My Lords, according to the BBC this morning, a teenager has been stabbed to death in west London. Knife crime is increasing at an alarming rate, having reached its highest rate in eight years in 2017–18. Every death is a tragedy, and too many of our young people are losing their lives. However, the parents, friends and relatives of those killed want not just our sympathy but to do something about this. I propose a five-point public health approach to knife crime, only one point of which involves more resources for the police. This should be primarily about addressing the causes, not the symptoms, of knife crime.
The picture of knife crime is complex. First, there are those who rely on violence. Drug dealing, because it is an illegal activity, cannot be legally regulated. It can be fatal in a direct way, because there is little or no quality control—no information about purity or potency, and no restrictions on who can buy drugs or in what quantity. But it is unregulated in another way—deals are enforced and competition is challenged using violence, because there is no legal means of doing so. Whether to ensure that your stash of illegal drugs is not stolen or that the buyer pays, or to defend your turf, knives are used to regulate. This trade is spilling out from our big cities into the countryside and seaside towns through county lines. Vulnerable young people are being exploited, being sent to live in appalling conditions to sell drugs hundreds of miles from home under the threat of being stabbed by their own and rival gang members.
However, many in the black community feel that the drugs element of knife crime is overplayed, even racist. All the drug dealers I have met have been white. Use of knives among criminal gangs is as likely to be about so-called respect: respect for senior members of the gang, who stab junior members who step out of line, and respect for a gang’s territory and standing by threatening or stabbing members of rival gangs. It is not just me saying this, but the College of Policing’s evidence-based report on knife crime.
Connected to gang rivalry are the violent lyrics of drill music and violent YouTube videos. Some say they are legitimate artistic expressions of lived experience, reflecting the violent environment in which they live. Others say they encourage, incite and drive violence, as the competition to be the gang with the greatest number of hits or views on the internet rises in proportion to how shocking the violence contained within them is.
At the same time as the criminal gang culture has grown, the visible presence of authority on the streets has diminished. Community police officers and, more importantly, police community support officer numbers have been decimated. There has been a 19% real-terms reduction in total funding from central and local government to police and crime commissioners from 2010-11 compared with 2018-19. Central government funding for commissioners has fallen 30% in real terms since 2010-11. Since the peak of 31 March 2009, police officer numbers have fallen by 21,365—over 14%—as of 31 March 2018. Police community support officers, the bridge between the police and communities, has fallen by 7,127—a reduction of over 42%.
My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for seeking a debate on this very timely subject and for his wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to it. I also commend him for the piece he wrote on this subject for the latest issue of the House magazine. In his article, which I am sure many noble Lords have read, he describes the complexity of the knife-crime phenomenon and discusses its underlying causes and its potential solutions. The solutions he mentions in his article, and has just mentioned in his speech, are not the kind of things one would normally associate with someone who spent most of his professional life as a police officer on the streets of London. But they are the kind of things required to solve complex social problems such as violent youth crime, which results from an amalgam of, among other things, poverty, inequality, poor schooling, unemployment, social alienation and racial prejudice. There are no quick fixes in this world and I commend the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for making this abundantly clear.
I also commend the Government for taking a similarly broad and longer-term approach to this problem. As my noble friend Lady Barran said in answer to an Oral Question about youth violence last Thursday morning:
“'The Government are taking steps to address all aspects of youth violence, from prevention to enforcement. Diverting young people away from crime is at the heart of our approach, which is why we are investing more than £220 million in early intervention schemes to steer children and young people away from serious violence”.—[Official Report, 20/6/19; col. 842.]
How refreshing to hear a Minister discuss a complex social problem without either minimising its significance or promising to deal with it almost instantaneously, without giving any indication of how this is to be achieved.
Having said this, I do not believe that we are condemned to live with blood-stained streets for decades until these longer-term solutions finally work. Although tackling the underlying causes of social violence will take time and money, on the basis of my own experience of working in the New York and Philadelphia police departments from 1996 to 2004, I would say that the level of violent crime on our streets can be significantly reduced in the short term by proactive policing based on good intelligence, adequate resources, a well-developed strategy and effective tactics and leadership.
My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, and would be happy just to adopt his speech. He clearly has significant knowledge of policing. The part of his speech that I really want to own is his commendation of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for securing this debate and for the way in which he introduced it. Clearly, I follow two speakers who have significant knowledge of policing, and I do not intend to compete with that. We find ourselves in a debate where there will be violence—but it will be violent agreement with each other.
However, I feel qualified to contribute to this debate because, before I was elected to Parliament, I spent about 25 years practising law in the west of Scotland. In that 25 years, I was in courts at every level and every single day I was confronted by the tip of the iceberg of the violence in the society of which I was a member. All across Scotland, the level of violence was horrific. In the court I most practised in, I saw the same names coming up generation after generation, behaving in exactly the same way and producing the same damage to their own families and to others. There was a general sense of resignation that that was just the norm—a combination of things that nobody would ever be able to shift.
When I became the Member of Parliament for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, for a period that did not change. But then a police officer called Carnochan came on the scene, who was appointed to a position that most people who do not know about policing would recognise as essentially the Taggart of Scotland. He was in charge of Strathclyde Police’s murder squad. He transformed the way in which, even after a quarter of a century of knowledge of it, I looked at the issue of violence. It was a remarkable event for me when I met him and Karyn McCluskey, who worked with him and who started what is now referred to as the Violence Reduction Unit but then had another, more sophisticated name—but that does not really matter. He told me an interesting anecdote. He said that Strathclyde Police’s clear-up rate for homicides was extraordinarily high—well above 90%. They were in great demand across the world as people wanted to know how they could clear up these crimes so well when many other places had terrible challenges. He told me that, as he was about to mount a podium—I cannot remember exactly where it was—he had a road-to-Damascus moment. He thought, “Why should I be so proud of clearing up murders? I should really be preventing them from happening”. From his knowledge, he had an instinctive sense of why such violence was happening and set about, with the permission and instruction of the chief constable in Strathclyde at the time, who was a man called Rae, to concentrate on it. Within five years of setting up the unit and implementing what has become known as a public health approach, he and others had halved the level of violence in the community that they served as police officers. It was a stunning statistic.
My Lords, I welcome this debate and declare an interest as a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime. The incidence, and to a lesser extent the nature, of crime may vary from place to place and from generation to generation, but crime is something that all communities have to come to terms with and devise appropriate strategies for in their own way. Over the years, we have learned much about the underlying causes of crime and had a good deal of research into the effectiveness of various responses. Overall, most research has tended to refute rather than confirm hypotheses about the causes of crime and the effectiveness of punishment and treatments. In essence, public and political mood is conditioned more by hunch, gut feeling and media hype than by outcomes of detailed research.
Knife crime has achieved much publicity in recent times. There is a widespread public perception that our society is becoming increasingly lawless. This is supplemented by statistics of offences recorded by the police. Austerity, and the subsequent cuts in public services since 2010, has contributed to this phenomenon. A reality we fail to appreciate is that not all crimes are reported. Public expectations of the police’s ability to solve crimes are far greater than the service’s ability to deliver. The grim statistics of rising knife crime are well known and well publicised, as are the tragic consequences of knife crime for victims and their families. Last year the number of recorded offences involving knives was at its highest since comparable data became available.
What can be done to stem and reverse this alarming trend? For any approach to tackling knife crime to be effective, we must stand back and look at why young people decide to carry knives. One study summed up the reasons in the phrase “fear or fashion”. Fear, because many knife crime offenders say that they carry knives for their own protection. They have the misguided belief that it will make them safer, as they can use their knives to defend themselves if they are attacked. In fact, the truth is the opposite. All the evidence shows that offenders who carry knives are more likely to end up in a violent confrontation in which they are stabbed with a weapon—either someone else’s knife or their own—as well as being more likely to end up causing the tragedy of injury or death to someone else. Fashion refers to many impressionable young people carrying knives because they see it as part of a macho self-image.
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for obtaining this debate and for his excellent analysis of some of the causes and, indeed, the work that has been done on how we might address them, which is a holistic approach. I am also delighted that a number of experts in policing are speaking in this debate. I come to this with little knowledge of that, but I have knowledge through the 136 schools in my diocese—I have been to two this week—and in many of the urban areas across Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, which seek to bring together groups of young people to reflect on how this can be addressed.
This debate looks at the impact of government policies on serious youth violence. As the causes are many and varied, we need to look at a wide range of different issues. We are all aware that access to lethal weapons has escalated and intensified conflict. Demonstrably, when the year to March 2018 represented the highest number of knife homicides in England and Wales since 1946, it is all too clear to us that it is too easy to obtain weapons, notwithstanding the Offensive Weapons Act 2019. Indeed, from previous problems, for example acid attacks, we are aware that simply removing one way of attacking other people does not necessarily immediately solve a problem. I am therefore delighted that government action in reducing weapon accessibility has had some success, with Operation Sceptre taking some 10,000 knives off the streets. Yet piecemeal approaches will never be enough.
Other speakers have raised our approach to the stop and search policy. We need to hear, and I hope the Minister will be able to comment on, the latest evidence on how this policy is being implemented and where it is achieving the aims we want it to. Assessing government policy’s impact requires an appreciation of the complex and interlinked factors that drive young people into violence. As Centrepoint has said, there are many factors driving youth violence, whether poverty, exclusion, disadvantage or other situations. It is nevertheless significant that 21% of young people convicted of possessing a knife had been excluded from school. There is a lack of children’s support generally. The cut of 62% in council early years services spending since 2010, the loss of more than 1,000 Sure Start centres and the rise in school exclusions are all contributing factors to serious youth violence.
My Lords, I am delighted to add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on introducing this debate and the manner in which he introduced it, but I intend to pick up many of the points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans in a thoughtful and interesting speech.
Over the past week, I have been reflecting on the years that I have been in Parliament. Last week marked the 49th anniversary of my election in June 1970. In thinking about this debate, I have been reflecting on some of the great changes that have taken place in our society during that time. Three in particular stand out. I am not making value judgments; I am merely stating facts. The family has changed very much in that period. What was then the norm is no longer the norm. The drug culture which has grown up over the past years, to which the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, referred in his opening remarks, was unknown in 1970. Another enormous change is the advent and prevalence of social media. Without social media, the county lines to which he referred could hardly exist. We are having to cope with a very different sort of society than existed when I was first elected to Parliament.
Of course, it is right that we should talk of proactive policing and community policing, as we have today, but although he did not use these exact words, the right reverend Prelate was in effect saying to us—and I believe very strongly in this—that prevention is better than cure. We must try to develop a culture in which the use of a knife in violence is just not contemplated. It will take time, but I believe that it must begin in the home and in the school. Many times in your Lordships’ House, I have been critical of the deficiencies in careers advice in schools and citizenship education. I believe—I have mentioned this before—that every young person leaving school in our country should have had to do some community service during his or her last year in school. It does not particularly matter whether that is taking meals to the elderly, looking after the young or whatever, but community service—putting something into the community—should be obligatory, frankly.
As my noble friend Lord Paddick said in opening this debate, there are many facets to the horrors and challenges of knife crime. One of these is that there is an established link between the very large cuts to local government funding and the increase in knife crime. At this point I remind the House of my relevant interests as a local councillor and vice-president of the Local Government Association.
In February this year a group of major children’s charities—Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the NSPCC, the Children’s Society and the National Children’s Bureau—produced a joint report containing a new analysis of the research they had done on local funding per child. They found that the funding available to local councils per child has dropped by as much as 52% in real terms. Furthermore, the report stated the view of youth and social workers that the dramatic cuts were inextricably linked to a rise in youth knife crime and the criminal exploitation of children by county lines gangs.
The Local Government Association figures paint a similar picture. The LGA statistics show that more than 600 youth centres closed and nearly 139,000 youth service places were lost between 2012 and 2016 alone. Councils were forced to cut spending on local youth services by 52%, from £652 million in 2010-11 to £352 million in 2017-18 as a direct result of government cuts to local government funding.
The sad fact is that the statistics also demonstrate that early intervention by youth services and youth offending teams—I am surprised that no one has mentioned them so far today in the debate—can and does significantly reduce the number of young people who become involved in criminal activity and knife crime in particular. Youth services design targeted approaches so that those young people who are more likely to be enticed into, for instance, knife crime are diverted from it. Youth offending teams both divert young people from criminal activity that may lead to knife crime and provide support that steers young people away from further involvement in illegal and possibly violent activity.
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on enabling us to debate this pressing issue. I should declare my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, because that is the subject to which I wish to refer.
Perhaps the most devastating of the many statistics included in the first House of Lords Library briefing is the fact that the number of under-16s admitted to hospital has increased by 93% since 2012. The Government are clearly worried about that figure and have introduced a wide range of initiatives. The Home Secretary clearly realises that drugs are at the heart of this problem and has launched a review of the illegal drugs market led by Dame Carol Black. Tragically, her review was castrated before it began because she was explicitly prevented from looking at drug law. Without reform of our drug laws it is difficult to imagine that this problem can be solved. The Government will struggle uphill all the way because they have a deep problem right at the centre of everything.
Of course there are very important remedial measures which Dame Carol Black will consider, such as the need to reverse the cuts to drug treatment services and the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets which have led to the closure of youth services, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, outlined so strongly. These services offered activity, support and just a little bit of hope to these very vulnerable people. I have not seen any mention of the need to restore the budgets of schools to enable them to re-employ class assistants and others to work with vulnerable children. I heard only this morning that a school has had to cut out completely its volunteer programme. It must cost thruppence-ha’penny—almost nothing—yet it has had to destroy that volunteer programme to try to make ends meet. Class assistants and volunteers work with the most vulnerable children who have behaviour problems. Without that support those children are excluded from school, and we have heard appalling numbers about exclusions over the past 10 years or so. Alongside these policy disasters, which urgently need to be reviewed, are the cuts to the benefits budget which have left youngsters looking for some money somewhere, and it does not take them long to find illegal drug dealers—a veritable gold mine, if you are prepared to take a bit of a risk.
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I am a member of the All-Party Group on Knife Crime, ably led by Sarah Jones MP. We have heard from young people involved in knife crime about the impact of these cuts and the impact they have had on them. One told us that she used to feel safe when she saw safer neighbourhood teams, who worked out of her local police station. The safer neighbourhood teams—one sergeant, two constables and three PCSOs in every ward in London—now consist of two officers per ward, provided that they are not on their day off, on holiday, off sick, or on maternity or paternity leave. There is no backfilling. That same young woman described her term in Holloway prison as the best time of her life. Detention is no deterrent and knife crime prevention orders work against a public health approach, potentially criminalising more and more young people.
The second group of knife carriers are those young people who believe that they need to carry a knife to protect themselves from those who rely on violence because they see no visible uniformed presence on the streets. Even if the police were there, many believe they are not there to protect them. Many in the black community still feel they are overpoliced and underprotected—that the police are there only to stop and search them or arrest them, even when they are innocent. Blanket Section 60 operations simply add to that perception. Community policing is not just a visible deterrent to criminals and a reassurance to victims; it enables community intelligence more accurately to target stop and search on those who the community know are knife carriers—policing carried out with the community, not done to a community.
Some noble Lords, including the Minister, might say that they do not recognise the scenario I am describing, and it is easy to ignore the reality when the violence is largely contained within these communities, rarely spilling out to disturb the likes of you or me. However, I have talked to young people who live in these areas, I have worked in these areas, I still live in one of these areas and I recognise what young people are describing.
What makes young people join gangs? At an individual level, many of them are suffering from adverse childhood experiences: domestic violence; abandonment through divorce or separation; a parent with a mental health condition; being the victim of physical or sexual abuse or neglect, either physical or emotional; where a member of the household is in prison; or growing up in a household where adults are experiencing alcohol or drug-misuse problems. Many have grown up in a situation where violence is seen as the normal way to resolve problems, where bullying and misogyny are normalised and where involving outside help is alien. When members of the APPG visited the only young offender institution in Scotland, without exception the inmates had experienced multiple ACEs.
Scotland invests in young offenders. There, they are counselled about their adverse experiences. A resident police officer explains that the police are there as much to protect them as to lock them up. A woman’s refuge worker explains what normal families and healthy relationships look like.
Some of this emotional neglect—not being made to feel loved, wanted and belonging—is not the fault of hard-working parents, some of whom must do multiple jobs working 16 hours a day six or seven days a week to pay the rent and put food on the table. They simply do not have the time or energy to do what they want to do for their children, to do what their children need and want from their parents.
Many children do not belong to a school community either. Whether it is a rigid traditional education that fails to engage all pupils, or whether ACEs result in disruptive behaviour, many find themselves officially excluded from school or informally off-rolled. School performance targets result in schools taking the easy option of jettisoning so-called difficult pupils. On the APPG’s visit to Glasgow, we learned that the number of pupils excluded from school in the city was less than the fingers on one hand. In the London Borough of Croydon, more than 1,500 pupils have been excluded from school in recent years, and that is just in one London borough.
I suggest five priorities for government action. First, we need to tackle in-work poverty by mandating the real living wage and providing parents with the support that they need in order to provide for their children, through such things as children’s centres and Sure Start. Councils have suffered a 77% decrease in government funding between 2015-16 and 2019-20.
Secondly, we need to provide safe and healthy alternatives to criminal gangs by properly funding youth services, outreach workers and the kind of modern youth clubs that really engage young people. Charities and sports clubs need to have long-term core funding—which local authorities used to provide—and churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, temples and others that provide somewhere safe for young people to go should be acknowledged, supported and encouraged.
Thirdly, we need to heal the damage caused by adverse childhood experiences, investing in children’s mental health and intervening in teachable moments, such as Redthread’s work in emergency departments with the victims of knife crime.
Fourthly, we need to provide truly inclusive education, where no pupil is left behind. Compulsory sex and relationship education for all pupils without exception needs to include teaching the violent, exploitative realities of criminal gang membership, like the excellent work done by the charity of which I am patron, GAV.
Finally, we need to create an environment in which communities and the police can unite against knife crime by restoring community policing.
The situation is far more complex than I have been able to outline in the time available. I hope noble Lords will add to my necessarily limited opening to this important debate. I must emphasise that this is not a Liberal Democrat plan; it is the result of my membership of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime, under the excellent leadership of Sarah Jones MP. If noble Lords have had the chance to look at the Barnardo’s briefing which they will have been sent in relation to this debate, they will recognise a lot of what I have said in my opening.
As I previously mentioned, the evidence-based briefing of the College of Policing talks about heavy-handed stop and search resulting in it being less likely for communities to come forward with the vital intelligence that police forces need. Even though there is no direct proportionality between crime reduction and the number of police officers, once you get below a particular level of policing criminals feel that they can act with impunity and victims of crime feel that they have no choice but to defend themselves.
One of the most disheartening responses this morning on Twitter to the plan which I have just outlined to your Lordships was, “And who is going to pay for this?”. The people who are paying for this now are the victims who are dying on our streets, and the families and relatives of those who are dying. If we do not do something about this, those families and young people will continue to pay for our inaction.
We do not have to look overseas for examples of successful policing operations. The recent success of our own Metropolitan Police in tackling moped crime is an excellent example of how effective policing can eliminate, within weeks, problems that have reduced whole communities to an abject fear of public spaces. That is why what is required to tackle our present knife crisis is a two-pronged approach: a longer-term strategy focused on underlying social problems of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, mentioned, as well as short-term tactical action based on high-quality, proactive and innovative local policing using good information and good technology.
I say “local” policing because I believe that violent crime on our streets is most effectively tackled by local police forces acting with the support of their local communities. There are two main reasons for this. First, street crime is basically a local problem. Although it is now widespread, it does not affect every city or town to the same extent. Even within a single county, there are major differences between one part and another. As Matthew Ellis, PCC of Staffordshire, said in a press release only yesterday—announcing new measures against knife crime—although some places in Staffordshire have an issue with knife crime, most places in the county do not.
Secondly, effective policing depends critically on community co-operation. Even American police chiefs, whose approach to policing is often derided in this country as overly aggressive, recognise that community support is the foundation of community safety. For example, Bill Bratton, who dramatically reduced crime as chief of police in both New York and Los Angeles, writing in a national UK newspaper about knife crime in London, said that it is not a matter of simply putting more cops on the streets—although he called for more cops on the streets—it is a question of what they are doing on the streets. I quote:
“You don’t want them just being seen, enforcing all the rules and regulations, you want them interacting with the community. [They] need to be developing a relationship with the community that allows … an intimacy of understanding”.
It is only when such an understanding with the community has been established that police operations such as stop and search can be effective. Without this understanding and rapport, police officers carrying out this basic policing operation are often seen as an occupying army. That is why I urge the Government to adopt this two-pronged approach to knife crime: a combination of national policies, programmes, resources and leadership aimed at tackling the underlying complex social issues that lie at the heart of the problem; and local policies, programmes, resources and leadership aimed at tackling the immediate problems on our streets.
The good news is that our local police and crime commissioners and their forces are more than able to rise to this challenge, not only in tactical policing operations but with imaginative social programmes involving local schools and doctors. I wish I had time to tell noble Lords about some of these programmes, such as those developed in Norfolk by PCC Lorne Green, in Bedfordshire by PCC Kathryn Holloway and in Staffordshire by PCC Matthew Ellis.
I believe that knife crime is best tackled by our national and local institutions working together. I feel strongly about this, because I fear that a new Prime Minister, whoever he may be, will wish to demonstrate the smack of firm government by taking personal control of the fight against knife crime and directing it from No. 10—which I call the Tony Blair approach to fighting crime. I do not for a moment oppose all interest in this issue from the centre. Indeed, more funding from Whitehall is always welcome and useful, provided of course it is distributed to those programmes and forces that have most need for it. What I fear is operational direction from Whitehall, which is almost always counterproductive. It is aimed primarily at attracting national headlines rather than solving local problems. Our present arrangements for ensuring local community safety are more than fit for the purpose of tackling the problems of knife crime effectively and sensitively. There is no need to develop new arrangements for this job. Let us simply provide those who are doing the job with the support they need to do it.
In preparation for this debate, I came across an interview that John Carnochan gave recently—he has been very busy with visitors from London and the south as he explains to people, including the Mayor of London and others, how he did this. I commend the interview to everybody. It was published on 10 May 2018 in the Inside Politics section of the online version of Holyrood magazine. It was an extensive interview in which he explained his achievements in the current context. There was a sentence in it which was compelling. He said that when people came first of all, he thought they were looking for a magic bullet and there was none—if they were to reduce the level of violence, a complicated approach would have to be taken. They were shocked by the fact that the level of violence in Scotland is still appalling, but the point he was making was that it had been halved in a relatively short period and there was still much more work to be done. In no sense was this man complacent.
I shall quote one sentence that is crucial and is the lesson that we should all take away—it is not nearly a sophisticated approach, but it is a very strong truth. He said:
“I said to them, you need to get past the crime figures. Stop talking about knife crime and talk about violence, and try to understand the patterns”.
He then goes on to explain what he means by that—noble Lords can read it for themselves. He pushes back against those who suggest that such phraseology diverts attention from victims and the consequences of crime, because it does not. He said that he would never give up on these issues—aspects that the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Wasserman, identified—which are important to individual communities and their safety. But the most important thing is to learn from that. Having grown up in this environment, I cannot imagine a more difficult one in which to try and shift the pattern of violence. Despite the complexities that we will hear about in this debate, if it can work there it can work elsewhere.
My second point is in a sense more important for the House than for this debate. I have been immensely impressed by the quality of the seven briefings I have received, including one from Barnardo’s which has been referred to. At a few minutes past 11 pm last night, my mobile phone alerted me to an email and I got, for the first time, a copy of the College of Policing’s Knife Crime Evidence Briefing. I am giving the college a subliminal message that 11.10 pm the night before the debate is a bit late. I have not read it yet, but I have looked through it. As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that I cannot do justice to any of the briefings I have received, but they are full of great stuff. We are constantly searching for a way for Parliament to be relevant and to bring people in. Why do we not open a portal for every debate—it would have to be moderated—where those who wish to engage could post their briefings in real time? People could consider and relate back to them. It would stop all noble Lords having to read them and give them name checks; they would be part of our deliberations. In this environment it would be a good thing to do.
I have run out of time and I apologise, but I have a question about government accountability. I have been trying to follow what the Government are actually doing on strategy and planning in relation to violence. There has been a lot of activity and renaming of committees and after the Prime Minister’s summit on this there was a Written Statement. The last paragraph of the Statement says that the deliverables of the summit represent,
“an increased programme of work across Government”.
It promises some things which I hope the Minister will refer to in her summing up. It promises to keep Parliament updated, it promises a plan of action and it promises some detail on how the Government will go forward. We know the strategy; we now need to hear what the plan of action is.
Drug misuse and dealing is also an important part of this picture. It is unrealistic to think that we can ultimately solve the problem by punitive approaches to this issue. In recent years the proportion of knife crime offenders receiving custodial sentences has sharply increased, partly because the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 introduced minimum sentences for a second offence of carrying a knife of four months for juveniles and six months for those aged 18-plus. However, this has not stopped knife crime rising; nor have increases in the stop and search policies we have adopted. Study after study has found little correlation between the use of stop and search and the rate of knife crime or violence generally, and the resentment the heavy-handed and racially disproportionate use of stop and search produces in young people all too often drives them into the arms of gangs, rather than achieving the opposite.
We need to look at more constructive solutions to the problem. Custodial sentences are inevitable for offences that have caused death or serious injury, but I see little point in passing short custodial sentences on young people apprehended for carrying a knife. Short custodial sentences are commonly agreed to be the most pointless and ineffective sentences courts can impose. They have much higher reoffending rates than any other form of sentence. Their containment effect is very short-lived. They are not long enough for any sustained attempt at rehabilitation in custody, as they do not provide enough time for an offending behaviour programme, a drug treatment programme or a vocational training programme. However, they are long enough for offenders who have stable accommodation to lose it, for those who have jobs to lose them and for those involved in education or training courses to lose the chance of completing them. This means that, on release, these offenders are more likely to be homeless, jobless and not involved in training or education—all things which increase rather than reduce the likelihood of reoffending.
Moreover, young offenders can all too often react the wrong way to a short spell in custody, deciding they have to live up to a hard image in front of their peers. For all these reasons, short custodial sentences often do more harm than good. A demanding community sentence is much more likely to provide the opportunity for intensive work to tackle the attitudes that lead offenders to carry knives, yet the use of community sentences has been falling. The approaches most likely to change young people’s attitudes to carrying knives are programmes or interventions that show young people the real consequences of this misguided way of thinking.
Many of the most effective interventions are those that involve former offenders who have now matured and seen for themselves the awful, negative consequences of carrying weapons. These ex-offenders can often act as credible and positive role models for young people, particularly if these interventions are combined with practical help with education and training, which can equip young people to lead a more constructive lifestyle. Any available funding to tackle knife crime would be far better spent on funding more interventions of this kind than on any other approach to the problem. This approach would be more likely than any other to reduce the number of families whose lives are blighted by the appalling consequences of young people’s willingness to carry knives.
If we do not provide children with support in their lives, whether in their communities or schools, we risk alienating them from participation in wider society. I therefore welcome the Home Office working with Ofsted and the Department for Education in focusing on the risks surrounding crime and exclusions. All children deserve education, opportunities and support, as they will have the potential to contribute to the good of society. If young people are to play a full part, it certainly means that they must have access to employment. That is why we must consider the impact of government policies on tackling unemployment. I am shocked, like, I am sure, many other Members of this House, that young people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. Can the Minister explain to the House what impact government policy is having on addressing this specific issue?
Communities have a significant influence on the people in them. I note the views of the Children’s Society, which produced one of these briefing papers:
“Children carrying weapons should be seen as a child protection issue which needs a safeguarding response. A whole-system approach must include all government departments. Young people thrive best when their lives are given validity through positive community affirmation, yet when young people feel they have fallen short of being worthy of affirmation, the power of society as a redemptive force is crucial”.
With a presence in every community, we in the Churches and on these Benches want to play our part in combating serious youth violence. In a couple of weeks’ time, the General Synod of the Church of England will hold a debate on this subject during which the Reverend Canon Dr Rosemarie Mallett, a prominent campaigner and a parish priest in an area that has seen a great deal of serious youth violence, will call on parishes to open the doors of our churches after school hours to make safe places.
This type of community-led action is about providing safe spaces for the young, who can sometimes view the church or other religious premises as a neutral group. Perhaps this is why the capital city’s busiest knife amnesty bin is in the church in St John’s, Hoxton. We want to explore how we can play our part to help with that. We are not blind to violence: we see its impact on our streets in our parishes in many urban areas. It has been widely reported in the press in the past week that some churches in the centre of Luton in my diocese, inspired by the words of the prophet Isaiah—
“they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”—
have been reclaiming knives delivered through a knife amnesty and made a striking sculpture of a phoenix rising from the ashes. Just like the phoenix, communities can rise together. This is much bigger than just unemployment or policing. We need to engage everyone we possibly can at the grass roots for a much wider debate and much wider ownership by society if we are to address this problem, which is causing devastation to so many individuals and families across our nation.
I would like to see every young person leaving school go through a citizenship ceremony, rather like those who take British nationality. I have attended some of those ceremonies, and they are very moving. The people taking part are very serious about what they are doing, and I think every young person should go through something like that. Citizenship education should not only prepare them for a world in which they will take part—by voting, participating and in many cases, one would hope, answering the call to public service—but make them realise that they have rights, yes, but also responsibilities and duties. I honestly think that if we placed more emphasis on citizenship education, we would be going a long way down the route to creating a better society.
I thought the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, about short sentences were so very pertinent. Wherever possible, young people should be kept out of institutions. I had a young offender institution in my last constituency. It merited a damning report from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, when he was Chief Inspector of Prisons, and pulled itself up considerably; he was then able to give it a much better report. But many of the young people in that institution became nurtured in crime by being there.
When I was chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the other place, I saw some of the positive effects of community restorative justice. I genuinely believe that we ought to place more emphasis on that. I ask my noble friend the Minister to refer to this when she winds up.
Any of us who are parents or grandparents—in your Lordships’ House it is more the latter than the former—are deeply concerned about our grandchildren growing up in a world in which violence is endemic. It should be our collective determination, not just wish or endeavour, to ensure that future generations of children leave school with a sense of belonging to a community, feeling that they have an obligation not only to receive from but to contribute to that community, and realising that violence of the sort we have been reading about in the press this very week is completely unacceptable.
The Action for Children report quoted a youth worker whose role currently is to support victims of stabbing in an A&E in London. He said:
“Young people and their families are not getting the support they need and things are reaching crisis point. Dealing with the issues at A&E is too late”.
There are consequences to severe cuts in local services and local communities and families are damaged, sometimes beyond repair. Preventive services, such as youth services, are a vital element in keeping individuals and communities safe.
One of the key recommendations of the report by the APPG on Knife Crime is that, as part of the public health approach, the Government should use this autumn’s expected spending review to provide a considerable increase in funding to youth services so that they can provide safe spaces and access to the support that some young people need. What is so frustrating is that this pattern of large cuts in youth services leading to a rise in young people involved in crime is entirely predictable: it has happened before; the link is known. That makes the continued cuts to local youth services as a consequence of government funding decisions even more to be reprimanded.
The Government have at least responded, in a piecemeal way, to the knife crime crisis by providing additional funding to police services. In West Yorkshire, ad hoc funding has enabled early intervention and prevention work with young people, schools and communities to tackle knife crime. Disappointingly, the funding is a one-off and therefore there is no sustainability either in the funding or the prevention work. It is as if the Government see a horrific problem and throw some one-off funding at it in order to reduce critical media headlines. What they should and must do is provide continuing year-on-year funding to local government to provide the intervention and prevention work that will turn lives around, keep young people safe, remove the trauma of violent knife crime from a community and enable young people to turn away from knives. The win for the Government is that this approach costs the public purse less in the long run. It is a win-win. The only thing that is surprising is that it is taking the Government so long to accept that this change is absolutely essential.
The Children’s Society report on knife crime points to another policy needing revision, knife crime prevention orders. Branded as preventive, these orders are in fact targeted at children who may be the victims of exploitation. As the right reverend Prelate noted, the society rightly points out that any child found carrying a knife should immediately prompt a safeguarding response. Does the Minister accept that important recommendation? The Children’s Society’s concerns mirror those expressed in this Chamber when the Bill was going through. The orders risk criminalising young people and pushing them further from support rather than the other way round. Does the Minister accept that analysis and the need to revisit that legislation, or at least the regulations within it?
Even with those policy changes, if they occur, the Government will be working uphill, as I have said, unless they are willing to look at the evidence of the relationship between our drug prohibition laws and knife crime and many other societal problems, although today of course we are concerned with knife crime.
I hope that noble Lords will bear with me if I spend a couple of minutes explaining why I have fairly recently come to the view that the legalisation of cannabis for adult social use would do more to deal with knife crime than any other initiative. The Government seem to accept that most knife crime occurs because youngsters are caught up in drug gangs or carry knives in case they are attacked by a gang wanting to recruit them. The demand for cannabis is on a different scale from the demand for any other drug, so what would a legal cannabis market look like? The legal cannabis would be a well-balanced, uncontaminated product. Good up-to-date research has shown that that sort of product has no risk of causing psychosis. There has been a lot of publicity about cannabis causing psychosis, but it absolutely does not. The illegal stuff does but a legal product would not.
The only other possible risk from cannabis is of inhibiting brain development in children. If legalisation led to more children taking cannabis, I would not support it, but the US evidence suggests that that is simply not the case. In Colorado, the use of cannabis by teenagers has fallen, and in the other legalising states it has remained much the same as it was before the change in the law.
If the supply of safe cannabis were regulated and available only in pharmacies or other legal outlets, the illegal market would largely collapse. Yes, skunk would continue to be available from the drug dealers, but if young people could buy legal cannabis safely from somewhere else, children would not find their way to the illegal drug dealers. No doubt children would get hold of the legal product—they get hold of alcohol, after all—but it would be considerably safer than what they take at the moment. The important point is that the cannabis they got hold of would not be skunk. That is crucial. Skunk is horrible, dangerous stuff. What about class A drugs? We do not know the proportion of cannabis users who move on to class A drugs but we know that the gateway effect is crucial. This would end. There would be separate markets for legal cannabis and illegal drugs.
I realise that the Minister cannot respond to any of those comments until we get a new Home Secretary but, if and when we do, I hope that I can have a discussion with him about the possibility of revisiting the terms of reference of Dame Carol Black’s review.