Knife Crime Prevention Orders

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend knows that the illegal drugs market is considered to be the major driver of serious violence. These gangs deal in drugs for nothing more than money—money is their sole motivation—and they exploit children to carry those drugs around the country. The way in which they exploit those children is terrible, which is why we are tackling the organised crime gangs behind the drugs market, and sending out a message to anyone who may have a wrap of cocaine at the weekend or dally in drugs almost as a hobby that they are part of the picture of violence and exploitation. They need to be aware of where their drugs may very well have come from.

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I have a few questions for the Minister that I hope she can answer, especially given that the Home Secretary is not here. How much does she expect the roll-out of knife crime prevention orders to cost? Will there be extra community police officers? How does this fit with the Government’s public health approach? Will there be extra resources available for programmes such as Divert, which I visited at Millwall in my constituency last week and which has proved successful in reducing reoffending by over 20%? Reoffending costs the UK up to £10 billion a year, so should our focus not be on early intervention programmes such as that, rather than gimmicks that risk criminalising our young kids?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for all the work she does on this issue. She knows how important intervention is in the Government’s approach to tackling this serious violence. In terms of reoffending and preventing offending from happening in the first place, that is precisely what these orders are about; they are called prevention orders. We want to prevent children and young people from carrying knives in the first place, and that is consistent with our approach on, for example, the #knifefree campaign on social media. In terms of the costs, I do not have that figure to hand but I am sure that it will make its way across to me at some point.

The orders have been put in place at the request of the Metropolitan police. We have listened carefully to its analysis that there is a small cohort of young people that these orders may help, and we have drawn inspiration from similar prevention orders that are used in other regards. It will be for the police to decide how they use this tool as part of their operational toolkit. I would argue that this is consistent with the public health approach, because the positive and negative requirements within the order will enable the young person to receive help from other state organisations that will be able to draw them out of the criminal gangs that they might well be frequenting.