Crime and Antisocial Behaviour: Small Towns

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin) on securing this interesting debate, which looks at the issue from the perspective of smaller towns and communities—we call them villages in my part of Lincolnshire—and I am pleased to take part in it. I thank hon. Members from across the House for the examples they have given of crime and antisocial behaviour in their constituencies. There have been some particularly moving examples, and I am sure the whole House is united in hoping that those who have been devastated by those crimes get the help and support they need.

This Government are committed to tackling and preventing crime and antisocial behaviour, and we recognise the particular challenges that smaller towns and communities may face, including in Northern Ireland; we may not have heard all that we wished to hear from Northern Ireland, but I am sure the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) will tell us what is happening there.

[Jim Shannon]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Atkins]

If the hon. Gentleman promises that he will be brief, I will.

[Jim Shannon]

Let me give the Minister some examples of what we have done: antisocial behaviour officers are in the councils; the PSNI work alongside street pastors and churches; and local community groups organise events to take young people away. Those are three things that make a difference. Also, it is not down to the police only, but the parents.

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that it is a community effort, in spite of the importance of law enforcement. That is why, in our Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, we put in place six powers, some of which can be exercised not just by the police but by local authorities. We appreciate that there will be different solutions to different problems in different areas.

The debate is about “rising crime”. I fully recognise the concerns that Members have raised, but I must remind them of the analysis by the independent Office for National Statistics, which sets out that most people are not victims of crime, and that the likelihood of becoming a victim remains low. We also recognise that there has been a genuine rise in serious violent crime, and there is a range of actions under way to tackle that.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Does the Minister realise how maddening the comment, “You are not likely to be the victim”, is to our constituents? If somebody is stabbed in their street or there is a drunk and disorderly person in their shopping centre, they are the victims, and that has an impact on their behaviour.

[Victoria Atkins]

That is the finding of the Office for National Statistics. We have to work on the evidence; that is the way in which we formulate policy. It is a great shame that the hon. Lady was not able to join the briefing session I held yesterday for colleagues from across the House, to update them on our actions to tackle serious violence. She would have seen the range of activity going on, not just in London but across the country, to tackle crime and the causes of criminal activity. Although the statistics are very worrying at the moment—that is why we are acting as we are—it was acknowledged yesterday in the meeting that there is a cyclical element to them. We saw similar spikes in serious violence in the mid to late 2000s. We bore down on them, and we need to ensure that our actions have a similar impact.

In our serious violence strategy, we put a much greater focus on steering young people away from crime while continuing to promote a strong law enforcement response. We are investing in early intervention projects—my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) made that important point. I am delighted to tell the hon. Member for Batley and Spen that West Yorkshire is receiving more than £1 million until March next year to allow the police, community safety partnerships and others to work together on a programme of early intervention projects to prevent serious violence in the county.

We have also launched the national county lines co-ordination centre, and its work has produced huge benefits; in a single week in May, there were 586 arrests, and 519 vulnerable adults and 364 children were engaged with for safeguarding purposes. I am sure that many colleagues are conscious of the exploitation of young people by criminal gangs. On serious violence, we are looking at how gangs communicate in the 21st century and helping the police to tackle gang-related activity on social media.

We recently passed the Offensive Weapons Act 2019, which tightens up the law on the sale of knives and corrosive substances. We are in the middle of a consultation, to which I encourage hon. Members to respond, on a new legal duty to underpin a public health approach to tackling serious violence. We have introduced a new £200 million youth endowment fund that will be delivered over 10 years. It is locked in. That money will be invested, and it will support long-term interventions with children and young people at risk of involvement with crime and violence. We are conducting an independent review of drug misuse, which will report its initial findings to the Home Secretary in the summer.

As colleagues have mentioned, we have established vehicle theft and burglary taskforces to bring together Government, the police and industry in order to improve our response to those crimes. With reference to burglaries, we are looking at building standards and whether we can design out crime, as has happened in the past with vehicle theft. We continue our work with moped-enabled crimes; in London there has been a heartening decrease in that type of crime. That shows that working across civil society, industry and local authorities can really bring dividends. Colleagues will also be aware of the announcements about retail crime we made recently with regard to the Offensive Weapons Act. I very much hope that we will be able to announce the results of that consultation in due course.

Hon. Members also mentioned the impact of antisocial behaviour. We absolutely recognise the impact that forms of antisocial behaviour can have, which is precisely why we introduced the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. The point of the six powers in that Act is that they are flexible and give local forces and local authorities discretion in how they deal with instances and patterns of antisocial behaviour in their areas.

In summary, we very much recognise the impact of crime on not just big cities, but market towns, urban towns, if I am allowed to use that phrase, and villages. That is precisely why, as well as putting in place the suite of measures that we have touched on in this important debate, we have secured an extra £1 billion of funding for the police. That is already enabling police and crime commissioners, including in West Yorkshire, to increase the recruitment of police officers.

As always, I thank hon. Members for their contributions. I very much look forward to debating this issue again in the future. I think we all recognise that concerns about the safety of our constituents and our communities are central to our work here, and to our taking a collegiate approach across the House to ensuring that our country is a safe and comforting place in which to live.