Serious Violence Strategy

Debate between Ben Wallace and Sarah Jones

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a clear point. In the past, there were plenty of middlemen between the local gangs and the big serious organised criminals running out of Colombia or the Balkans. That has now reduced. Through safe and secure encryption, young people have the ability to order drugs and gangs have the ability to have delivered to their door large packets of drugs from Albanian or Serbian drug gangs, or indeed from local drug gangs: United Kingdom citizens—it is not the copyright of the western Balkans. That has put real power into the system.

At the same time, the United Kingdom is fast becoming the biggest consumer of cocaine in Europe. There is high demand from the consumer, and cocaine is no longer the preserve of the yuppie or the rich. We are seeing cocaine in my villages, in rural communities and in communities in London that would not previously have used it. It is a high-margin, high-supply drug at the moment, and that is fuelling the increase in violence.

With those Albanians or those serious organised criminals comes the enforcement of the county lines. They do not just put a 15-year-old into a house or “cuckoo” the house; they provide a weapon to enforce the drug line. Sometimes, if the 15-year-old is not a willing participant, the gangs will ruthlessly enforce that county line with violence. They will kill those people and they will kill the local drug dealers if they get in their way.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and I, through the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, recently met some girls who had been involved in county lines. They had become involved because of boyfriends, because of money and because it was a solution to the problems they faced in their lives. They said that nobody had ever told them not to do it. No one at school or earlier on in their lives had explained that these things might be offered to them and that there were choices to be made. There was no one in their school telling them about that. Does the Minister agree that schools have a duty to keep our children safe, and that they need more resources to ensure that children know what good choices to make?

[Mr Wallace]

I totally agree that we have to educate children about the dangers that they are exposed to.

I go back to the point about modern communications and smartphones. In the past there was often a gulf between streetwise communities where young people grew up exposed to crime and were sometimes exploited by it, and other areas where people would say, “I never see gun crime in my village”. In the past, there was no connection between the two, but now it is all joined up. Now, young people can be exploited wherever they are, and whatever their background, by being able to access drugs using their smartphones. That is why we are seeing this problem seeping in, and that is why the first place to go is the schools—as low as the primary schools—to teach children about how vulnerable they can be online and how vulnerable they can be to being approached.

Another part of my portfolio involves child sexual exploitation. People are being exploited, manipulated and organised through those telephones. That is a real challenge, and I am not going to pretend that we have a solution.