Tuesday 17th July 2018
(5 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesOffensive Weapons Act 2019 View all Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 17 July 2018 - (17 Jul 2018)
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I am grateful for the publication of written evidence, but the responses to the consultation that was the forerunner to the Bill have not yet been published. A summary of the responses is on the Home Office website, but several of the witnesses who will give evidence today reference their consultation responses in their biographies, and we have not had access to them. Could we at least have the consultation responses from the witnesses who are giving evidence today and on Thursday, if not all the responses?
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The list of corrosive substances in schedule 1 is based on some scientific advice that the Government have received, as I understand it. Could that advice be made available to us as well?
Victoria Atkins
If I may, I will check with the officials and get back to the Committee on that.
The Chair
Good morning. We are now in the public part of our sitting. We will hear evidence from Redthread, the Ben Kinsella Trust, St Giles Trust and Acid Survivors Trust International.
I remind all Members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill. We must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee has already agreed. For this session with the four witnesses here, we have until 10.55 am. Before we start, do any Members of the Committee wish to declare any relevant interests in connection with the Bill?
Victoria Atkins
For the sake of completeness, Mr Gapes, I used to prosecute for the Crown Prosecution Service and other prosecuting agencies before I was elected to this place.
The Chair
Thank you very much. Any others? No.
I ask the witnesses that when you answer a question for the first time, please introduce yourselves and tell us about your background. We will do it that way rather than any other way round, to save time.
Victoria Atkins
Q
John Poynton: My name is John Poynton. I am chief executive of Redthread, a youth work charity that works in partnership with health, particularly emergency departments at major trauma centre hospitals. The charity meets young people when they are victims of violence and attends the emergency departments. It uses that window of opportunity or teachable moment to help with wrap-around support and to encourage and empower young people to help to break their cycle of violence.
There is a recognition in working with the London major trauma centres and other local emergency departments and the major trauma centres across the midlands that by the time a young person attends a major trauma centre with a major trauma stabbing or shooting injury, they have often already attended on average four to five times with lower-level injuries. The idea is that violence breeds more violence. Some victims will go on to become perpetrators if there is not an opportunity to interrupt the cycle of violence, and others will go on to become victims time and time again.
There is an amazing opportunity in that clinical setting for Redthread youth workers—I am sure Rob will talk about the St Giles team on the trauma ward at the Royal London—to be embedded and to work shoulder to shoulder alongside the doctors and nurses, so that they meet the victims of violence in the department and follow the patient to give them support and really use that teachable moment.
Rob Owen: I am Rob Owen from the St Giles Trust. I suppose we are best known for the fact that I probably employ more former armed robbers and drug dealers than any other organisation in the UK. They like the fact that I am a reformed ex-investment banker, so that probably fits well.
Our model is that we want to use people with lived experience, who have had similar life experiences, to help our client group. In this field in London we want to focus predominantly on the preventive side. We run a very effective project called SOS+, using people who have had those lived experiences, who have been trafficked, sometimes exploited and certainly involved in gangs, to go into, now, predominantly primary schools and secondary schools to explain to kids the realities of getting into a gang—the realities of having a drug debt; the realities of someone forcing you to take drugs out of your backside at point of violence. They demystify the allure that a lot of people feel about county lines, getting involved in drugs and carrying weapons. The spread of county lines in market towns and coastal areas is something that I am sure you guys are aware of and something that is going to become an increasingly big problem in the UK.
That is the preventive side. On the doing side in London, we run one of the largest gang-exit services, again called SOS, which was founded 10 years ago by an amazing man called Junior Smart. It uses people who have very credible life skills to work with those who are in gangs and are at the point when they probably feel they can exit. We want to get them out safely, so sometimes we work intensively with the police to get them relocated, but getting a young child out of a gang is often much simpler.
Finally, to go back to John’s point, we were very fortunate in being approached by Martin Griffiths who is the most amazing trauma surgeon in Britain and was celebrated by the NHS 70-year awards. He was fed up with the fact that 46% of young people on his slab had been there before—it was very interesting what John was saying. Martin was upset by the fact that these kids now have on average seven puncture wounds. They are not being attacked, as in the old days, by one kid on one kid; they are being attacked by multiple kids, so you get one person with very traumatic injuries. He was fed up with the fact that these same kids were coming back again and again. He brought in, through Redthread, our ability to come in and have those SOS caseworkers at the hospital, at the point of most need—a point of reachability, I suppose is the answer—to try to de-escalate violence that could occur because that young child has been attacked with their peer group, but also to take that kid and give them a much better chance of not getting involved again in the cycle of gangs. That percentage has gone from 46% to 1%, which we are obviously quite pleased with and which I think Martin is very relieved about.
The people we are dealing with are multi-disadvantaged and very hard to engage. They feel they have no role or stake in society. The only way to help them is to put in place intensive support that encompasses their family and their siblings as well. That is the scope of what we are doing.
Patrick Green: My name is Patrick Green, CEO of the Ben Kinsella Trust, which was set up 10 years ago following the murder of Ben Kinsella in Islington in north London. We work with children who generally display really good behaviours and values and go to school. A lot of the children we speak to would not normally be those whom we feel are concerned with knife crime, but our ethos is that it is important that all young people should have a conversation around knife crime. We believe there is a teachable moment much earlier in the process, and our job is to stop young people going to John’s and Rob’s services. We hope to lower that number.
Many young people learn about knife crime from other young people or via social media, which are never the most reliable sources. We give young people the opportunity to talk to a credible adult and have an experience that helps them to embed good values. No young person is born with a knife in their hands. It is a learned behaviour. If you can help them to unlearn those behaviours or value the good behaviours and values that they have, at a point in the future when they might be tested, they can go back to a point that they have a reference on, and it makes a big difference in making more positive decisions. We have worked with about 10,000 young people since 2012.
Jaf Shah: Good morning. My name is Jaf Shah, executive director of Acid Survivors Trust International. Interestingly, we have always historically had an international focus, but the rise in attacks in the UK, particularly over the last five years or so, led a number of our partners and Government organisations with whom we have worked overseas to say, “Look, you are advising us. Why aren’t you doing anything in the UK?” In order to not appear hypocritical, we decided to take on a largely advocacy role here in the UK to bring about some of the changes that we have brought about in other countries with a great deal of success. Our focus over the past few years has been about trying to raise awareness of acid attacks in the UK, to place them within the context of how it happened—why it happens, who are the victims, who are the perpetrators—and to use some of the methodologies that we have acquired to tackle those issues in other countries—with, as I said, some success. It is a new journey for us here in the UK because we are dealing with a quite different demographic than we would be dealing with in terms of perpetrators.
Our latest research is based on a Freedom of Information Act request, having approached all the police forces in the UK. I was of the view two years ago that the vast majority of attacks were committed by young men on young men, but our latest Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that that figure is distorted by the figures from London, where it is true to say that two thirds of victims are young men and a third of victims are female. If you take the Met figures out of the equation, you realise that at least 52% of victims are women, which then starts to follow more closely the global pattern.
Here in the UK, we are looking to bring a change in legislation, and we are working with local partners to start to engage with the communities most affected. Our offices are based in Tower Hamlets, which has probably the third highest number of attacks in the whole of London. We particularly want to engage with survivors to begin engagement with young people around education programmes, and many survivors with whom we are working closely are very interested in pursuing that goal, with the desired outcome of reducing attacks in the UK.
Victoria Atkins
Q
John Poynton: I do not have the precise statistics on what is coming in, but there is no question that there is no place for zombie knives, machetes and large weapons like that. My concern is that a number of young people will come to hospital with all sorts of improvised weapon injuries from screwdrivers and the like. Clearly it is important to make weapons less easy for young people to get hold of, but there will always be a need for education and earlier intervention, to look at how we get young people to understand that certain weapons are tools, and that there are ways to use them. This should not be about finding any sharp implement, be it a screwdriver or something else that has been sharpened, to use. When young people come to hospitals, it is not as clearcut as saying that it is just about zombie knives or kitchen knives.
With regard to availability, a lot of young people talk about the traditional method of ensuring that the public feel safer that weapons are being taken off the streets: we see the traditional use of photos of weapons that have been found or taken, and that helps us to feel that those weapons have been removed. The broader picture—the public health approach to looking at this issue—is that lots of young people will see those same pictures that make us feel safer, but they will perhaps not read all the copy that goes with the picture and they will see those pictures as showing the weapons that are available, and they are somewhat traumatised by the idea that those weapons are available. The availability or lack of availability of certain weapons needs to sit alongside a clear and simple narrative to ensure that the entire community—including young people and us—understands that the community needs to be safe. We all need to have the same perception that the community is safe, and not have this misunderstanding of what they need to do to feel safe.
It was interesting for the police to recognise last year that only 25% of knife crime could be attributed to gangs. My question is about what we do with the 75% of “normal”—for want of a better phrase—non-gang members. How do we really educate them to understand that they do not need to pick up a knife to feel safe on the streets?
Rob Owen: Picking up on John’s point about escalation, it is almost like an arms race. What is happening with county lines in particular is that London gangs are looked up to as the grandfathers of gangs, and regional areas aspire to be more like London gangs, often because of social media. They are saying, “We now need to have weapons, because we need to up our game.” In the old days the drug market in a market or coastal town was safer. Nowadays the kids who are involved in county lines or local drug dealing groups are thinking, “We need to have the next big thing.”
There is definitely an escalation in violence, and there is definitely an escalation outside London of the use or ability to use a weapon. The really sad thing is that a screwdriver is more deadly than a knife. If you talk to a surgeon, they will say that it is more complicated to sort out a stab wound from a screwdriver than from a knife, which I was surprised by. In primary schools, it is about demystifying. On social media, people see that there are safe places to stab each other—this is well documented. Actually, there is no safe place to stab someone, because if you hit an artery, it is pretty much game over.
A public health approach has to be taken. When the police catch a kid with a knife, one of the things that has to happen is that has to be seen as a beacon of need—that that kid needs some support to try to break that cycle. The kid is carrying that knife for a multitude of factors, but we are not going to solve things by taking that knife away or taking the drugs off them—then they would have a drug debt, too—and throwing them in prison. They will come out and have the same problems. It is about putting in that intensive care, even if they are caught with a knife, however unpalatable that is to the Daily Mail or whatever it is. It is about a beacon of need. All these kids who are being targeted by gangs are either in pupil referral units or have been excluded from schools. So 100% of the clients we are working with on county lines who are carrying weapons have been excluded from school. If you ever want a beacon of need for where resources should go, it is kids who have been excluded from school.
Patrick Green: Clear, unambiguous messaging around knives is important in the preventive world. If you are working with young people and there is any ambiguity, you get the “but” argument—“but I know somebody who this didn’t happen to”. You can lose the group. We are working with peer groups in schools, and that is so important.
I believe that it is important that the online world is brought into line with the retail world in terms of sales and the restrictions on sales. I have no figures for you, but from the conversations we have with the young people we deal with—particularly those who admit to carrying a knife or having carried a knife—knives will mostly be got from domestic settings, but shoplifting comes very high up in where they get knives from.
I feel that the voluntary code for e-tailing is not delivering as it should be. That possibly relates to the second part of your sitting today. The open display of knives gives young people an opportunity to take knives that they might use in other places. They are less likely to buy a knife and are more likely to shoplift it. That is why I think the legislation is important. It will help the preventive agenda and our conversations with young people. It will make it clearer to them what they can and cannot do, and that is important at this time.
Jaf Shah: I would echo much of what has been said, particularly around deploying a public health approach to addressing the root causes of this escalation not only in acid attacks, but in violent crime. In the case of acid and the availability of corrosive fluids, many complications clearly arise from the availability of lots of household products that contain high levels of corrosive content. How you regulate access to those types of products is a challenge. What the Bill proposes around licensing for sulphuric acid is an important step, because sulphuric acid at a concentration of 98% causes enormous physical and psychological damage to survivors. That licensing is a vital step, but the passing of legislation in itself is insufficient.
We need to ensure that we deploy a long-term approach to dealing with the root causes. We know that once you reduce the availability of one type of weapon, another weapon becomes available, and I think that is what has happened with the rise of acid attacks. It came at a time when there were greater attempts by law enforcement agencies to control other weapons. Many would-be perpetrators saw loopholes in the existing system that are now being addressed, so they chose to use acid, because it is a lot easier and cheaper to purchase and causes an enormous amount of physical and psychological scarring.
Louise Haigh
Q
Rob Owen: I think it is very varied. We do work on prevention. Through SOS+ we go into quite a few PRUs. They have been fantastically helpful and welcoming. It is really mixed. A lot of schools do not like to admit that there is a gang problem—some primary schools particularly are very worried about admitting that they are becoming targeted.
The gangs are becoming much more sophisticated in the way they recruit. They often do it through siblings. It is not simple. The different county lines are not uniform; they all have their own style and tolerance to violence. They all do it slightly differently, but there is a theme emerging that any child excluded from school becomes a target, because they have become alienated, and are the sort of material that the gangs are looking for.
Sadly, the people we are looking at are 10, 11 and 12-year-olds. It is no longer 16 or 17-year-olds. County lines have been going forever, but it was always older kids doing it. Now the real problems are the level of sophistication in almost brainwashing them into the gang, the levels of violence that are associated with those gangs, and the targeting of kids who have been excluded from school.
Patrick Green: I would echo that. It is really sad. We work with a lot of young people who have been excluded from school. There is no question that they are in a particularly difficult place in terms of the level of intervention and support that they need. I feel that some schools, as you would expect, do that a lot better than others.
I do not think that there is universal engagement at the moment. Things have definitely changed. Certainly, schools listen to Ofsted. We could get far more co-operation from Ofsted in terms of safeguarding, not just in the school itself but in the surrounding area and on the journey that young people make to and from school.
I just think that far too many young people are being excluded from school in the first place. We can probably tell when primary schools come to us and highlight young people whom we are already concerned about, purely from the attitude that we can see in a short two-hour workshop. Far more could be done in terms of safety nets and checks and balances on young people. When they get to being excluded from school, it is really difficult and a tough road back.
John Poynton: There is a real need to not make the schools and the young people feel as if they just have to focus on a lesson on gangs and knife crime. We have all mentioned that knife crime, gangs and county lines are symptoms of much deeper, longer-term root causes. Schools will probably not have any problem recognising that they have children who have had adverse childhood experiences throughout their lives. They have parents who perhaps are not able to support their children in quite the way they need. I suppose I really want to look at how schools are supported to engage the families and the children on those root-cause issues, rather than at trying to talk a headteacher into just having a gangs, knives or county lines lesson plan in their personal, social, health and economic education. I think you need to do both but, again, this is similar to my point about showing weapons that have been taken off the street. In going into schools, my colleagues here obviously do a very good job of ensuring that children are not traumatised. For children who perhaps are not engaging or listening in quite the same way as those who are going to stay on in mainstream education and do well, they might hear that this is normal. There is an element of re-traumatising, or possibly triggering a previous childhood trauma.
For me, it is again about ensuring that schools are better supported to work as early as possible around adverse childhood experience and support the parents through primary school, so that, as Rob pointed out, we are not having to bring the personal, social and health education lessons around county lines and gangs lower and lower, because we should be meeting it at the very beginning.
It is less threatening to teachers and to heads to talk about how we support all children with adverse childhood experience from reception, rather than to try to go backwards in talking about the more worrying subjects. I am not saying it is either/or; it is both.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from the Crown Prosecution Service, the London Borough of Croydon and the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. We have until 11.25 am for this session. Would you like to introduce yourself briefly?
Andrew Penhale: My name is Andrew Penhale, I am the chief Crown prosecutor for the north-east of England. In common with many chiefs, I have a legal lead area, which is knife crime, gang crime, firearms and corrosive substances.
Ben Richards: Good morning. My name is Ben Richards, I am from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. I am here as a double act with Trish. My background is doing our workforce survey for the last few years, so I offer the national perspective, while Trish has the more legislative perspective.
Trish Burls: Good morning. I am Trish Burls, I am the manager of Croydon trading standards and the London lead for trading standards in relation to knife test purchasing, alongside the Metropolitan police.
Victoria Atkins
Q
Andrew Penhale: It probably has not been adequately dealt with as it should be. Part of the work we have been doing in conjunction with trading standards and the Metropolitan police has been to look at measures to deal with online companies that sell knives without putting checks in place. The obvious check for a standard retailer is that you can ask for ID when somebody comes to pick it up. Responsible retailers will do that. Online, that is a little more difficult. There is a declaration, and if a credit card is used, that may to some extent offer a guarantee that somebody is 18, but of course, people can lie. Online retailers do not always put in place the checks that they should. There have been test purchases made and companies have been given warnings. There are current test purchase investigations underway.
The Bill changes the picture because it imposes concrete obligations on retailers to check the age of the purchaser and to ensure that the items are delivered only to somebody who is 18. That is a completely different picture from what we have had before. It also requires the packaging to be marked up accordingly so that it is clear to the deliverer, who may be completely different from the retailer. The Bill imposes a series of obligations that are really needed, because at the moment the online picture is not one where the checks are adequate.
Victoria Atkins
Q
Andrew Penhale: That is true. The trouble is in establishing that all due diligence and checks are put in place. That is quite clear when you have got a retailer like Sainsbury’s, for instance, with a face-to-face transaction, because they can ask the question. It is a bit more complicated in the online sphere. How do you carry out a check? Without improved measures there is not really a position. The law has not kept up with technology, and as a result the Bill is really needed to resolve that.
Trish Burls: I think we should make a distinction. The police take prosecutions through the CPS route, whereas local trading standards departments take them through their local authority’s prosecution route. As far as I am aware, trading standards have not taken any online prosecutions. The onus of a prosecution will fall on a local team’s budget. The work we have done up to now has been alongside the police.
The new measures are welcome. However, it is important to say that we are missing a set of statutory powers in the Bill, which will not necessarily aid trading standards in carrying out much more work in that area.
Victoria Atkins
Q
Andrew Penhale: Again, it is important and needed. There is this gap with online provision, and it is really important that that is duplicated from knives. It is exactly the same problem: there needs to be a verification process to ensure that they are delivered to people 18 or over.
Ben Richards: We mirror the importance of this, and we understand that. As Trish has touched on, the issues are within statutory duties and resources to be able to take on duties on top of those already being carried out.
Louise Haigh
Q
Trish Burls: For trading standards officers, yes, it is.