Violent Crime, Gang Activity and Burglaries

In 2019, the NCA estimated that over 2,000 individual county lines were in operation. It said:

“These deal lines are controlled by criminal networks based primarily in urban hubs and facilitate the direct purchase of illicit drugs, primarily class A (crack cocaine and heroin), by drug users in smaller towns and rural areas.”

The three urban areas most affected by county lines are London—obviously—Liverpool and Birmingham. When the Minister replies, could he say what activities the Government are planning to reduce the involvement of children, particularly young children, in such county lines?

According to police statistics, there were almost 50,000 knife crimes in the year to March 2022. In the West Midlands, there is considerable concern about such incidents, with an increase of 163% between 2010 and 2021. It is of course easy for His Majesty’s Government to blame knife crime in London on the Labour mayor. The previous Home Secretary—I cannot remember who that was because there have been so many—was adept at blaming Sadiq Khan, although surely the Government must bear most of the responsibility for criminal activity and the response to it in the capital.

Countrywide, there were 192,060 burglaries between March 2021 and March 2022. That is 526 every day, or one burglary every 164 seconds. As I indicated earlier, there has been an 88% increase in domestic burglaries in the West Midlands between 2014 and 2019. I will detain your Lordships on burglaries for a moment because I feel strongly about this. I have lived at my present address in south Birmingham for 32 years. In that time, I have been subjected to no fewer than five burglaries, two of which were successful—from the burglars’ point of view—and I assure your Lordships that few incidents are more depressing than arriving back from London to find your front door smashed and every room in the house turned over. Burglars are not known for tidying up before they leave; the contents of every drawer and cupboard are taken out and strewn across the place.

Although it is sometimes said that burglary is a victimless crime because we claim on our insurance, it is sometimes months after the event that we realise that certain items are missing. Many of the items stolen are not particularly valuable financially but mean a great deal to the people concerned. In my case, among the things stolen was a silver casket I received from the borough of Sandwell with my citation as a freeman of the borough. They dropped the medal and the citation itself in the garden, so at least I can still prove that I am still a freeman of the borough of Sandwell but the solid silver casket disappeared with the other valuables. Various other silver items were taken on this occasion, which, quite frankly, were irreplaceable: a silver tankard which I and other members of the Bredbury and Romiley Urban District Council received when we were abolished—by a Tory Government, incidentally—following the Local Government Act 1972. I cannot replace that and it was not worth very much, but these are the sort of items and the sort of distressing results of the number of burglaries that take place in the United Kingdom.

The Home Secretary—at least, the Home Secretary until yesterday—made a speech to the Conservative Party conference recently, promising to restore police numbers to those we enjoyed when the Conservatives first came to power in 2010 and that a police officer would visit every burglary. No consultation has taken place with the Police Federation about the practicalities of such a scheme but, then again, it served its purpose by drawing a standing ovation at the Conservative Party conference. Alas, her opportunities to draw such a standing ovation in the office of Home Secretary have now been curtailed by her own act of yesterday, but it placated the crowd at the time. Indeed, it roused it to some degree of enthusiasm.

I have dealt with the outline of the situation so far as the terms of the Motion before us are concerned, but I could not leave this subject without talking about police morale generally. Under a Conservative Government—a so called Government of law and order—police morale has plummeted considerably. The vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales has lobbied the Government over many years, particularly about the reckless cuts made to police forces during austerity, which have resulted in rising levels of crime. He said that

“we are seeing this pressure disillusion colleagues with years of experience, driving them to leave the service due to pay and morale issues and the devastating impact of unfair and discriminatory pension changes.”

I spent a couple of years when a Member of the other place as a home affairs spokesman and spent some time during that period accompanying police officers on their duty, some in the Metropolitan area and some in the West Midlands. I read lately of the problems in the Metropolitan Police area and the decision of the new police commissioner to get rid of, as he puts it, literally hundreds of police officers for improper behaviour. Of course, I support that. However, I have to say, without in any way defending the sort of behaviour that the new police commissioner outlined, that I was struck by the youth of some of the police officers I accompanied and by the sort of tasks they had to undertake.

One that sticks firmly in my mind was accompanying two police officers, a man and a woman, in their mid-20s to the flat of an old person who had not been seen for some months. It was necessary to break down the door accompanied by a member of the local authority. The sight and smell of a corpse that had been in that property for some three months remains with me after 30-odd years. When we give police officers tasks such as that at a fairly young age, it is perhaps inevitable that they develop a carapace—a thick skin—concerning the duties they have to undertake. We followed that up within a couple of days by picking up a hopelessly incontinent drug addict from the arches near Waterloo Station. We should appreciate that young police officers perform tasks that no one else would want to do and, while quite properly taking action against those who misbehave, we should recognise that, for many of them, coming to work means the sort of role that I have just outlined.

As for police officers in the West Midlands, I am grateful to the police commissioner for some of the facts and figures on financial cuts to policing in the West Midlands since 2010. In 2010, the West Midlands had a total of 8,765 police officers. Austerity meant that 2,221 were cut and £175 million slashed from the police budget. That is 25% of police officers in the West Midlands, plus hundreds of essential police staff, including 300 community support officers. At the same time, there were huge cuts in the services vital to preventing crime in the first place, such as youth clubs, mental health services, local council funding and probation services. When these arbitrary cuts are made, it is often forgotten that although the Government of the day can show an instant saving, the cumulative cost of those savings far outweighs the initial amount saved. So many young people in the West Midlands being deprived of some of the services that I have outlined has resulted in the increase in crime that I have mentioned. As of March 2022, because of the Government’s change of heart, the total number of police officers in the West Midlands now stands at 7,642 but that is still over 1,000 officers short of the situation back in 2010 when that Government came to power.

As of today, we are to have a new Home Secretary, Mr Grant Shapps, who is taking over. He has had a versatile career since he entered the House of Commons. He has changed his name a few times as well, but I will come to that in a moment. He has been the Transport Secretary, the International Development Secretary, the Conservative Party chairman, the Housing Minister and now he is the new Home Secretary. He is a very versatile chap. According to this morning’s Guardian, he is a man of many roles and many names. He has been known as Mr Michael Green, Mr Sebastian Fox and, most unlikely of all, as Ms Corinne Stockheath during his career. Which name and guise he will adopt in his present role, only time will tell. I hope he will prove a better Home Secretary than he was a Transport Secretary. Noble Lords might recollect that I have bored the House on numerous occasions with transport stories. He was notorious for every problem being a photo opportunity when he was Transport Secretary. One would hope that he will change his tune in his new and extremely important role.

For a Government who pride themselves on their economic abilities, this Government have virtually bankrupted the nation. For a Government who wrap themselves in a flag of patriotism on every occasion, they have reduced the British Army to its lowest level for two centuries. For a Government who brag about law and order, there is nothing at all to brag about, given the situation that many of our people in this country find themselves in at present. I beg to move.

Having said that, when someone is convicted, it is too late: we need to get far ahead on preventing it before we are simply dealing with the effects. As noble Lords know, some people say it costs—we hear various figures—something like £40,000 a year to keep someone in a young offender institution. It would be far better if we were spending that money on preventive work with youth workers and other people to get ahead of the game. We need to try to work out how we can support the police and get ahead of this terrible problem that is affecting so many communities.

How can we work to beat our swords into ploughshares and our knives into useful tools? In the areas where I work with voluntary groups and churches, there is an awful lot of work going on and a lot of analysis about how we can build the sort of communities that are likely to reduce the levels of knife crime. This is not a problem for just the left or the right; we need solutions from all political sides if we are going to get on top of this. According to a very interesting analysis I read, there is poverty of resources, poverty of relationships and poverty of identity.

On the poverty of resources, we are not investing in the way that we used to in youth work, and we are not investing in enough groups, sports and other activities to give young people activities to engender their sense of competition, pride and so on. We really need to think about how we are investing in this. In the communities in which I work, so many of our youth centres are being sold off. I think I am right in saying that my diocese now employs more youth workers—as a voluntary organisation—than Hertfordshire County Council and the Bedfordshire unitary authorities combined. That is good, but we need to invest more and recognise that there is a poverty of resources.

From the perspective of the right, there is a poverty of relationships. We have a crisis of children being brought up in families with absent parents and where there are no role models. A lot of the extended family has gone—where, for example, when a marriage broke up there was probably an uncle who would come round and be in loco parentis. A lot of that has gone. We need to look at how we can invest in our family life and how we think about young people having real mentors who can hold them responsible. It is vital that we think about these role models.

Finally, on the poverty of identity, many young people feel as though there is nothing to which they can aspire. They are being sold an awful lot of guff in the media about how everybody can be successful and famous. It is no wonder that they are dismayed when they know there is no way out of their local community. How can we provide ways for these young people to see that there are alternatives to finding their identity and role in society that are not based on holding a knife and saying, “Do what I say, or else”? Some of the very interesting work that has gone on with our churches has involved knife amnesties. Some noble Lords will have seen the extraordinary sculptures made of the knives that have been handed in; we had one recently in one of our churches in Luton.

I will ask the Minister three questions. First, may we have an update on the recruitment of police and police community support officers? That needs to include how many are leaving, not just how many we are recruiting: are the total numbers going up, because we need to ensure that we have the resources on the ground? Secondly, may we have an assessment of the success of serious violence reduction orders in reducing knife crime? Thirdly, may we have an assessment of the troubled families programme, which ran from 2013 to 2020 and worked with over 400,000 families? What lessons did we learn and are we implementing them?

In 2006, there was one officer per 430 residents of Leicestershire and Rutland. In 2018, that one officer was for 615 residents. Last year, the figure was 500 residents. By March next year, it should have been 488 residents, but now it will not because of the cut of 100 officers. That is a sad story. My question to the Minister is this, although he may not be able to answer it: has the Home Office made any representations about the decision taken in that particular part of England, which is obviously against government policy?

I want to say a word about serious violence. Noble Lords will know of the Scottish violence reduction unit based in Glasgow, led by an ex-police superintendent, Niven Rennie, which over the years has inspired other police forces and police and crime commissioners in England and Wales and has, I believe, influenced the Government favourably too. We in Leicestershire were certainly inspired listening to him speak at a conference at our multiagency committee, the strategic partnership board, held at police headquarters in Leicester.

The principle behind all this is common sense. If action can be taken early with young people who have suffered what are called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and suffered trauma as a consequence, and who may be susceptible as a result to committing criminal and even serious criminal behaviour, including violence, that multidisciplinary action may prevent them becoming involved in crime in the first place and, if they do, give them a second chance to get out of it. Examples and evidence of success are there. Of course, it takes a long time.

The Government were impressed enough to give grants for the setting up and support of violence reduction units in 18 of the 23 police force areas, including Leicestershire. Ours has been going for three years now, brilliantly led by Grace Strong. It has much police force involvement, of course. It is a multiagency network, existing to tackle and prevent serious violence and violent crime, particularly that involving young people.

To give an example of what it does, it has organised a small team, often made up of young people, who visit the local A&E at the Leicester Royal Infirmary to try to talk to victims and perpetrators of knife crime, who of course end up in hospital, at what is called the changeable moment—that crucial moment—with the hope of persuading them that knife culture and violence is wrong and counterproductive. I think that is a wonderful initiative.

We set up something called people zones in my time in Leicester. These are small, specific geographical areas in which we established multiagency groups to deal with preventing all offending, from anti-social behaviour at one end to serious violence at the other. I am extremely proud of this initiative and am glad that my successor, who I have perhaps been a bit hard on in this speech, has confirmed the scheme. I congratulate him on doing so.

I end by saying how right the right reverend Prelate was in saying that we owe so much to our police. I learned that very much as a police and crime commissioner.

Anyway, back to the Prime Minister’s pension. If I understand the rules correctly, she is entitled to a Prime Minister’s pension when she leaves office. I would not like to see her go into poverty like the WASPI women who have been deprived of state pension money because they were not given sufficient notice. The WASPI women did nothing wrong, such as taking the “Great” out of Great Britain. If I have misread the rules on the PM’s pension and she is not so entitled if she goes, say, tomorrow, for the sake of argument, I would be happy to contribute to some crowd-funding venture, if that would persuade her to go.

I was distraught when I heard that Suella Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary yesterday, because the other half of my speech was devoted to why she was unfit for high office. She was Attorney-General in 2020—a government law officer. Not only did she not resign when the Government announced that they intended to override the Northern Ireland protocol, she publicly defended the situation. When Mr Brandon Lewis, as Northern Ireland Secretary, said that the new Bill in 2020 to amend the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU

“does break international law in a very specific and limited way”,—[Official Report, Commons, 8/9/2020; col. 509]

Sir Jonathan Jones, the Permanent Secretary of the Government Legal Department, the most senior lawyer advising the Government, resigned over this statement. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, resigned as a Government Minister in this House—a careful and thoughtful man who took 48 hours to do so.

This was a serious issue leading to serious resignations. Mr Brandon Lewis’s statement was not contradicted by No. 10 Downing Street. Clearly, we would not wish to put Mr Brandon Lewis anywhere near the law and order brief. Oh, wait a minute, he is Justice Secretary. I always have this image of a young urchin in Peckham, where I live, being held by a security officer for stealing juice and a bar of chocolate from the local supermarket saying, “I did break the law, but in a very specific and limited way.”

I turn to one of the aspects of the Government’s strategy to tackle crime and gang activity. I do not have time to deal with the virtual collapse of the probation and social work services, which is a stain on our country. A lot more could be said, if I had the time. But I do want to say something about our police and prison officers. Ms Braverman, when she was still in office, promised the Conservative Party conference that there would be 20,000 more police officers by March 2023. Is that still the Government’s policy? Does it simply make up for the 20,000 reduction when the Conservatives came to power? Is it sufficient when we have 4 million more people in the country? Nothing was said about prison officers. Will the Minister indicate the Government’s plan for recruiting more prison officers?

As chair of ACAS, 20 years ago I participated in a two-day residential seminar on how to improve working conditions in the Prison Service. The issues identified have worsened tenfold since that time. If prison officers are not valued for the important work they do, how will we achieve better safety, security and skills training in our prisons?

The noble Lord, Lord Snape, has already referred to Ché Donald, the national vice-chair of the Police Federation, who said that the increase in the number of police officers is desperately needed, but also pointed to other issues of stress and disillusion, pay and the impact of unfair discriminatory pension changes. These are such basic HR issues that only a Cabinet of millionaires could fail to see their importance. The pensions issue alone, capping the pension contributions of public service pensions, has had the consequences that I predicted when it was first imposed—a 10% cut. Ask any HR officer if he would like to hang on to 10% of his staff and not lose those skills, training and experience—

We spend about £3 billion on our prisons. That is not a lot of money; it adds up to about £44,000 for each prisoner, but if they have problems and are likely to try to commit suicide or are violent, that figure can go up another £10,000, £20,000 or £30,000. We have prisoners who cost £100,000. As the right reverend Prelate said, we are spending the money in the wrong place. We are not spending it on prevention.

When I was banged up, it cost £63 a week, I think. That seems low, but it was three times what my dad was earning as a plasterer—so there is a kind of weirdness. I would like to see the complete and utter reformation of not just how we treat prisoners but how we treat crime. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, talked about the enormous increase in burglary in the West Midlands. What is burglary? You can call it burglary, but you can also call it an economy. You could call it a form of trade. You could call it all sorts of things.

Something is going desperately wrong in our country when we are putting so much effort into all sorts of things but we are not putting any effort into dismantling poverty. What do you think knife crime is? I will tell you what it is. I remember, as a boy, being a member of a gang and having a flick-knife. I went round imposing myself on people who did not have a flick-knife. We did not use knives as often then because we had hanging over us the threat that, if we killed somebody, we ourselves would be killed—if we were over the age of 18.

I am not very liberal about the fact that what we have now is a complete devaluation of human life. When there is poverty, how do people who are stuck in poverty express themselves? How do they make themselves something on the block, something in their block of flats or something on the street? I know that, if I was back there, I would be seeking some kind of identity. A knife is a brilliant way of getting some identity. If, at the same time, you are surrounded by TV, Netflix and all this other rubbish that shows the devaluation of human life, with no spirituality or love for each other, you will not give a toss if that knife goes into somebody and reduces them to nothingness.

We are in the middle of a crisis. We are not in a crisis just because Truss has screwed things up. That is a manifestation of a crisis. There is a deeper crisis. When I came into the House of Lords, I came here to dismantle poverty. I did not come in to make the poor a bit more comfortable or move the chairs on the “Titanic”. We really need to stop, think and wonder why we let our police officers down. I know them. I know the guys who are coming back beaten up by what they have to see and the lives they live—like our prison officers, teachers and people in the community. It may sound weird, but I think we really need to reinvent our thinking around crime. We have to sit back and say, “Whatever we’ve done is not working”.

Many of these crimes are driven by drugs and gang activity. Gang involvement with drugs is often, and most destructively, manifested through county lines activities. I saw the impact of this in my housing work, and I will focus my comments on violent crime as it affects young people—specifically county lines drug dealing and the dangers for young people, particularly those in care or in vulnerable families who get caught up in gang violence and knife crime. My noble friend outlined how county lines operate.

The Government have declared that this a priority for the police to tackle. In October 2021, they published their Beating Crime Plan, and money has been spent on dedicated task forces and 18 violence reduction units. They have also set up the youth endowment fund to fund early intervention projects. We have been given the stats to show that this is having some impact. Policing responses have interrupted and closed down some gang activity. In 2019, the National Crime Agency estimated that there were more than 2,000 individual county lines in operation. It revised that in April last year to nearer 600, ascribing the reduction to increased policing and new guidance on tackling this issue.

However, there is no room for complacency. The National Youth Agency warns that the county lines business model is adapting, making offending harder to detect and increasingly resilient to disruption by law enforcement. This is far more deeply embedded than can be resolved by policing alone. The threat of gang-led county lines drug dealing to young people and the risk of violence and exploitation remain at shocking levels. It is estimated that 20% of those involved in county lines are children. The most common age range is 15 to 16, but the NYA notes anecdotal reports of children as young as 7 or 8 being exploited.

It is our most vulnerable children who are most likely to become ensnared. This means those who lack a safe or stable home environment; those who have prior experience of neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse; those who have mental health or substance misuse issues; those who have been excluded from mainstream education or are in care; and those who are homeless, in social housing or in insecure accommodation. They are the most vulnerable to exploitation.

We know the criminal exploitation of children is a common feature of county lines activity, yet we still have no statutory definition of child criminal exploitation. This potentially makes it all the harder for our public services to work together to identify how much support a child needs or, indeed, the level of risk surrounding an exploited child. Can the Minister tell the House when the Government will implement in law a definition of child criminal exploitation?

If we are to tackle the threat from gangs and violence associated with county lines, we must have sufficient youth services and support for young people living in areas of deprivation and disadvantage. Further, they must be trained and upskilled so that they can build capacity and outreach in order to work with vulnerable young people wherever they are. Sadly, along with years of cuts to policing and the courts—this has been mentioned already—we have had years of cuts to funding for youth services. The provision of safe spaces and group activities for young people, with trained youth workers and skilled volunteers, is enormously patchy. This leaves young people vulnerable and prey to gangs. Again, from my work in housing, I have seen where youth workers now have so few resources that they are not able to offer alternatives to keep young people out of gangs and off the street.

The YMCA report Out Of Service noted that, since 2010, more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and more than 750 youth centres closed. In 2010-11, local authorities spent an estimated £1.36 billion in real terms on youth services in England. By 2018-19, the real-terms reduction was £959 million—a 71% cut during that period. The consequences of these cuts during 12 years of this Government are seen in our shocking levels of knife crime, rates of serious violence and the rise of mental health difficulties among young people. Youth services are a lifeline for many young people, but these cuts have left many without local safe spaces or support.

The NYA’s 2021 report, Between the Lines, called for a high-level government strategy—a youth workforce development to recruit, train and deploy 10,000 full-time qualified youth workers. This goal should sit alongside the target of 20,000 more police officers outlined in the Government’s Beating Crime Plan. The NYA is now also calling for revenue investment to recruit a further 20,000 youth support workers and 40,000 trained volunteers. Have the Government listened to the call from the Home Affairs Select Committee last year for a youth service guarantee? How have they responded?

If it is the case that violent crime is disproportionately committed by young people, we need investment to deliver viable alternatives. We must increase support for those initiatives that have proved successful. All this points to the vital importance of the levelling-up agenda and investing in skills development to put people on a more productive path.

The pattern of job-related crimes is changing all the time. Our most disadvantaged communities and our most vulnerable young people continue to live with serious crime and the reality of gang violence. We need to tackle the roots of these problems, but we are running out of time if we are to keep our communities safe.

“set off to hunt down the Dea-John group”.

According to the prosecuting barrister:

“Khan carried the plan to seek retribution forwards and actively encouraged the attack.”

A witness said that Khan pointed and shouted, “Oi, you …”, using the N-word. Dea-John and his friends ran but he went in a different direction from the group to get away. Khan and the other defendants ran after him. A witness said that the men had their tops off, using them to cover their faces. They were carrying weapons. Khan allegedly shouted “Bang him out” and “Eff him up” to one of the teenagers. These were grown men. If that is not incitement, tell me what is.

The 14-year-old lad had asthma, ran out of breath, was caught, stabbed and killed. Imagine it: on the streets of Birmingham last year, a boy chased by a racist mob, cornered, stabbed and killed. This is incredible. No one doubts that those five people were responsible, but four of the five defendants who chased him, including the two adults, were found not guilty by an all-white jury. The fifth, aged 15, was convicted of just manslaughter. He will be free in less than three years. Someone in Birmingham asked me what lessons have been learned from this—a gang shouting racist abuse and the stabbing of a black boy?

The noble Lord, Lord Snape, will remember Birmingham in the 1980s, as I do. Failings of the police and the criminal justice system resulted in riots on the streets. Handsworth, Lozells—on fire. There is never any justification for such behaviour.

Dea-John Reid’s mum called for calm in the black community. It listened, because it trusted the authorities, but it has clearly been let down. Why are those men walking free? Was there a problem with the evidence? Did the CPS not prosecute it properly? Did someone get to the jury? What happened? Why has there not been an immediate public outcry about this?

If this had been in London, it would have been a national scandal. It was a racist attack—an issue about knife crime, community safety, policing and the failure of the criminal justice system. The Opposition should be all over this, holding the Government to account. Why am I the only person who has raised this in a detailed way in either Chamber of Parliament? I want Ministers to look at it. I think the Attorney-General should refer it to the Court of Appeal. I know that we cannot have political direction of the police and the courts, but this cannot be allowed to stand. Will Ministers call in the chief constable and the CPS of the West Midlands to find out what has gone on. Could other charges be brought, such as affray or racially motivated assault? Something has to be done to secure justice for this family and for the black community in Birmingham.

The second case I want to raise is the racist attack on a group of Jewish children celebrating Hanukkah in Oxford Street last December. They were attacked by a mob of anti-Semites who made Nazi salutes, yelled, “Eff Jews; eff Israel”, spat at the children and threatened to smash the windows of their bus. The whole terrifying incident was caught on camera yet, despite clear CCTV evidence, mobile phone footage and multiple witnesses, investigators concluded their investigation, and the attackers remain at large.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is a former government reviewer of anti-terror legislation, said:

“The police must start to prioritise violent and explicitly racist attacks, especially where there is photographic evidence of a kind which would enable the perpetrator to be identified.”

Referring to this, and to another attack in London last year, he said:

“Both of these cases are examples of institutional failure to prioritise significant cases involving serious danger to members of the public. Letting this slide makes other incidents and even possible terrorist incidents more likely.”

The Board of Deputies has demanded an urgent meeting with the Home Secretary. Dave Rich, the director of policy at the Community Security Trust, said:

“This comes in the same week that the Home Office revealed only eight % of all racist and religious hate crime lead to a charge or summons.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism said:

“If even high-profile hate crimes such as this are not solved and the perpetrators brought to justice, what hope do the many other crimes against Jewish people have of being satisfactorily investigated?”

That campaign, the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle have jointly offered a reward of £30,000 leading to the conviction of any of the perpetrators. I draw attention to my declaration in the register as a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle. Will the Minister or his colleagues speak to the Met and find out what else can be done to bring those responsible to justice?

One interesting reference in the report is the finding that police officers had a good understanding that the causes of minor crime required a health response rather than a crime response. This is a key issue. I hope we will address these issues in the context of the forthcoming mental health Bill, and I hope the Minister can tell us in his reply that the Government understand the nature of this problem and that dealing with the issues that people have identified today is a priority.

Secondly, I want to say something as a resident of the inner city, where youth crime is a particular concern. It needs to be understood that it is not a middle-class panic about crime in the inner city. The people who really suffer from crime in the inner city tend to be those who are least well off; they are the real victims of what is going on. It is not a question of victims versus criminals and a case of just locking them up, going hard on them and throwing away the key. Most of the young people who tragically fall into this cycle of crime are victims of crime themselves and have gone through difficult and challenging childhoods. It is not just a question of telling parents to be tougher; those parents are struggling as well. The parents themselves have often had complex childhoods, and they need support. That is the pattern and, if we do not fund services correctly and fully, we will see these problems repeated generation after generation.

I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe for a very clear and good exposition of the issues involved, particularly in county lines crime, and the fact that children are being exploited. I very much hope the Government will give a clear response to the points raised. It is a wide problem, but it is worth emphasising again that there is a specific issue of local services, both from councils and from community groups. It is a totally false economy to cut back support for this work with young people, because we pay a higher cost in the longer term. I ask the Minister to say something specifically about the support provided by public services and the community to support young people so that they do not fall into this cycle.

In my final minute, I want to say something about the police. We very much rely on the police to look after us, and that is right. That is why it was of particular concern to get the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. It seems that the Metropolitan Police is addressing these issues, and we need to recognise the good work it is doing. Last night the Met Excellence Awards showed the good side of what the police can do. We have to encourage that and root out the problems identified by the noble Baroness’s interim report.