Violent Crime

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Yvette Cooper

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

There is an understandable tendency to focus on the law enforcement response and on our early prevention strategy, but an important part of this formula is the behaviour of serious organised crime gangs. These are the people who exploit our young people and children, these are the people who try to extend their drug markets across the country, and these are the people whom we absolutely must target if we are to bring an end to this. Along with the Minister for Security and Economic Crime, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), I have emphasised the need to target serious organised crime, including the profits that the criminals make from their disgraceful, disgusting business. I shall be happy to discuss the issue with my hon. Friend in more detail after the urgent question, but I can assure him that tackling serious organised crime is an essential part of our overall efforts to target serious violence.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Yet more lives have been lost, more families are devastated, and there are disturbing reports of older gang members paying young people to stab, maim and kill. However, the letter that the Minister has just sent to the Home Affairs Committee suggests that the surge funding for policing is for only one year, which limits police forces’ ability to recruit the officers they need, and also that the youth endowment fund will support only £6 million-worth of projects this year, which is a drop in the ocean compared with the scale of the cuts in youth services and interventions. Does the Minister not understand the real concern about the lack of grip, the lack of urgency, and the lack of scale in the Government’s response? Can she really put her hand on her heart and say, in the light of this escalating violence, that the Home Office is doing enough?

[Victoria Atkins]

In the letter, we made it clear that while the spring statement included £100 million for police forces, the Home Secretary had committed himself to making resources for them an absolute priority in our spending review. In our conversations with chief constables who are either already setting up violence reduction units locally in, for instance, the west midlands, or are beginning to do so as a result of this announcement, we fully acknowledge that the funds cannot be just for a single year.

As for the youth endowment fund, we have locked in the money over 10 years, precisely because we have listened to local charities and those who work closely with young people. They say that it is often the short-term resourcing that is a problem, so we are investing £200 million, although it is expected to be more over the 10-year period. To demonstrate the urgency that we have ascribed to this issue, we have managed to move £200 million off the Government books in, I think, an almost unprecedentedly short time—a matter of a couple of months—which will seem pretty extraordinary to anyone who has not served in a Government Department. We have put the fund into an independent charitable trust, which is running it. The bids for the first round will close on 23 July, so if there are local charities that Members think should apply, I ask them please to press them into doing so. We expect the trust to make the first announcements of bids in the autumn.

Knife Crime

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Yvette Cooper

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his kind words, and I am reminded of the many comments made about him in celebration of his recent knighthood. He makes an important point about sentencing. Of course, it is the judiciary who decide the sentences they impose on defendants as they appear before them in court, but we really must emphasise the importance of the public message on this for local communities living in the sorts of circumstances outlined by the shadow Home Secretary, where people fear for their sons and daughters. That is why we have introduced mandatory minimum sentences for those caught in possession of a knife on more than one occasion. We have asked judges to apply a minimum of six months’ imprisonment to such people to send out that very clear message that holding a knife is not acceptable, is not normal, and if you hold a knife in a public place not only do you put other people at risk, you put yourself at risk as well.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I do not doubt the Minister’s good intentions on this, and I think the whole House would agree on many of the things that can make a difference. The problem is that she could have been saying most of these things about a year ago. There is no real sense that the Government are doing anything on the scale that is needed or with the urgency that is needed, whether that is on extra policing, early intervention, youth intervention or tackling exclusions from schools. One summit is just not enough. We want to know what the Home Secretary is doing. Is he holding weekly meetings, either in Cobra or in the Home Office, to pull everyone together and get some action by the end of next week or by the end of the month? Let us see something that actually makes a difference and saves lives.

[Victoria Atkins]

I take the right hon. Lady’s point about meetings and summits and so on. As she knows, the way in which we get things moving in Whitehall and then across local government and local areas is through drawing everybody together into rooms. We have been working on this day in, day out since the serious violence strategy was launched. We are already funding 29 projects through the early intervention youth fund and working with police and crime commissioners to reach those young people who need help. We have already funded many programmes through the anti-knife crime community fund, which involves smaller projects, and I hope that many Members of Parliament will have received letters from me about the projects in their constituencies that have benefited from it. We have a media campaign called #knifefree, which we in this place are probably not aware of because frankly we are not the people that the campaign is targeting. It is targeting young people in a very direct way on social media, through catch-up television and elsewhere, and it is supporting the message that it is not normal for people to carry knives.

I want to put out this plea: there is more that we as a society can do to press this message home. I am due to meet representatives of the Premier League to ask whether they can encourage their football legends to do even more as role models to get the message out there that carrying a knife is not normal, that people do not have to do it, and that if they do, they are putting themselves at enormous risk. There is a great deal more that we as a society can do to get that message out there to young people about carrying knives, but there is also a huge amount of work going on involving police officers. We have weeks of intensive activity in which police forces across the country make tackling knife crime the priority for that week. I went to an operational briefing on Friday where the plans for the following week were being laid out. Those weeks have extraordinary rates of success: in the last one, 9,000 knives were taken off the streets of our country. The more of these surge operations we can have, the greater benefit there will be in the immediate term on this very complex issue.

Knife Crime Prevention Orders

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Yvette Cooper

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

That is exactly the point of the Bill. We are very conscious that, while most retailers do what they should by obeying the law that has been in place for more than 30 years to stop the sale of sharp knives to under-18s, online retailers are not doing so well in that regard, so the Bill is intended to ensure that online as well as shop retailers meet their obligations. That is just one of the ways in which we are trying to prevent young people from getting their hands on these very dangerous weapons in the first place.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Does the Minister not realise that the Home Office appears just to be tinkering while children and young people are dying on our streets, families are being devastated, and parents are worrying about whether their teenagers are safe on their way home? She has talked about an endowment fund, but it is spread over 10 years. She has also talked about an early intervention fund, but it amounts to only £22 million, and there are reports that it is being cut.

This proposal stands against cuts of hundreds of millions of pounds in our youth services. Does the Minister not recognise that any chance of preventing young people from being caught up in dangerous gangs, drug networks, exploitation or county lines requires investment in people who can work with those young people? Will she now commit herself to meeting the scale of the huge and serious problem that we are facing, and to presenting a much bigger, much more ambitious plan that can actually save lives?

[Victoria Atkins]

Let me, if I may, correct the right hon. Lady on a couple of points. The endowment fund is spread over 10 years deliberately to ensure long-term investment in prevention and intervention, and it will be leveraged as well. It is in the process of being launched. As I said earlier, reports of cuts in the early intervention youth fund are mistaken: it remains at £22 million. As for scaling up our response, the serious violence strategy encompasses all of Whitehall, it encompasses local government, and it encompasses the various agencies and arms of the state that it would be expected to encompass.

Our plan to consult on a legal duty to take a “public health” approach to this issue goes further, dare I say, than what is being done in Scotland. If the consultation reveals that there is an appetite for it, all the arms of the state will have a legal duty to prevent this violence. So I do believe that we are scaling up our approach. I do not for a moment underestimate the scale of the task that we face, but we must ensure that all the various levers are pulled in a way that is consistent and will deliver results.

Hate Crime

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Yvette Cooper

Monday 12th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend. I must say that I was not sure whether I had heard the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) correctly. As I have said, the record of both the Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers on the issue of tackling anti-Muslim sentiments is pretty clear. It may be that the hon. Lady can clarify her remarks at a later stage.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I do not think that the previous question represented the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) was making. I hope that we can address this issue as a united Parliament, and not in a way that is divided. We should all stand together against this kind of vile threat and this illegal incitement to violence. Our whole Parliament, the police and our communities across the country should want to stand firm with Muslim families and Muslim communities against this kind of vile Islamophobia, because we know from history that an attack on some of us is an attack on all of us. That is why we stand firm.

What has the Home Office done since I raised last week the prevalence of National Action illegal propaganda videos on YouTube—still—and also, I discover, on Twitter and on Facebook? We know that the former counter-terror chief has warned of online radicalisation and the rise of far right extremism, and our Select Committee has heard in our inquiry about the serious issues around Islamophobia and hate crime. The Minister will know that we are allowing social media companies to collude with these far right extremists if action is not taken to take down this kind of vile illegal propaganda.

[Victoria Atkins]

The right hon. Lady knows the work that the Home Secretary is doing with the large technology companies to improve their reaction. I think that pretty much everyone in this place—and certainly everyone outside—agrees that technology companies need to do more to remove these hateful pieces of incitement from their platforms much more quickly and working with police. I am sure that we have agreement on that.