County Lines Exploitation: London

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) on securing this debate on this incredibly important issue, and on making her points in such a compelling fashion. She made clear the very real impact on constituents and the feeling in local communities, as did hon. Members from both sides of the House. This is one of those rare issues on which we can reach cross-party agreement. This debate has made clear the commitment to tackle it—not just in London, but nationally.

Drug gangs target vulnerable young people—including, sadly, as the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) said, children in care and those who have had a very difficult time at home. Gangs deliberately target such children because they know they are susceptible to peer pressure and the influence of adults. They beguile, entice, flatter and befriend them, and when they have ensnared them, they put them to criminal work. It is exploitation pure and simple, which is why I am pleased that we are beginning to see such cases prosecuted under the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which gives them the stigma they deserve, at the same time as tackling criminality.

As we have heard, once caught up in county line gangs, children are at risk of extreme physical and sexual violence, gang recriminations and trafficking. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), who has done much work in this area, set out cogently the effect that such violence has had in his market town, 60 miles from London.

County lines gang activity and its associated violence, drug dealing and exploitation has a devastating on young people, vulnerable adults and local communities, including the parents, as the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) said. This is a relatively new phenomenon. The hon. Lady said that she met constituents involved in this issue for the first time four years ago. I suspect that that was the beginning of this terrible new phenomenon; we were not debating it in 2010 or 2011 because it was not a problem.

We must give the police and others who have to deal with such gangs a bit of room to pace up and understand the way these cases and gangs are developing, because it is an extremely dynamic situation. We know that gangs are looking for new markets at all times to “diversify” their businesses. It is extremely fast-moving. Everyone involved—the Home Office, the police, local authorities and charities—has to react quickly to these situations.

Please be under no illusion: the Government are determined to crack down on this phenomenon, help those who work so hard on the frontline to support children, and investigate and prosecute the gang leaders. In short, we want to rescue and safeguard the victims, and take the gang leaders off our streets. How do we identify the gangs and support the victims? There must be both a national and a local approach to county lines, given the geographical range of some of the gangs. As hon. Members said, we cannot focus just on law enforcement. We have to look at the care we give to the children who are dragged into the gangs, and prosecute the gang leaders.

We have set up a national group to deliver a co-ordinated programme of action to tackle this issue. Through that group, which includes heads of police and other agencies, we have engaged social workers, health practitioners and law enforcement, as well as trained school nurses and housing support officers to raise awareness among the groups of people who reach into the lives of those children and their parents. We are trying to raise awareness among those groups so they can spot the signs of exploitation and point the young people in the right direction.

We completely understand that we need a multi-agency response, and that is what we are trying to do through the national group. The national group then reports to an inter-ministerial group. I appreciate that, outside Whitehall, all these different groups may not mean very much, but that means that Ministers have an understanding for their Departments. We meet regularly—I chair the group—so we can understand what, for example, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are doing to tackle this dreadful gang crime. We will outline further action on this issue on our forthcoming serious violence strategy, which will be published early this year.

The hon. Member for Stockport understandably focused on the issue of missing people. She has so much expertise on that issue and has worked on it for so long; it was a pleasure to meet her recently to discuss her concerns. The safeguarding response to such children is at the heart of protecting young people involved in such exploitation. We have published guidance to raise awareness of the fact that missing is a clear indicator of potential county lines involvement. We have funded local reviews through our ending gang violence and exploitation programme, which I will talk about in a moment, to improve the multi-agency response.

Missing people, in the context of county lines, will be highlighted in the forthcoming missing people strategy, which we are working hard on. The hon. Lady knows only too well how complex the issue is. We want to get it right, and we hope to publish that strategy in the coming months. I have listened to what she has said about child abduction warning notices, which we will consider carefully.

On tackling gangs, we have the ending gang violence and exploitation programme, which again draws together all the relevant Departments—the Department for Education, the Department of Health and Social Care, and so on—so that we work collaboratively on the complex features of county lines. Through that programme, rather like the national group, we know that health professionals, school nurses, housing officers and so on are being given training and being made aware of the key indicators of involvement so that they can spot victims and give them the help needed.

We also need the public’s help. I have been struck by the submissions of colleagues that some parts of the public are not aware of the phenomenon, and that is why this year we are running a nationwide campaign to ensure that parents know when things are perhaps not going right at home with their children, and where to go to seek help.

Through the national ending gang violence and exploitation programme, we are also trying to help local projects on the ground. That includes £300,000 for a new support service operated by the St Giles Trust and Missing People to provide additional support to young people exploited through county lines. That includes one-to-one support for county lines victims travelling between London and Kent; specialist return-home interviews, with subsequent referral and care plans for victims; and scoping work to identify how our support can be improved.

In addition, we have given £100,000 to 15 local area reviews outside London, because those are the areas the gangs are targeting. We want to enable those areas to look at what they are doing to ensure they are responding to the threats to young people—not just those from London but young people in their areas, because the gangs recruit locally as well.

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

I am listening intently to the Minister. She has pointed to the ending gang and youth violence strategy and to different areas that feed into her, with lots of different projects working together at different times. However, what many Members have asked about and what I am interested in is: how does this all link up? Are databases being shared, or is there cross-working among the different areas? If not, how will the Government ensure that we manage that better?

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

We may understand this in Whitehall, but I appreciate that we cannot wander around the streets of London talking about strategies. However, it is through such strategies that we draw all the partners together. There is a great deal of collaborative work on this, because we know that a child may start in London but end up on the other side of the country—north, south, east or west.

I will come to law enforcement in a moment, but there is also a great deal of work going on between police forces. Such things are not always on the front page of the local newspaper, because that would not be appropriate, but we ensure that officers talk to each other and share intelligence, as happened in Swansea, so that they know when gangs in London are coming to an area outside and the police can work together to bring a prosecution.

Young people’s advocates are also important. We have heard a lot today about youth clubs and so on. Since 2012, young people’s advocates have been funded in London, Manchester and Birmingham. They do an incredible amount of work, in particular with women and girls. We have not spoken much today about the impact of such issues on women and girls, but they can be terribly affected by sexual violence in gangs. Recently, I visited a charity called Safer London, which has young people’s advocates working with young women who have been sexually exploited, sometimes pimped out by the gangs or used in gang recriminations. Those advocates can do a great deal to turn around such women and girls’ lives.

Other organisations that we are helping include Redthread, which targets—that sounds like the wrong word; I should say “focuses”—on young people in London when they come into accident and emergency with stab wounds. Redthread tries to reach them at that most vulnerable point in their lives to break them free of the gangs. We have also just handed out more than £800,000 to local knife-crime charities—some Members might have received a letter from me about local charities that have received such funds—to ensure a local approach, because areas are different and we do not assume that what will work in one part of London, for example, would work in another. We rely very much on local charities with their expertise on knowing what will work.

Other strands of work include a local projects fund of £280,000. MOPAC, the Mayor’s office for policing and crime, and police and crime commissioners play a very important role. We are pleased that the Mayor of London is continuing with the London gang exit scheme, which tries to get young people out of gangs.

I am conscious about leaving time for the right hon. Member for Enfield North to respond, so I will move on to prosecution. I used to prosecute drug traffickers and other criminals for a living, and I am keen that we target the leaders of the gangs. I have heard what has been said about the Modern Slavery Act 2015. To our collective recollection, we have had no request from any arm of law enforcement to review the Act; law enforcement is using the Act as it stands. Of course, if we get such a request, we will consider it, but we have had no such request yet.

The problem, as the hon. Member for Lewisham East emphasised, is getting the people at the very top; sadly, that has always been the case—I speak as someone who used to prosecute gangs. Trying to get the people at the top, rather than those lower down the rungs, is very difficult, but that is not the fault of the Act; it is the difficulty of drawing the evidence together so as to get, for example, conspiracy to supply class A drugs on the indictment. The police are very much working on that, and the National Crime Agency has prioritised county lines as a national threat. It is working on that across the country. It has had a 100% response rate from all forces with its latest report, which gives the best intelligence assessment we have had so far.

To focus in, however, because I am conscious of the time, I should say that we have had some success in the area of prosecution. I am very pleased that two defendants in Swansea recently pleaded guilty, and other cases under the Modern Slavery Act are in the pipeline. Drug dealing telecommunications restriction orders are in force, but I cannot give any more detail on when the first one will be used, for operational reasons. The police, however, were very excited to have those orders as a power and they intend to use them. I hope that at some point I will be able to update the House on that.

Be under no illusions—as a Government we are very committed to tackling county lines. To quote a police officer to whom I spoke recently, who is tackling such gangs in her local area: “They are stealing our children.” That sums it up. We cannot and will not allow them to do that, and we will do everything we can to stop it.