Knife Crime
Debate between Sarah Jones and Lewis Atkinson(1 week, 6 days ago)
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Sarah Jones
I thank the hon. Gentleman for welcoming the strategy and for the work he has done. He is absolutely right: people commit knife crime offences with all different kinds of knives. Some of the knives that have been banned have a particularly pernicious impact, given the damage they do to people’s bodies. We are putting in place a whole raft of interventions to ensure there is more control over the sale of all types of knives. These includes the age verification checks in the Crime and Policing Bill, and interventions on the sale of knives generally: making sure that young people are not buying knives, and putting in place a duty on companies to report if people buy in bulk. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) also mentioned the work that campaigners are doing on the design of knives to stop them being so impactful.
The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) is absolutely right about social media. In the Bill, we are putting more onus on social media companies to do more, with a duty to report the sale of knives that are illegal. There is a lot more to be done with regard to very serious violent content online. This Government—including the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones)—have done a lot of work on this issue and are doing a huge amount to address porn, child sexual exploitation and violence against women and girls, but there is another piece of work to be done with the companies to ensure that all violent content is removed.
Lewis Atkinson (Sunderland Central) (Lab)
My family sadly knows the devastating consequences of knife crime. As the Government launch their welcome action plan today, I think of my cousin David Charlton, who was killed with a knife in 2012. Reducing knife crime is a moral imperative, so that there are fewer families like David’s or indeed like the family of Connor Brown, whose bereaved parents have done excellent work in tackling knife crime in Sunderland and the north-east and were recently recognised with MBEs for that work. Their approach has focused on education, so will the Minister say a little more about the plan’s commitment to update the curriculum from September so that every child receives knife violence prevention education in school? Will she support the involvement of bereaved families where they want to be part of the delivery of that curriculum?
Police Reform
Debate between Sarah Jones and Lewis Atkinson(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Sarah Jones
I am not sure whether or not the shadow Home Secretary is in favour of this announcement—it is not entirely clear. Perhaps he can come back when he has made up his mind.
The right hon. Gentleman asked several questions that I am happy to reply to. He asked when the White Paper on police reform will come out. It will be this year, I can assure him. We have been working with local police chiefs, police and crime commissioners and the staff associations on what the reform will look like, and we are making the final changes to our reform agenda. As a former Home Office Minister, he will know that we need to make many improvements in respect of performance, accountability, technology, and the structure wherein we have 86 decision makers across the country who, basically, ensure that there are huge inefficiencies in the system while performance and productivity do not rise as fast as they should. Again, I assure him that there will be a significant White Paper that we bring out before the end of the year.
We made the announcement about police and crime commissioners today so that we can continue to work in good faith with the commissioners as we finalise our reform programme. It was right to tell them as soon as we could. I spoke to them at some length this morning, and will speak to them again, not least at their conference next week.
The shadow Home Secretary talks about crime rates. I do not have to remind the House of his and the former Government’s record in office. They cut 20,000 police and recruited 20,000 police, so we now have a police workforce that is very new, large numbers of whom have been in post for only a couple of years. Despite the recruitment done at the end of the Conservatives’ period in government, prosecution rates did not improve. The system is so unproductive, so inefficient and so badly managed that we need to make huge reforms. We have been making progress since we came to power—for example, just a couple of weeks ago, we announced an 18% fall in knife murders, 60,000 knives have been taken off the street, and knife crime has fallen by 5%. We are surging neighbourhood policing capacity, which was decimated under the previous Government, and we will have 3,000 extra police in our neighbourhoods by next April.
The shadow Home Secretary asked about the evidence of mayoral success. I encourage him to talk to the mayors and deputy mayors responsible for police and crime. The ability of a mayoral system, with all the public services beneath it working together more collaboratively and more effectively, is clear to see, so I suggest he has a look for himself.
The right hon. Gentleman asked whether powers will be transferred to the new models. They were. The new model will not be a faceless committee of local bureaucrats. Its members will be the leaders of the councils and a senior police and crime lead, who will drive the day-to-day work. Accountability will remain, as will the statutory responsibilities. This is an opportunity for us to work across local government and with other partners to make sure that we drive the best possible system.
A saving of £100 million is, I think, quite substantial, not “tinkering around the edges” as the shadow Home Secretary suggests. If he waits a few more weeks, he will see the reform agenda that the Home Secretary is designing in its totality. It will put policing on a much better footing than he left it.
Lewis Atkinson (Sunderland Central) (Lab)
What the people of Sunderland want is visible and responsive policing. There is no doubt about the decline in recent years. Northumbria lost 1,100 officers under the previous Government. How will the Minister ensure that the savings resulting from these changes are reinvested in the frontline, to improve neighbourhood policing in places like Sunderland?
Sarah Jones
That is of course the aim of this Government: we want to put policing in our communities, where people expect it to be, and make sure that the police are not, as they currently are, spending hours and hours of their day on bureaucratic, very outdated, very unproductive tasks. Indeed, in many cases police officers are actually doing the job of police staff, which is ludicrous. We need to work with our police chiefs to change that, ensuring that our police officers are doing the roles that we need officers to be doing, while the very important crime fighters of our police staff are doing what they need to be doing. That is not currently the case, but we are working hard to make sure that it will be.