Dawn Butler
Main Page: Dawn Butler (Labour - Brent Central)Department Debates - View all Dawn Butler's debates with the Home Office
(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) on introducing this important debate and on his powerful speech, which set out the challenges that we face. We have heard some extremely strong speeches, in which Members have made the point that this is not year zero. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, there is a long tradition of violent groups in this country, going back centuries in different manifestations. However, the nature of the problem is changing. It is growing younger and more female, and it is spreading to other areas. Yet it remains true that the crisis largely, but not exclusively, affects black and minority ethnic populations and is one of deprivation.
It is a great shame that we do not have more Members of Parliament in the Chamber to discuss this subject, and I fear that my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham is right that if the problem were not overlaid with that of deprivation, we would have more. It is critical that we exercise our duty as Members of Parliament to all our constituents, and that we echo the cries of pain that we hear in our communities by addressing the problem.
Because this is not year zero, we know that after a sharp increase in deaths from serious youth violence in London in 2007 and 2008, action was taken and the situation improved in the years to 2011 or 2012. The last debate that I secured on gangs and serious youth violence was in 2011, and after that time—I am not saying that the two facts were connected—there was genuine progress. Steps were taken, and there was a welcome reduction in the number of deaths in London. As my right hon. and hon. Friends have set out, that success is now being reversed, which is extremely worrying. As others have said, by no means all incidents are reported to the police.
Westminster North is not Lambeth, Haringey or one of the other areas usually associated with such pressures. It is certainly not south central Los Angeles. However, I will tell the House about some of the incidents that have happened there over the past couple of months. In January, just after the unfortunate removal of security cameras in Church Street in my constituency, a young man was stabbed in the street in front of witnesses. A constituent emailed me to say:
“This brutal and bloody event was shocking to witness and occurred immediately outside two shops that belong to”
the local trading association.
“I understand…that the victim is in surgery, and was lucky that a deep stab wound just missed his heart.”
Two days before Christmas, a young man I know well who did work experience in my office was surrounded by a group of 20 local young people and stabbed in the chest. The knife entered the fatty tissue of his heart, and he was extremely lucky to survive.
A few weeks earlier, a constituent who lives in my road emailed me to say:
“I was awoken by noises in the street outside and some desperate shouting. I got up and looked out of the window and saw a young lad on the phone, he was saying to someone on the other end; ‘I’ve been stabbed’.
I called 999—it took a long time for me to persuade them it was a real, serious incident. I understand that the boy had 4 stab wounds.”
That boy was 16 years old. In October, constituents reported violent clashes in St Mary’s Paddington Green and in Paddington recreation ground, tweeting at me:
“We desperately need police on patrol. The situation is out of control.”
They said that violence was rampant, with drugs and gangs, and tweeted:
“Huge gang fight behind Little Venice Sports Centre”.
That is a few weeks in Westminster North, which indicates how real the problem is.
It is true that, as my right hon. and hon. Friends have said, people can live in the communities affected and be completely oblivious to the situation. As a middle-aged woman, I can walk the same streets and live in a different world from the one in which our young people live in our cities, but increasingly also in some of our towns. Their experience of it is different, and the adult community needs to wake up to the challenges.
It is important to note that although most adults might be oblivious to every single one of those incidents, they have ripples, which spread out. The 20 young people who stabbed the young man who had done work experience in my office know what happened. Their families and relatives know the risks and dangers, and so do the family of that young man himself.
One of the most distressing things that I encounter is when I go into schools in my constituency and talk to eight or nine-year-old children and ask them how they feel about their community. One point they raise is gang violence. They ask whether it can be stopped, because they fear for their relatives.
Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. In my constituency, the youngest gang member is eight years old and the oldest is 61. That shows the breadth of the problem in communities such as Brent Central. As she says, many people are oblivious to what happens on the streets.
Ms Buck
My hon. Friend is right. We are in a dangerous situation as the pressure on youth services bites, because early intervention is so important. We often think of early intervention as being for the under-fives, but it is as important in the teenage and adolescent years as it is for under-fives.
Dawn Butler
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. When I was the Minister for young citizens and youth engagement, it was our hope that such provision would be made statutory and that youth services would be ring-fenced in each council. It is disappointing that the Government have scrapped that and that we do not invest in all the youth services that have done an excellent job in communities for many years.
Ms Buck
I agree. However, it is not just youth services; there is also pressure on child and adolescent mental health services. For all the talk about giving mental health services parity, there has been an unprecedented squeeze in modern times on mental health services, particularly on CAMHS. My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham made a point about mental health and I want to spend a minute or two on that. Westminster council—again, I praise it when it does good things—commissioned a report on gangs and mental ill health, a vastly unexplored subject that is important in understanding serious youth violence.
The report said:
“Street gangs and associated serious violence have been a growing concern in the UK over the past decade and a specific concern in Westminster. They are concentrated in poor urban areas with high crime and multiple social problems. The mental health needs of young people in gangs have, until recently, been overlooked.”
The report demonstrated extremely high mental health need among those involved in gangs. Compared with non-violent men, gang members had increased rates of antisocial personality disorder—57 times higher than the average. Suicide attempts are 13 times higher, psychosis is four times higher, and anxiety disorder rates are twice the average. Gang members are significantly more likely than non-violent men to have used mental health services, with gang members eight times more likely to have consulted a psychiatrist, eight times more likely to have been admitted as a mental health in-patient and five times more likely to have used psychotropic medication.
We have a mental health crisis that affects the very people that we need to deal with, yet, at the same time, CAMHS are being reduced, and particularly some of the school-based services that can provide early referral. I am especially worried that the mental health intervention in my local authority is half what it was two years ago, and is funded only until next year. Of course, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime—MOPAC—anti-gangs initiative is funded only until next year. There is therefore uncertainty about intervention.
Dawn Butler
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. I belonged to a gang when I was younger. We had a uniform and a code—it was called the Girls’ Brigade. We have to be very clear when we are defining gangs. It is also our responsibility as MPs to work with everyone. I met my borough commander this week, and I do so every month so that we are all working together and, as my hon. Friend says, we are listening to young people to ensure that they are not criminalised or labelled from a very young age.
Vicky Foxcroft
My hon. Friend makes an extremely good and strong point. We need to talk about violence in our society. We need to forget age for a second. When someone—anyone—gets so angry they end up killing someone, we have failed as a society. We have failed the victim, failed the victim’s friends and failed the victim’s family. We have also failed the killer. What a life they must have led up to that moment when they pull out a knife and stick it into another human being.
What is our answer? What do we do to them? Police, court, prison—we lock them up for a minimum sentence of 25 years and then they are released. Then what? What kind of life have we provided for that person? We can picture the scene: dad out of work, mum an alcoholic; missed by social services, due to cuts; missed by youth workers, because they no longer exist; missed by the local police, because of cutbacks. We are creating a perfect storm. Youth work, cut; police, cut; social services, cut. What hope do we have while this Government are in power?
Shrinking the state—is that really the answer? Of course not. It is the very fabric of society that needs to be fixed in order to stop these events. I do not hold the Minister solely responsible. There is little that she can do on her own that would fix things. The problem is bigger than that. What do the Government do? They spend close to £1 billion on a citizenship scheme. They give it some clever branding and congratulate themselves on building a social movement. But what then? Once young people have completed the scheme, they are still in the same situation as before. The scheme is £1 billion of window dressing; £1 billion to change nothing. We do not need window dressing. We need to change fundamentally the way we approach society. We need to change the narrative. We need to talk about peace. We need to talk about community. We need to promote positive images of our young people. We need to give them a voice.
Running programmes for teenagers—well, that is nice, but it is not going to change much, not fundamentally. We need to start much younger. It is only when we change the lives of the youngest in society that we will see real change take place. Any psychologist or educationalist will say that. The younger we start to effect change, the sooner we can start to make change. So let us change things. Let us change the record, change the narrative, change the future.
This debate calls for a wide-ranging consultation focusing on serious youth violence. I am sure we can all get behind this. Let us do this together, because it is by working together that we will prevent young people from disappearing from our streets.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Let me make it clear that I was not around for the mods and rockers, but heard about them from my mum and dad!
A couple of years ago, I was driving home when, around the corner from my home, I saw to my horror the body of a young man curled up on the pavement. Several police officers were with him, and I could hear the sirens of ambulances on their way. That young man was the victim of a stabbing and was clutching a stomach wound that thankfully proved not to be fatal. That incident shook me to the very core; it was so close to my house and it was not even late on a Friday night.
Some in my community live every day with the pain and worry that results from knife crime and gang violence. They worry about their children’s safety and they have been robbed of a basic sense of security. They want—they need—weapons off our streets and they want their children to be safe.
I am therefore disturbed by the recent rise in recorded knife crime—up 9% in England and Wales last year after a long downwards trend. If we look at the numbers in more detail, we find that rapes involving a knife are up by 26%; threats to kill by 20%; and attempted murder by 24%. Gun crime is up by 4%. Those numbers are absolutely chilling.
I know that we need to treat recorded crime numbers with caution. The police should not be discouraged from improving the reporting or the recording of crime, which can explain such fluctuations, but sadly there is evidence that the increase in recorded knife crime simply reflects an increase in criminal activity using knives. For example, data from the London Ambulance Service shows a 9% rise in incidents resulting from assaults involving a knife.
There is some evidence to show that the rise in knife crime is related to an increase in the number of gangs. Recent Home Office research suggests a sharp rise in the number of gangs in the capital, and the number of offences that the Metropolitan police associates with gang activity has increased by 25% in the last three years. There are 225 recognised gangs in London, with around 3,600 gang members. In a large city, that is a relatively small number people, but they still account for 17% of serious violence in the capital.
Given those numbers, my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) is quite right to draw this issue to our attention and to call for a debate this afternoon. There have been some stonkingly good speeches, and I want to pay tribute to all colleagues who have contributed to such a good debate.
I am aware that a number of police services have chosen to focus significant resources and activity on dealing with the scourge of knife crime. Last week, I visited Bedfordshire police to discover how they had managed to cut knife crime by 21%. Officers from Bedfordshire’s Operation Boson told me that they had adopted best practice from across the country, and tried to attack knife crime relentlessly from every angle. They believe that they have reduced the number of knives on their streets through “secret shopper” inspections and by carefully deployed “surrender bins”, unannounced “knife arches” and the judicious use of stop and search powers. They have also supported diversion schemes in partnership with the likes of Luton Town football club, which are aimed at offering alternative ways in which young people can deploy their abundance of skills and energy.
Bedfordshire’s magnificent performance has been done on a shoestring. The excellent police and crime commissioner Olly Martins told me that balancing all the demands of the service with ever-decreasing funding and resources was like trying to balance spinning plates, always worried that something would come unstuck. It is clearly a testament to his skill and determination and to the commitment and professionalism of serving police officers in Bedfordshire, particularly those in Operation Boson, that Bedfordshire police have been so successful in their assault on knife crime.
However, in the case of much crime, prevention is always better than cure, and I know that some first-class work is already being done throughout the country to try to prevent crimes of this nature from happening. If the House will forgive me, I shall give a parochial plug to the “Carry A Basketball Not A Blade” initiative, which is run by Newham All Star Sports Academy. That charity was started in tragic circumstances by Anthony Okereafor after two of his friends were lost through knife crime. Anthony helps young people by harnessing the power of sport to provide a counter-narrative to the poisonous idea that gang life is in some way glamorous. It is the sort of “peer-to-peer prevention service” that I think works incredibly well, and the Home Affairs Committee thinks that it should be “expanded” and “commissioned more consistently” across the country.
Dawn Butler
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. In the context of prevention, may I thank the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, who is in the Chamber today, for all the work she has done in Hackney, where she has comforted so many families who have experienced violent crime?
Lyn Brown
Absolutely. People of that kind, with commitment of that kind and programmes of that kind, require our support. They require staff who have expertise and the trust of their communities, but they are also seriously in need of investment. Last month, however, we discovered that the Home Office was pulling the plug on funding for the ending gang and youth violence peer review network, a practical programme that brings together academics, local government officials and the police to develop and share knowledge and best practice with the aim of reducing gang violence. The Government’s last annual report on the network described it as “successful” and
“low cost and high impact”,
so why is its funding being cut?
Two weeks after news of the cut was leaked to The Guardian, we were told by the Minister that the network would be replaced by a new “forum”. The network had the resources that were necessary to establish and share best practice; will the new “forum” be equally well resourced, or will its funding be reduced?
I should be very grateful if the Minister answered some of those questions. I can tell her that Deborah and George Kinsella, the parents of the murdered teenager Ben Kinsella, said:
“We are extremely disappointed to hear that the government is making further cuts to funding to tackle serious youth violence when there are so many of us trying to make things better for others after losing our own children.”
June Addai, the grandmother of 17-year-old Marcel, who was murdered by a gang on a Hoxton housing estate, said:
“The government seem to be cutting everything. Children have nowhere to go, they need clubs to go to rather than hanging out on the streets where they can get into trouble. They get left behind.”
Knife crime is beginning to creep up, and it is an undeniable truth that that is happening after five years of deep cuts in spending on youth clubs and crime prevention. There will be naysayers who will claim that the increase in knife crime has nothing to do with the cuts, and that is why I fully support my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham’s call for an all-party commission. We need to get to the bottom of why youth violence is on the increase, so that we can begin to turn the tide. I ask the Minister, who is not a bad woman, “Can we have an all-party commission—please?
Karen Bradley
I will address that point briefly, but I must make some progress because I am conscious that this debate is to be followed by an extremely important debate on Welsh affairs in which many Members want to take part. On the figures, on which the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) commented, we want to see these crimes recorded. We want the police to know about them and we want to understand what is happening. I recently visited the A&E department at King’s College hospital in the constituency of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). It is absolutely tragic that the first opportunity we get to have a teachable moment with these young people is when they turn up at A&E. They are turning up not in an ambulance—the gangs do not phone an ambulance or any other blue light service—but in private cars and being dumped at A&E, and that is the first opportunity that any agency has to make contact with them.
I want to pay tribute to Redthread, which provides young people’s advocates at A&E departments across London. Those advocates are important in making contact not only with the young person who has been the victim of an attack but with their family when they come to visit. They play an important part in keeping that young person in hospital and getting them to speak to someone they trust. That might be the first opportunity we have to speak to them, and we need to find a way of making that happen sooner. This is about education, about working with schools and about working in vulnerable locations. When I talk about the revised programme, I will mention some of the approaches that we are using in that regard. I want all those hidden crimes that are not being recorded at the moment to be reported and recorded so that we can understand what the problem is. [Interruption.] I sense that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) might want to intervene on me, but this must be the final intervention as I need to make some progress.
Dawn Butler
I am not sure that I entirely understand the Minister’s response, because there are plenty of opportunities to intervene on these young people. Lots of people and organisations in Brent and elsewhere are intervening at an early stage. Poverty is key, but education and early years provision are also key in providing opportunities to intervene. Perhaps she will get to that point later in her speech.
Karen Bradley
I agree that there are many opportunities for intervention. My frustration is that those opportunities are not taken until the young person is found in A&E. I hope the hon. Lady shares that frustration. I pay tribute to her council in Brent. I met her council leader recently and learned about the partnership working that the council is doing to understand the problem. It was a peer review that assisted in understanding the problem, but now this is about local delivery.
The hon. Lady is right to say that this is about poverty. People in Brent talked to me about the housing estates and the work that they are doing in South Kilburn, which neighbours the Paddington recreation ground, with whose football pitches I have to say I am familiar. They are doing incredibly important work on the South Kilburn estate to transform it into a place to live where gangs will not be allowed to flourish. I pay tribute to Brent and to the many other local authorities around the country that are working hard in this regard. I hope that many others will be able to take advantage of this programme through the support that the Home Office provides.
I want to make some progress now, so that we can get on to the important Welsh affairs debate. First, however, I will just mention that although I understand that the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) is concerned about an eight-page Government document, this might be the first time that anyone has ever told me that a Government document is too short. We are usually accused of producing too much with too little substance underneath it. The “Ending gang violence and exploitation” document has been widely welcomed. We worked with many organisations and stakeholders to develop this approach. The paper sets out the high-level approach, but incredible amounts of work have gone on underneath that. It has been welcomed by many organisations including Safer London, the Met police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.
The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) asked why certain areas were involved in the programme. The answer is that those areas have said that they want to be part of it. They want to know what learning is available and to understand the partnership working. For example, they want to learn about working and sharing information with A&E departments. It is vital that we get that information as quickly as possible and share it with different agencies. I also take the point about the definition of a gang. The definition for gang injunction purposes is set out in the Serious Crime Act 2015. That is why there is no separate definition; it is a known definition that has already been set out in legislation.
So, what does our new programme involve? There are six priorities, based on the fact that gangs are operating in different, more covert ways. That is why our first priority is “county lines”, which was mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Yeovil (Marcus Fysh) and for Colchester. The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey)—I think I shall refer to her as my hon. Friend, if she does not mind—also referred to that in her speech. It is important that we help the most vulnerable people in our society who are being exploited by urban street gangs to run drugs and to do many other things, and I am enormously supportive of the missing persons charities and of her work on the all-party parliamentary group on runaway and missing children and adults. That work is vital in helping to find those young people and getting information about what happens to them when they go missing and who is influencing them. She was right to talk about trafficking and modern slavery; this is very much modern slavery and these are trafficking offences. I hope the prosecution services and others will use those modern slavery offences, where appropriate, to get convictions, because I want us to get convictions and stop this happening. If the best and most likely way to get the conviction is by using modern slavery offences, I am all for that and it is what we should do.
The second priority in the programme is protecting vulnerable locations, which again links to the point about missing people and “county lines”. We need to get to the places where vulnerable young people are being targeted—pupil referral units and residential children’s care homes. These are places where young people who are very vulnerable to exploitation find themselves. On the point about young offenders institutes, these are vulnerable locations and, as hon. Members will know, the Ministry of Justice has asked Charlie Taylor to lead a review of this matter. I want to see the results of that review. I also want to make sure that we understand and that those young offenders institutions understand that those vulnerable young people are being exploited, and that they take action to stop that happening.
The third priority is reducing violence, including knife crime. I have listened to many of the contributions about knife crime and I agree that we do not want to see knives on our streets. There are many offences and measures that police, trading standards and local authorities can use, but we are looking carefully at what else we can do to make sure the authorities have all the weapons they need to take knives off our streets. I was at a conference last week hosted by the Metropolitan police at New Scotland Yard with retailers, making sure that they understand their role in a responsible society in ensuring that knives do not hit our streets.
The fourth priority is safeguarding gang-associated women and girls, which has been mentioned by many Members, including the hon. Members for Dulwich and West Norwood and for Streatham, and the right hon. Member for Tottenham. The very idea that girls think that it is acceptable to be exploited in a line-up by various gang members and that this is something they should do is absolutely wrong. I am pleased that the Government—I hope that hon. Members noticed this announcement earlier this week—have committed £400,000 to young people’s advocates to work with all young people, but specifically targeting girls and young women, to try to get that teachable moment. The aim is to get to the young women, educate them and give them the experience and knowledge they need to say no.
Our fifth priority is to promote early intervention, a point raised by many Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester talked about how we have to get in early and educate young people. Finally, our sixth priority is providing meaningful alternatives, and the hon. Member for Streatham made the point on that clearly. We need to show young people alternatives, and he rightly says that that does not just mean a windy church hall. These have to be meaningful alternatives to gangs, so that young people do not feel that gangs are the only place they can go.
I want to touch on some of the specific points that were raised. I am looking forward to discussing the independent commission with the hon. Gentleman. I am not convinced at this stage that a national independent all-party commission is the best way to approach this. We need to get into delivery and make sure that the programme is allowed to deliver. I know that local commissions are being set up. I met the West Midlands police and crime commissioner yesterday, and he is setting up his own local commission. I encourage hon. Members to do that work locally. I hesitate to establish a national commission because, as we have all said, there are different considerations to take into account and different things are going on. The hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford made the point that local young people and local communities need to be part of this. I would encourage local work and local commissions, where appropriate, but I am not convinced that this is the right time for a national commission. I am, however, looking forward to meeting the hon. Gentleman. May I also ask to meet my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport to discuss her interesting suggestion about Fagin orders? Civil orders have been successful. They are used when we do not have enough evidence for a criminal procedure, and I would be very interested in talking to her about that.
There are many more things I could say and many more points I could make, but I am conscious of the time so I will conclude by repeating my thanks and congratulations to the hon. Member for Streatham on securing the debate. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to it. I wish to finish by assuring everyone that the Government and I regard this issue as incredibly important. It is a continuing priority, and we will continue to work with national and local partners to address these issues.