Stephen Timms
Main Page: Stephen Timms (Labour - East Ham)Department Debates - View all Stephen Timms's debates with the Home Office
(6 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesThe list of corrosive substances in schedule 1 is based on some scientific advice that the Government have received, as I understand it. Could that advice be made available to us as well?
If I may, I will check with the officials and get back to the Committee on that.
Q
Jaf Shah: A combination of interventions is required to deal with a pretty complicated scenario. Obviously, in understanding acid violence, we know that, effectively, 50% of acid attacks occur in London. Within London, the three boroughs most affected constitute probably in the region of about 35% of attacks. It is no coincidence that those three boroughs are the three poorest boroughs in London, so you have to think about the issues of disadvantage of many young men—it is predominantly young men.
From 2017, in our data, 75% of perpetrators were men, 10% women and the rest unknown. What we are seeing is, again, the gap in what those young men aspire to and what they can realistically achieve through legitimate means. The aspiration thing is a key element. Every young person aspires to achieve something, and that might mean material goods, but what happens if you are not going to achieve that aspirational goal?
Not only do we have to ensure that there is a very strong educational programme that works around issues of respect and anti-violence, but we have to create opportunities for those young men, in particular, to find alternatives. That might be further education; it might be university. Clearly, most young people want to have some money in their pockets, so the issues around employment opportunities also come into play. If you take a trauma approach to dealing with the problem, you have to understand that many young men who commit these crimes have probably been victims of violence themselves. You have to engage with them at that level as well.
It is a very complicated scenario—hence the fact that I think you need to have an integrated approach in dealing with the problem, because it requires engagement with so many different stakeholders. That is not going to happen very easily; it will take at least two years—maybe a year if you are lucky—to embed the infrastructure, align all the stakeholders to a clear objective and then deliver a programme of work.
Patrick Green: It is all the things you mention. If I can borrow from public health language, in a health setting, in preventative work, we send out positive help messages to everybody to eat well, exercise well, not drink too much and so on. We have those positive, preventative messages. If there is then early intervention in terms of screening, we screen people and hope that everything is positive. For those that are negative, we move in very quickly and intervene. We do whatever is necessary to stop it going to the next stage.
It is a similar approach to tackling youth violence and knife crime. We need to do far more in terms of the preventative work. The early intervention work can be all the things you mention plus 100 things more. It comes down to really good youth work. You have to really understand what is happening for the young person involved, both for them and in their environment. If you put the right measures around them and allow them to fail once or twice along the way, then, generally, you can pull young people back from that setting. Sadly, it is not just about doing a prescribed number of seven or eight different things, and I think the serious violence strategy captures a lot of this; it is about doing a large number of interventions in a strategic manner.
Q
Jaf Shah: No, but the Home Office last year commissioned the University of Leicester to look into the motivations behind the attacks. Some of the critical data and understanding of what types of corrosive fluids are being used in attacks could be produced through the forensic work conducted within hospitals and the investigation process when attacks are reported. There is a lack of data because it is a relatively new crime; well, it is not a new crime, as we all know—it is an old crime—but the numbers are so much higher than they have ever been in the past. Suddenly we are addressing a relatively new crime, and we are at those early stages where more data needs to be accumulated to better understand the problem, the motivations and the environment in which perpetrators are committing those attacks—to understand the real motivations behind those acts.
I commission a lot of research on the subject because it is a relatively new phenomenon here in the UK. I have commissioned law studies to understand what laws are in place in other countries, how we can learn from those laws and how they are being implemented.
Q
Jaf Shah: There were 470 reported attacks in London in 2017, out of 948 nationwide.
Q
I would be interested in your views about something that puzzles me about the Bill—no doubt at some point we will have the opportunity to ask the Minister about this. There are two main offences in the Bill relating to corrosive substances: selling them to people under 18—the Bill bans that—and having them in a public place. However, the definition of “corrosive substance” differs for those two offences. For the first, there is a reference to a schedule: you must not sell the products in schedule 1 to people under 18. For the second, there is a different definition, in clause 5(9), which states that
“‘corrosive substance’ means a substance which is capable of burning human skin by corrosion”.
From your point of view, which of those two approaches is preferable? Should we have a list setting out the problem substances, or would a more general definition work better?
Jaf Shah: I would be interested in having a list. The reason I would prefer that method is that once you start to collect data after an attack has been committed and you have the forensics, you can understand which substance is most likely to have been used. If you can compare it with an existing list, that helps in terms of accumulating hard data, and then we can actually target the particular fluids that were used. It makes sense to have a list and to report against that list.
Q
Jaf Shah: Yes, it does.
Q
Jaf Shah: If I remember correctly, there are about eight substances, and they certainly constitute the types of substances that have been used in attacks internationally.
Q
Jaf Shah: I would certainly be open to extending the ban to people under 21. I put forward 18 initially, really to tie it in with existing controls for other weapons so that there was consistency, but I can certainly see the value of increasing the age to 21.
Q
Jaf Shah: I certainly think so. Part of the issue we have is a lack of data. If we keep our options open, we may prevent attacks from occurring in the future. Limiting the range may be detrimental in the long term, I suspect.
Q
Rob Owen: I think there is generally a very low level of awareness. If we twist this slightly, to stop this happening and effectively break the cycle of offending, in our view, you need to inject into that person’s life a credible caseworker who they can relate to and who will go that extra mile to start sorting out pragmatic issues. Often they revolve around the family situation. We are not talking about nuclear families here; we are talking about multiple siblings—many of them failing at school and being failed by school—who are very well known to social services and to nine-plus Government agencies, but there is no one in that person’s life who they actually want to engage with.
I suppose the great trick with these individuals is to put someone into their very complicated lives who they actually believe in and can see is on their side, and who is enabled to do something about it. We always talk about going the extra mile, but if you are trying to help someone with a housing situation and you go down to the homeless persons unit, it will take you five or six hours to advocate through that glass. Several times you will get back a piece of paper saying, “You brought the wrong form. Come back again tomorrow.” If you leave that to the client, it is never going to happen. You often need someone there with the right skills and the right determination, and who that client believes in, to start changing their attitude from, “I’m not going to engage in school.”
You need to get in place someone who is the right role model who will actually start changing their perceptions. The point about aspirations is interesting. Lots of young people who are very vulnerable want the trainers and so on, and they think the easy way to get them is by dealing drugs. The reality is that they earn less than they would do at McDonald’s, and they have a threat to their life. Education is about having someone in their life who they believe in and can engage with. A lot of people are put into their life but they do not want to engage with them, so it is a complete waste of time and makes things worse. That is the reality.
Q
Trish Burls: I would certainly like to come in on the residential premises one. The definition of residential premises could cause a problem for businesses and enforcers alike, in that residential premises have been defined in the Bill as places purely for residential use—no business use at all. These days, increasingly, many people work from home or have businesses registered at home and so on, so businesses might find that difficult to comply with and enforcers might find it difficult to enforce against.
Q
Trish Burls: In terms of age-restricted products in general, do you mean?
Yes.
Trish Burls: We enforce a range of products already—alcohol, tobacco, fireworks, butane and knives, obviously—and trading standards advocates age check 25 or age check 21, a system whereby a retailer is encouraged and advised to check someone’s age if they look under 25 so as to give the retailers a big gap between 18 and 25, and to get them into the habit of asking for the appropriate identification at that point.
Levels of compliance have got much better in recent years, in part because of the fact that age-restricted products are high on the agenda for trading standards to keep children safe. Most trading standards departments do regular checks on this through test purchasing—almost a double band of checks as well. In Croydon we offer a lot of education to traders—we offer free-of-charge trader training sessions for them so as they aware of the law in that area—and we will check that they are complying by carrying out test purchasing, using young people.
Overall, I feel that the age of 18 is challenged a lot more now. Certainly our rates of failure, in terms of test purchases carried through by a young person’s purchase of an age-restricted product, are lower than they used to be.
Q
Trish Burls: I do not know, is the simple answer, I am afraid. I would guesstimate that when advice and education go first there will be a high degree of compliance among retailers, because awareness is raised. As I said before, it is an unusual retailer who will deliberately sell an age-restricted product into the hands of a young person, but I am afraid I do not know.
Ben Richards: We do not have any concrete figures. The only thing we would say is that obviously consistency will be the issue. Some areas are very proactive with their business communities, reaching out with advice and guidance. Some are less so, because of resource constraints. That will be an issue with the delivery of the obligation.
Q
Trish Burls: I think exactly that. At the moment, this is still a new area for them. I would anticipate that there would probably be a low level of compliance if you were to go out now and carry out a series of test purchases on acid-related products, simply through lack of awareness and lack of training. Certainly, some work needs to be done before this becomes law to educate to prevent sales.