Oral Answers to Questions

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise these issues. On a fair share of police officers, I understand that his force has already recruited 67 more police officers, and our plans to recruit 20,000 police officers go from strength to strength. I note that Derbyshire police have received over £400,000 in covid surge funding very much to step up on enforcement and fines, and to deal with issues such as antisocial behaviour, which is a particular issue that my hon. Friend has raised on behalf of his constituents.

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

What recent assessment her Department has made of trends in the level of violent crime.

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

According to the crime survey for England and Wales, overall levels of violent crime have reduced since the peak in the mid-1990s. However, this trend has begun to stabilise and there is growing public concern. We are taking action by surging police capacity in the forces most affected by violent crime, and investing in early intervention to prevent young people from being drawn into serious violence.

[Vicky Foxcroft [V]]

Last month, I found out through an answer to a written parliamentary question tabled in September that the serious violence taskforce has been discontinued. Are the Government still committed to a long-term public health-based approach to tackling violence affecting young people? I fear for other measures they may be looking to scrap via the back door.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am slightly mystified by the hon. Lady’s attempt at surprise, not least because I think there was an exchange at this Dispatch Box some months ago when we discussed the serious violence taskforce, and, indeed, there have been previous questions. The Prime Minister—given that he had been a renowned crime-fighting Mayor—decided on coming to office that he wanted to take leadership of the crime effort himself, so we created the criminal justice taskforce. Beneath that sits the National Policing Board, and a performance board sits beneath that. That is all focused largely on fighting violent crime.

Our commitment to fighting violent crime remains strong. Just this morning, I was able to announce an extra £35 million of funding into violence reduction units, a very large proportion of which will obviously come to London. Both the Prime Minister and I have experience of fighting crime, and along with the Home Secretary—who was previously chair of the all-party parliamentary group on victims and witnesses of crime—have shown enormous commitment to this issue over a prolonged period, and that will continue into the future.

Immigration Rules: Supported Accommodation

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

Yes, I do agree. In fact, some of those 60,000 are people whose asylum claims are not pending but whose asylum claims have been rejected, and where the legal process has been convoluted and removal has not been effected. One of the things that we intend to do in our Bill is ensure that failed asylum seekers can be more quickly returned to their safe country of origin, which, of course, is what should happen. My hon. Friend is right that we need to speed up asylum decision making and get these numbers down. That is fair to individuals who have a valid asylum claim, but also to the taxpayer, upon whom otherwise falls an extremely large financial burden. I agree entirely with my hon. Friend’s sentiments.

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

Lewisham is proud to be a borough of sanctuary, and the council has stated that it will not collaborate with the Home Office in enforcing new immigration rules that make rough sleeping a legal ground to cancel or refuse permission to stay in the UK. As we enter the coldest months of the year, how can the Minister justify these rules when they risk deterring rough sleepers from seeking help and threaten to put many lives at risk?

[Chris Philp]

The Government have been extremely clear that the rules on rough sleeping to which the hon. Lady refers only apply where the person concerned has persistently refused offers of help and support, and are engaging in persistent antisocial behaviour. It is expected to be used in an extremely small number of circumstances. Of course everybody will be offered help and support to get off the streets. The Government have invested about £700 million this year alone in helping people to get off the streets and into accommodation. She mentions Lewisham’s desire to assist. One way in which the London Borough of Lewisham can certainly assist is by taking on some unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who are arriving in Kent. I look forward to hearing from her and from the leader of her authority as to exactly how many of those children they propose to take in over Christmas.

Scheduled Mass Deportation: Jamaica

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

Yes I do agree, of course. My hon. Friend puts the point very well. One of the most fundamental duties of any Government is to protect their citizens, and ensuring that foreign nationals convicted of serious offences are removed from the country is one very important way in which the Government can protect our fellow citizens. As I have said, I am aware of cases where people were eligible for removal or deportation but for some legal challenge reason this was not done and they then went on to commit some serious offences.

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

I have a constituent on the flight who came to the UK aged 11. He has no friends or family in Jamaica, but he does have three children who do not know that he is likely to be deported. Although he is desperate to see them one last time, he does not want them to worry. Have the Government carried out any assessment of the impact this will have on his children, who are likely to never see their father again?

[Chris Philp]

The balance between family rights and the obligation on the Government to remove dangerous offenders is laid out in statute. If a challenge is brought, it is up to the courts to determine in each individual case how that balance is struck. I would say—I have the case details in front of me, but I do not want to recite them to the House, for reasons of confidentiality—that the hon. Lady’s constituent is an extremely persistent and prolific offender, and that includes some quite dangerous offences. As I say, the balance between family rights and public safety is set out in statute and is struck by the courts, but I make no apology for putting public safety first.

Oral Answers to Questions

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to Thames Valley police. It is an exceptional and outstanding police force, and I know his community is served well by it. He has heard my remarks on the police covenant, and it is absolutely right that we do much more to protect our frontline officers and their family members and provide the welfare support that they all need as well. I absolutely concur with all Members of the House in recognising that Friday’s murder highlights why we need to put that into law.

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

My constituent Angela was detained in 2011. She was abandoned in the UK as a child with a man who imprisoned her. He and others beat and repeatedly raped her until she escaped as a teenager. Two clinical professionals and a human trafficking expert have reported to the Home Office that her story is credible. The Home Office refuses to consider this evidence, insisting that Angela is covering up her true identity, and it has attempted to deport her. Will the Home Secretary conduct an urgent review of Angela’s case, please?

[Priti Patel]

I ask the hon. Member to contact me directly with the background and history of this particular case, and I will look into it.

Policing and Crime

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

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

Let me start by saying how disappointing it is that the “Victoria Derbyshire” show is going to be taken off-air. I have been on the show several times to talk about the impact of youth violence and finding solutions to prevent it. It has engaged in looking at the root causes of and how we tackle knife crime and with young people, including former young mayors of Lewisham, with genuine sensitivity. I hope this decision is revisited.

[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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend raises an extremely good point. A well functioning local criminal justice partnership, which will involve the local authority as well as the police and other bodies involved in crime fighting, will often look at exactly these kinds of issues. I hope that as we move forward in the police uplift programme one area of focus will be a regional approach to problem solving in policing. I would be more than happy to meet her to discuss this if she has any specific ideas.

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

12. What recent assessment she has made of the adequacy of the number of firefighters.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service (Kit Malthouse)]

We are confident that fire and rescue services have the resources they need to do their important work. Operational decisions are for each fire and rescue authority to make as part of the integrated risk management planning process, and it is for individual fire and rescue services to make decisions on the number of firefighters they employ.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

Since Grenfell, London Fire Brigade has undertaken focused and enhanced visits to high-rise buildings, using both station-based crews and fire safety inspecting officers. Inspecting officers are highly skilled individuals who ensure that those with responsibility for buildings are taking the necessary steps to uphold fire safety standards. What is the Minister doing to support brigades in recruiting and retaining officers in these essential specialist roles?

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously the Grenfell inquiry is due to publish shortly, and we will all have to learn lessons from its conclusions. The hon. Lady is right to point towards prevention as a key part of the mission of the fire service, and one in which there has been enormous success in the past decade or more in driving down the number of fires attended to, in particular, and incidents across the board more generally. We have secured an extremely good financial settlement for the fire service across the country this year, and I have urged fire chiefs, not least in the light of the first set of inspections for some time, to invest in prevention.

Violent Crime

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend is consistent in his message to social media companies about their huge responsibility in hosting videos, pictures and so on on their platforms. This is an ongoing dialogue and, in fairness to the social media companies, we are seeing some progress, but it is not enough. That is why we have helped the Metropolitan police to set up its social media hub, to ensure that drill music videos in particular, which can often incite violence, are taken down as quickly as possible. Also, through the online harms White Paper, we are advocating the idea of companies having a duty of care of towards the wider public.

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

We all agree that early intervention and prevention are part of the public health approach, but I sometimes worry that when we use that language, we are not actually following it through. Cross-departmental working is at the heart of the public health approach, so can the Minister update us on how that is going in relation to education, mental health, youth work, early intervention—Sure Start, for example—and the police? Also, has she done any work on pooled budgets, to ensure that the money follows the issue and that we do not simply have everybody fighting over their own departmental budgets?

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. On the work that is ongoing across the Government, she will know about the Prime Minister’s serious youth violence summit, the purpose of which was to drive action across the Government. The hon. Lady is absolutely right to say that the Department for Education has a huge role to play, as does the NHS and others. Indeed, only last week I visited an alternative provision school to see for myself the work being done on the ground to help young people who are at risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of serious violence. On the actions arising out of the summit, there is now a specific ministerial group attended by all the relevant Secretaries of State, as well as a unit within the Cabinet Office, to drive this work forward, so it really is at the centre of Government.

On the question of spending priorities, spending review discussions are ongoing and it will not surprise the hon. Lady to know that I have been emphasising the need for us to help vulnerable people—particularly those who might have been subject to adverse childhood experiences —at an early stage in life. That has huge benefits both for the way in which society enjoys itself and for the Home Office and its partners not having to pick up the pieces.

Oral Answers to Questions

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Very, very brief questions because we cannot keep people waiting indefinitely.

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

Scotland had a 10-year strategy to develop a public health approach to tackle violence, although people in Scotland would argue that it should have been a 15 or 20-year strategy. Will the Government show us how serious they are about taking a public health approach to this issue by committing to a 20-year strategy from the start?

[Sajid Javid]

Earlier I mentioned the consultation, which—to correct the record—closed at the end of May. I hope that the hon. Lady will input into that consultation. If she has made that suggestion to the consultation, we will be taking it very seriously.

Serious Violence

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

As we have heard in the contributions so far, serious violence is always an emotive subject for the public and for Members of this House. Sadly, given the recent knife crime epidemic in London and many other parts of England, it is an issue that we have had to discuss far too often in recent times. Of course, the adoption of the public health model to tackle serious violence in Glasgow and Scotland is not news to Members—indeed, it has already come up in this debate—but thanks to Police Scotland and the work of the violence reduction unit, levels of non-sexual violent crime have reduced significantly in Scotland, and the approach has been welcomed and advocated by the World Health Organisation. That reduction has been most apparent in west and central Scotland, and in Scotland’s cities more generally. Glasgow used to be known as the murder capital of Europe, yet it is now one of the safer cities in these islands. But despite this undoubted success, there is still a long, long way to go, and the Scottish Government are committed to tackling violent crime head-on, whatever form that takes.

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

It appears that the Home Secretary may be leaving this debate while the hon. Gentleman is making an extremely important contribution on the public health approach. Does he agree that that is a very disappointing thing to see?

[Gavin Newlands]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I am not surprised, sadly, that the Home Secretary has left. I was surprised, though, that in his very long speech, much of which we can agree with, he made very little mention of the public health model. It took interventions from Opposition Members to try to draw out his opinion on the public health model, and that was a shame.

--- Later in debate ---

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

Through my work with the Youth Violence Commission, I have spoken with many young people whose friends have been stabbed; with the grieving families of victims; and with the traumatised friends of perpetrators. If we trace the lives lost to violence, or to long prison sentences, back to childhood, we hear familiar stories of domestic abuse, neglect, childhood trauma and school exclusions.

Let us take one child, who I will call Jack. Jack’s father is unpredictable and often violent. His mother self-medicates to cope. She has few friends in the area where they live. She does not know her neighbours and she is financially dependent on Jack’s father. From an early age, Jack witnesses his mother being beaten and abused by his father. As a small child, he is withdrawn, anxious and has trouble sleeping.

When Jack starts primary school, his teacher notices that he struggles to concentrate most days. Sometimes he seems utterly sleep deprived. He is often late in the morning and falls behind with his school work. Jack struggles to keep up with his classmates, and feeling anxious about that, he starts to become more disruptive.

By the time Jack starts secondary school, things have become worse. The police have been called to the house on several occasions, and Jack has been referred to social services. At 13 years old, things have become so bad at home that the courts grant a court order and Jack is taken into care. He is placed with a foster family, which costs the council approximately £27,000 a year.

Jack struggles at school. He finds it hard to concentrate and he is behind his classmates, so he increasingly skips school. When he is there, he has a reputation for being disruptive and aggressive. That behaviour leads him to be suspended on numerous occasions until, at the age of 14, he is permanently excluded from school and sent to a pupil referral unit, which costs an average of £17,000 per pupil per year.

Shortly afterwards, Jack assaults a boy who ends up in hospital with various injuries. He is now known to the police and receives a warning. The cost to the police and the criminal justice system of responding to a single such crime is approximately £2,500. The immediate cost of health services for the victim is nearly £900. Jack is then referred to a youth offending team, which costs about £1,500. For a while, things get better. After moving placements several times, he settles with a foster family and he does not reoffend for a year.

Shortly after turning 16, however, he goes to a party and a heated argument quickly descends into a fight. Jack struggles with how to handle his emotions, and he stabs another boy. He did not expect this to be fatal, but two days later the victim dies in hospital from his injuries. Right now, at this point, we have lost two young lives. The devastating loss of these two lives is felt not just by the families but by the whole community and across society as well.

The overall cost to the hospital is more than £2,000. The cost of services to the victim’s family is about £6,000. After a trial by jury, which costs upwards of £150,000, Jack is sentenced to 15 years in prison. The average cost per place per year in a young offenders institution is £76,000. The average cost of a single homicide to the police is more than £11,000, and to the criminal justice system it is more than £800,000. Then there are the further hidden costs of a homicide. They include the lost earnings of the victim and the perpetrator and of their families, as well as the cost of the impact on the victim’s family and friends’ mental health, and the cost of the fear of violence and the trauma of the wider community. In total, the Home Office estimates that one homicide costs society more than £3 million. We have one boy dead and another boy in prison. By the time he is 18, Jack has cost the state nearly £4 million in interventions from the police, social services and youth offending teams, and in costs to the NHS, the local council and the criminal justice system.

Now, let us start the story differently. Let us add in some true early interventions. Imagine that we have another child in similar circumstances: let us call him John. When John’s mother is pregnant with him, she attends a Sure Start centre in her local area. The family centre gives her advice on family health, parenting, employment and training, and it is a good place for her to meet other expectant mothers. When John is born, she continues to attend the centre regularly, to see her friends and to get advice on parenting and child health. On average, the programmes cost around £1,000 per year per child.

Things at home are not easy. John regularly witnesses his father being physically abusive to his mother, and he is an anxious toddler as a result. At the children’s centre, one of the health visitors notices that John’s mother has signs of physical abuse and reports this to social services. The centre is aware of this and keeps an eye on her, and the group of friends that John’s mother has made at the centre are supportive. Unfortunately, she ends up in hospital, but the centre still supports her in leaving her partner. It refers her to a refuge, and the training on offer at the centre helps her to find a part-time job. The place in the refuge costs £52 a day, and the training costs £1,000.

The children’s centre is connected to a maintained nursery school, which John attends when he is old enough. At nursery he develops his communication skills, and by the time is four he is seen as school-ready. He is more independent, and has strong social skills for his age. As a result, he settles in quickly and makes friends, and he can keep up with his peers throughout primary school. Generally, things with John and his mother are much more settled by the time he starts secondary school. His mother is working full time, and after having had to move several times between friends and temporary accommodation, they have now been living in the same place for a year. The secondary school that John attends has a school nurse and strong mental health support, meaning that the teachers have time to work with and support all the children. The school has a zero exclusions policy as a result. The school nurse costs the school around £40,000 a year.

John’s mother works late, so after school he attends the youth centre down the road with his friends. As he gets older, the youth centre is also able to provide him with skills training and advice on work experience. The school has a dedicated police officer attached to it, who John and his friends occasionally play football with at lunch and confide in if they are concerned about something. The partnership between the local police force and John’s school has also been beneficial for the police. In building up trust with the pupils and their parents, they are able to obtain information about vulnerable children who are at risk of being groomed by gangs. This partnership usually costs about £50,000 a year.

John still suffers with anxiety and occasionally has problems controlling his temper, but the school has the internal resources to support him and he receives mental health support for managing his temper.

When he reaches the end of year 11, John leaves school with five good GCSEs. He has a part-time job and has got into a local college to do business studies. He has also become a peer mentor in his youth centre and supports other young people. Based on the crude estimates I have outlined in this story, the cost of that early intervention is about £170,000. The cost of failure for Jack is more than 20 times that amount.

An early intervention approach will not only save money; it also has the potential to save many lives. We know that early intervention is key. A strategy based on very early intervention and wraparound support would not only reduce violence but have wider benefits for society and the economy.

Research shows that adverse childhood experiences or traumatic incidents in childhood can have a lasting impact in adulthood. Compared with people who have no ACEs, those who have four or more are seven times more likely to be involved in violence, four times more likely to have a low level of mental wellbeing and 11 times more likely to be incarcerated. As MPs, we need to be far more aware of this. In an attempt to raise the profile of that, I am writing to all MPs to ask them to complete a short online survey on how many ACEs they have. I hope that that will focus some minds.

We have to stop just talking about early intervention and start genuinely resourcing and delivering it. A true public health approach should focus on that, because every life is precious and our young people deserve the best start in life.

Offensive Weapons Bill

Vicky Foxcroft Excerpts

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend summarises the orders succinctly, and I thank him for all his work on the Bill. The point of the orders is to try to reach those children before they are in the criminal justice system. They include, for example, the ability to prohibit a child from accessing social media or entering certain postcodes, because we know the tensions arising on the streets from particular groups of young people in certain parts of our large cities. This is not about criminalising those young people; it is about trying to reach them.

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

In the Minister’s discussions with the police about programmes that work and the investment that they want to see, has she considered expanding Prevent, a programme with proven successes, or early intervention measures such as investing in our youth services? What the police keep saying, and what Ministers keep quoting, is that we cannot just police our way out. If that is the case, we need to invest in all those programmes that support our young people, so I would be grateful if the Minister said something about Prevent in particular.

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank the hon. Lady again for all the work that she does through the Youth Violence Commission. She is absolutely right. As I said at the beginning of the debate, the Offensive Weapons Bill is but one measure within the serious violence strategy, and these orders are but one measure within the Bill. We do not for one moment claim that the orders are going to solve everything, but we hope that they will be a path to reaching some of the children who are currently so difficult to reach, as the hon. Lady knows. These measures come on top of all the early intervention and the youth endowment fund, through which we are investing £200 million over the next 10 years to give certainty to the organisations that win bids. All those measures are really important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

Yes. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the pilots. Some of the concerns raised today were also raised in the other place, so their lordships saw fit to insert an amendment regarding piloting. I hope that it gives some comfort to the House that we will pilot the provisions in one or more specified areas in England and Wales. We have not yet determined which forces will have the privilege of starting these pilots. The second condition of piloting is that the Secretary of State will lay before Parliament

“a report on the operation of some or all of the provisions”

relating to KCPOs, so the House will be fully updated on the progress. I am sorry that I cannot give the hon. Gentleman more details regarding the operational aspects of the pilots at this precise moment in time, but I want to deal with the amendments tabled by the shadow Minister.

Amendments (b) and (c) to Lords amendment 7, and amendment (a) to Lords amendment 14, would make it a requirement for the police to obtain—and, by implication, for the youth offending team to produce—a pre-injunction report, including an assessment of the defendant, before making an application on conviction, or otherwise than on conviction if the defendant is under the age of 18, and to provide that report to the court as part of their application. It follows from this proposed amendment that the outcome of the consultation should be available to the court. The requirement to consult is an important safeguard to ensure that the youth offending team has a chance to influence the process, and we expect the YOT’s view to be before the court when it is considering the application. We will state in guidance that we expect the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to share with the court the outcome of the consultation with the youth offending team, and we will reinforce the message during the pilots that the applicant police force should share the outcome of the YOT consultation with the court.

Amendment (c) to Lords amendment 12 would also set down a requirement in relation to a pre-injunction report. Again, we believe that the requirement to consult the youth offending team addresses this, and I am not persuaded that it would be appropriate to include a requirement to consult the youth offending team if an application without notice were made, given the urgency of such applications. However, the consultation requirement must be fulfilled before the full hearing takes place.

Amendment (d) to Lords amendment 7 is not needed. The Bill already provides a power for the court to require evidence from the individual responsible for promoting, supporting and monitoring compliance with any requirement included in the order. That individual could be the youth offending team, but it could also be a community group or a charity, for example. Let me remind the House that the police fully support the provisions in the Bill as they stand in the Lords amendments that we have tabled in the Home Secretary’s name. There are already safeguards in the Bill to ensure that the orders are proportionate and that the views of the youth offending teams are taken into account during the application process. I therefore ask the shadow Home Secretary and the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) not to press their amendments.

Amendment (a) to Lords amendment 23 requires a report to be laid before Parliament on the outcome of the pilots. I would expect that, as has already been set out in our amendment, a report will be laid before Parliament about the success or otherwise of the pilots, and that KCPOs will be the subject of ongoing scrutiny.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

Will the Minister confirm that when that report is laid before Parliament, there will not be a further roll-out of the KCPOs without our seeing it in Parliament first?

[Victoria Atkins]

I think the hon. Lady is talking about the amendment tabled by the shadow Minister. We do not agree with that amendment. We believe that piloting and then the Secretary of State laying a report before the House is a perfectly proportionate way of assessing the pilots’ success. Let us not forget that we are talking about youth courts and magistrates courts using civil orders, with all the safeguards that are in the regime. This regime mirrors similar regimes used in, for example, gang injunctions. We should have trust in our youth courts and others that they will be able to meet the expectations of the House in terms of ensuring the wellbeing and the welfare of the young people they are looking after. The aim of these orders is to protect young people and also the wider community. On the proposal that a full report should be laid out, I am afraid that, in the usual way, such regulations are not subject to any parliamentary procedure, and the Government see no reason to adopt a different approach in this case.

There are of course other provisions that I have not even begun to address, although I may well have a chance do so at the end. However, I hope that my focusing on the three main issues arising during the passage of the Bill meets with colleagues’ approval. I very much look forward to hearing their contributions in the rest of the debate.