Emergency Summit on Knife Crime

(Urgent Question): To ask the Prime Minister if she will make a statement on her emergency summit on knife crime.

Just before I call the Minister to address the House, let me say that the whole House should join in united expressions of good wishes to her as she celebrates her birthday. Clearly, this is a Minister who knows on her birthday how to enjoy herself.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The urgent question is the gift that keeps giving.

Before I start my reply, may I, on behalf of the Home Office, reflect on the very sad anniversary that we mark today of the events that occurred in this place two years ago and the terrible loss of PC Keith Palmer? Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones, and with the wider policing family.

We all want our children and young people to be safe on our streets. As the Home Secretary has said, there is no one single solution; we must unite and fight on all fronts to end this senseless violence. We are listening to what the police need, which is why we are introducing knife crime prevention orders on their request, in the Offensive Weapons Bill; we have increased police funding by up to £970 million next year, including council tax; and in the spring statement we announced there will be £100 million of additional funding in 2019-20 to tackle serious violence. This will strengthen police efforts to crack down on knife crime in the areas of the country where it is most rife. The funding will also be invested in violence reduction units, bringing together agencies to develop a multi-agency approach.

It is important, however, that we recognise that greater law enforcement alone will not reduce serious violence. We have already announced a multi-agency public health approach and will be consulting very soon on a new statutory duty of care to ensure that all agencies play their part. We are investing more than £220 million in early intervention projects to stop the most vulnerable being sucked into a life of violence. We are also addressing the drivers of crime, including the drugs trade, with the launch of our independent drugs review. But we continue to look for new ways to tackle this epidemic.

The Prime Minister announced that she would be hosting a serious youth violence summit. The event will champion the whole community public health model, which is crucial if we are to address the root causes of youth violence, as well as disrupt it in our neighbourhoods and local communities. Given the broad array of experts and interested parties, we have been working across government in recent days to ensure the right arrangements are in place. I am pleased to confirm that the summit will take place in the week commencing 1 April, and that we will provide further details shortly, in the normal way. This underlines this Government’s absolute commitment to tackling knife crime and serious violence with our partners across the country, because we all want this violence to stop.

May I, too, say many happy returns to the Minister and apologise for dragging her to the Dispatch Box for the second time this week? I am sure that she and you, Mr Speaker, will be pleased that there are no more sitting days left this week for me to pester you in. May I also add my thoughts to those expressed on this anniversary of the death of PC Keith Palmer? Not a day goes by when I enter this place that I do not remember the ultimate sacrifice he made in defending us and defending democracy, and I am sure that the same is true for many other hon. Members.

There is no doubt the country is in the midst of a political crisis consuming this Parliament and the entire Government. But a parallel crisis is taking place on our streets, one that is leaving young people afraid to leave their houses and leaving communities paralysed in the wake of more and more young lives senselessly lost, with families destroyed forever, never being able to see their son or daughter again. There has been a 93% rise in the number of young people being stabbed since 2012-13. There is a serious danger, in these tumultuous days, of the Government losing sight of the desperate need for leadership on knife crime. This is no second-order priority; there is no excuse for ignoring it.

The Prime Minister, 16 days ago, promised this House that she would

“be holding a summit in No. 10 in the coming days to bring together Ministers, community leaders, agencies and others, and I will also be meeting the victims of these appalling crimes to listen to their stories and explore what more we can do as a whole society to tackle this problem.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2019; Vol. 655, c. 950.]

I appreciate the pressures on the Prime Minister—we all do—but to break that promise to the victims is inexcusable. Since she made that announcement, more young lives have been lost. Nathaniel Armstrong was killed in west London. There have been stabbings in Leicester, London and Cambridge, and as we heard yesterday, a young boy was stabbed in Clitheroe in Lancashire.

It is interesting—is it not?—that this urgent question is essentially about process. If we focus on what the hon. Lady has just said, we can see that she applied for this urgent question because she wanted to know the date of the knife crime summit hosted by the Prime Minister. As I say, I can confirm that the summit is going to be held in the first week of April. I wish the hon. Lady had just asked me quietly in the corridors of this place. I am always happy to speak to any colleague about tackling serious violence. We did not need to have an urgent question about setting a date for a meeting.

We know you don’t like scrutiny—

The hon. Lady is saying that I do not like speaking to the House. Come on, let us not be silly about this. This is such an important topic and it requires collaborative work. Frankly, urgent questions and press releases may be very helpful to the hon. Lady’s profile, but that is not what the hard work of tackling serious violence is about.

The hon. Lady wants to know what the Government have been doing. Last autumn, we set up the national county lines co-ordination centre, which has seen more than 1,000 arrests and more than 1,300 people safeguarded. Last week, there was the latest iteration of Operation Sceptre, as part of which every police force in the country adopts knife crime investigation methods appropriate to their areas to tackle knife crime. I do not have the figures for the latest iteration, because it ends at the weekend, but the previous week of Operation Sceptre resulted in more than 9,000 knives being taken off our streets.

We are funding Redthread to offer services in accident and emergency departments in hospitals with a particular problem with knife crime. We are funding projects across the country through the £22 million early intervention youth fund and smaller projects across communities through the anti-knife crime community fund. We have a long-running social media campaign—#KnifeFree—targeting young people most vulnerable to being ensnared by criminal gangs or to being tempted to leave their homes with knives and walk up the street with them. Only last week, I met the Premier League, which is working with us to get the message out through its vast network of contacts, including through its Kicks programme.

We are working with the Department for Education to publish best practice guidance for alternative providers, because we are well aware of the problems that seem to be arising with alternative provision. We are about to consult on a new legal duty to require a multi-agency public health approach to tackling serious violence. We have launched an independent review into drugs misuse because we know that the drugs market is the major driver of serious violence. We are launching the youth endowment fund: £200 million over 10 years for intervention on young people at various stages of their lives to move them away from gangs or prevent them from being ensnared by them.

I welcome the plan the Minister has set out and the vital work she is doing. In 2015, we legislated for a minimum jail sentence for repeat offenders who carry a knife, yet more than a third of offenders are still being spared jail—more than 500 last year. Why is this; what can we do to review the situation so that we can enforce the law; and does my hon. Friend agree that we need to review the area more generally to ensure clarity and honesty in sentencing and to end the soft sentencing culture?

I thank my hon. Friend for raising mandatory minimum sentences. I note that they are not universally accepted. Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition voted against them—I think—when they were first introduced. The point of mandatory minimum sentences is to send out a clear public message that people will go to prison if they are twice caught carrying a knife. We have also ensured—this is important—that the judiciary, which of course is independent and must be able to sentence on a case-by-case basis, has flexibility if the facts of a particular case require it. I note, however, that since mandatory minimum sentences were introduced, the number of people going to prison on the second occasion of carrying a knife has increased, despite the statistic he just cited. The message must be consistent. We do not want young people leaving their homes with a knife because it is more likely to be used against them than against others.

We absolutely did need this urgent question because we did not know the date of the knife crime summit. It is all well and good the Minister saying we can have informal conversations, but the House needs to know when things are happening.

On the Minister’s point about collaboration, I welcome her announcement of a public health approach, but, as we said in the Youth Violence Commission report, too often people talk about a public health approach without understanding what it is. One person who does understand is the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), so when the summit happens—in the week commencing 1 April—will the Minister ensure that the shadow Minister is invited?

I will not comment on attendees at this stage. I have said that this is the ultimate in process questions, and we are in the process of arranging that summit. We work on a collaborative basis across the House. I am delighted that Members from the opposition parties join us at meetings of the serious violence taskforce. I am delighted, too, that we work collaboratively. I was delighted to visit the hon. Lady’s constituency only last week to observe the police conducting a weapons sweep. This is about collaboration. I know that my announcing a date for the meeting is of interest to Members of the House—I will happily share that information—but my point is that the work of Government continues over and above the date of the knife crime summit. A tranche of work is going on.

Understandably, we have heard much about the immediate measures that are being taken, but will this summit focus a little more on longer-term measures to help tackle this dreadful scourge?

It will—very much so. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I think that everyone agrees that there is no single solution to this matter; it is about short, medium and long-term work. That is why it is so important that we are funding the youth endowment fund that we have announced and that we are giving long-term commitments to those projects that work with young people, intervening and making sure that they are steered away from both carrying knives and greater paths of criminality. With regard to interventions, we are very much looking at education, health, local government and the charitable sectors because we know that, by working together, we will stop this violent crime on our streets.

I draw the attention of the House to my life membership of the Magistrates Association, which is asking whether more force can be put into the role of youth offending teams in relation to the knife crime prevention orders that the Minister mentioned. Will she say something about how youth offending teams’ expertise and knowledge of very vulnerable young people will be right in the centre of how courts make those decisions?

I am so grateful to the hon. Lady for her question. Her experience in the magistrates court will help, I hope, to give her comfort as to how these orders are drafted. These are civil orders, deliberately so, because we do not want to criminalise these young people. Young people are being intervened on when there is intelligence or information from anyone—it could be anyone in the community—who is worried that they are involved in these gangs. This is about putting in place a structure around these children to help steer them away from criminality. Youth offending teams will, of course, be absolutely critical to that, and we will be working through it when it comes to the statutory guidance on how these orders should be used.

The official figures show that there has been a collapse in the number of stop and searches in recent years. It cannot be a coincidence that that has coincided with a huge surge in knife crimes and people being killed through knife crimes. Will the Minister give me some assurance that we will go back to trusting police officers to get on and do their job in the way that they know best without them fearing some kind of politically correct witch-hunt if they decide to stop and search someone they think is worth stopping and searching? We must trust police officers to do the job to keep us safe, because they know better than anybody in this House what needs to be done.

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Stop and search is a vital tool in the police’s armoury in keeping people safe on our streets. We want to give confidence to our officers that they have this power and that they can use it in accordance with the law. Interestingly, the rate of arrests arising out of stop and searches has increased in recent years with this intelligence-focused approach, but it remains a vital tool and the police have our absolute confidence should they choose to use it within the law.

In the past debate about antisocial behaviour, many of us found that acceptable behaviour contracts were far more effective than antisocial behaviour orders because they worked by preventing problems in the first place and by getting people to work side by side with the young people. I urge the Minister to look at that evidence from the past and see whether acceptable behaviour contracts could be a way to design the orders that she is talking about, because they would be far more effective with the public health approach.