over the past year and a half, and I agree with that, especially with the introduction of the Trident gang programme in my part of the country. We know just how much crime gangs are responsible for in our local communities—Members have mentioned many of them in this debate. We also know that gangs are responsible for about 14% of rapes, so when we talk about the gender effect of gang crime, it is about not just young girls being drawn into gangs but the consequences on our streets. We know that the Trident programme has made a difference. We have seen a 34% reduction in the numbers of young people being involved in gang crime, and the arrest of 1,500 gang members in London.

The question today is what happens next. The Minister should take away from this debate the fact that we are concerned, as indeed the Centre for Social Justice is, that our first step should be the engagement by the police with these young people, but that cannot be the only one. In particular, the concept that we can arrest our way out of this problem just does not hold true.

I read the report by the Centre for Social Justice and about the funding that is now going into gang intervention work, but I was concerned about the challenges that face some of the organisations involved. For example, some groups are being stopped from applying for funding because they are working with younger potential victims of gang crime. Many Members here today have flagged up the familial links in gangs. We see young people getting involved in the culture through their brothers, sisters, cousins or even next-door neighbours. Their close networks can lead them to be involved in gangs, and we need to stop that before it even starts.

The other problem is that the funding is guaranteed for only a short amount of time, and we all recognise that our problems cannot be resolved speedily. The most crucial aspect of the CSJ research shows that the relationship between the police and young people has got no better, and indeed in some circumstances it has got worse. If we want to turn around young people’s sense of their relationship with the public services—those people who are there to serve them and keep them safe—we need to do a lot more than we are doing at the moment.

That is about a number of factors. First, it is about building resilience. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East spoke admirably about resilience and the ability to tackle life’s challenges without resorting to violence and without feeling the need to join a gang, and about finding a positive identity and positive future for yourself as a young person.

Secondly, it is about understanding where the flashpoints are. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North admirably set out where those points of crisis and tension are on our streets, and she spoke about trying to divert young people away from them.

Thirdly, it is about the longer term engagement that we have with young people. Containment of young people who are involved in gangs is simply not an effective strategy. We have to engage with them, and we have to dispel and disperse those kinds of behaviour.

Fourthly, we have to protect the victims. I am very mindful that 70% of young people in London do not feel safe on our streets. That means that they do not feel safe getting on a bus to go to college, let alone walking about their own capital city. We have to address these issues too, because they feed into a culture in which gang violence and youth violence are the norm, rather than something that we must all address.

We recognise that dealing with this issue involves a joined-up approach. I press the Minister to think very carefully about what he can do to bring pressure to bear to tackle some of the bureaucratic problems that many people within our local communities face in trying to address these issues, particularly in terms of housing. We have heard today about some of the challenges that many of our local authorities face in moving people. Moving people cannot be done purely on a borough-by-borough or neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood approach. It needs to go from the grass roots up, but it also needs national support.

We must also learn from the best in the voluntary sector. Many people here today have already mentioned some of the fantastic groups that they work with in their local communities. I have had cause to meet Barry Mizen, and he is an incredibly empowering and impressive man. I have also met representatives of organisations such as the Spirit of London and Bang FM in Harlesden, and I have met many local councillors, such as Councillor Zaffar Van Kalwala in Brent, who are trying to tackle some of these issues at a grass-roots level. Within my own community, there are the Active Change Foundation, Gangs Unite—

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that empowering communities is a fundamental part of finding solutions to the problems that many of our poorer communities face with high levels of youth violence? Croydon North has an escalating problem of that kind, as youth violence spreads across London from the inner urban areas.

Next door to Croydon is Lambeth, which is of course the borough I was leading until yesterday morning, where a very different and innovative approach, which bears further scrutiny, is being used. It empowers communities to take action and take control of the problem for themselves. It is based on experiences such as the one on the Myatts Field estate, where a group of local parents, who were terrified when their young people started getting involved in gangs, began to take action for themselves with precious few financial or other resources. However, over a period of three years, they were able to get 80 of their young people out of gangs by running a range of activities for them. What the council is doing through a new youth services trust is to give local communities access to public resources to take action themselves. Is my hon. Friend’s view of empowerment models such as that one favourable?

[Stella Creasy]

My hon. Friend, who is newly elected to Parliament, has just shown why he will be a very powerful advocate for his local community, and he has also shown that he offers a huge amount of expertise on what works in tackling some of these problems.

My hon. Friend makes a very powerful case about empowerment and about working from the grass roots. As I was about to say, I absolutely agree with that approach but it needs resourcing. That is why this issue is about resources. When we consider that we spent £133 million in four days of policing the riots last year, the consequences to the public purse of not investing in those people who are working in the voluntary sector and our local communities who understand and can engage in these ways are huge. The Government have put £18 million in, but that is nothing compared with the 20% cut that we have seen in youth offending team and community safety partnership budgets, the very money that was funding the type of work that my hon. Friend and others here today have talked about.

Finally, I just want to put four questions to the Minister, which I feel he must address. First and foremost is the overriding question that all of us are asking: what happens to those who have been arrested and their families? What happens next? The strategy cannot simply be to deal with that issue on a year-by-year basis. The Government must come forward with a plan to deal with those generations who are affected, including the next generation and those people who are coming out of prison.

Secondly, where will the resources come from so that we can do that? We can all see the savings to the public purse from prevention. We need to see the Government being very clear about where the money will come from to make sure that those prevention programmes are made real.

Thirdly, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch made a very important and powerful case about gang injunctions. Will the Minister commit to review the effectiveness of the proposals about gang injunctions and what they do on the ground, particularly to work on those positive diversionary activities to ensure that we take people out of gangs and into a positive future?

Finally, can the Minister tell us more about what he is doing to bring together other Ministers and other resources from other Departments? Those Departments include the Department for Communities and Local Government; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East referred to; the Department of Health; the Department for Education; and the Ministry of Justice. Too much money in Government is spent on dealing with the consequences of the failure to address youth violence and gang violence. Can he tell us more about what he is doing to bring those resources together to ensure that we join up our plans, to protect our young people and ensure that the potential that they offer to our communities is not lost but realised?