Teenage Knife Crime
One of the characteristics of inner London is that terrible poverty and often shockingly high levels of deprivation, as some colleagues from outside London would acknowledge, go cheek by jowl with great wealth. It is not unusual in Hackney for Victorian or Georgian squares with houses worth £1 million to be next to estates that are still sinks of grim poverty, despite the money that the Government have spent on refurbishing them. When I see some of the savagery of the crime on London’s streets, there is a sense—this is not an excuse—of two nations living side by side in mutual incomprehension.
The other issue in Hackney relating to teenage knife and gun crime is the number of young people who fall through the education net. A former director general of the prison service, Martin Narey, said that on the day that a child is expelled from school, we might as well give them a date and time to turn up at prison. The route from educational failure and exclusion to life on the streets, gang culture, knives, crime and prison is direct. I do not expect the Minister to respond to the education and youth service issues that I want to raise, but provision for that must be interlinked with a long-term strategy to deal with the problem of knives and guns.
In Hackney in 2007-08, knife crime fell by 23 per cent., but my constituents do not believe that, particularly at election time. One issue with knife and gun crime is that the perception of crime is as much a problem as the level of crime. I could not walk through Stoke Newington and convince people that knife crime has fallen by 23 per cent., but it has. However, no matter how low the level of knife crime, it is still too high, particularly because it is a young person’s crime. We have had two fatal stabbings in Hackney so far this year.
Although 10 to 17-year-olds make up only 11 per cent. of Hackney’s population, they are responsible for 28 per cent. of reported crime. Why are young people carrying knives? I have been to schools and youth clubs and asked them why, and have tried to counsel individual young people who are brought to see me by their mothers, and they say that they carry knives to protect themselves. One simple thing that we could do is to go into schools and make them understand that carrying a knife does not protect them, but puts them more at risk, not least because it is a random weapon. A slip of the wrist or of the weapon and what was intended to frighten someone can end in murder.
Politicians have a tendency, and the media more so, to demonise young people involved in street culture, but we must remember that some—I am the parent of a 16-year-old— if not all of them, are quite frightened. They may look scary strutting along with their hoods and glaring menacingly, but they are frightened, and as much as we want to relieve the middle-aged, middle-class electorate from fear, we should consider how we can relieve young people from the fear that causes them to cling to their gangs. For many of them, the gang is their family because of family breakdown in inner cities. Young people who would once have found role models as apprentices in manufacturing industry now find their role models in street gangs. It is no coincidence that some of the centres of gang and gun crime—Brent, Hackney and parts of south London—were centres of manufacturing industry 20 years ago. As manufacturing industry and the possibility of employment for unskilled and semi-skilled males has declined, we have seen the rise of criminality almost filling that vacuum.
I want to stress that some young people, scary as they may look to us, are frightened. I had occasion to take issue with the Home Secretary, who is a wonderful Home Secretary in many ways, for saying that she would be frightened to walk the streets of London. I insisted that middle-aged ladies like me and the Home Secretary are perfectly safe on London’s streets. The people who are genuinely at risk are people of my son’s age.
I live on a street in Dalston in Hackney. At one end is the London Fields gang and at the other is the Holly street gang. I remember some young people at the Holly street end saying that there is nothing to do and when I said that there is a sports centre and a new lido at London Fields park, they replied that they did not dare to walk to that end of the street because it would take them into another gang’s territory. Those areas are less than quarter of a mile apart, and those young people live in fear.
I congratulate the Government on their legislative programme covering gun and knife crime. The Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 raised the legal age for buying a knife from 16 to 18. That was important. It made it illegal to use others to hide or carry a knife intended for unlawful use. It increased the maximum sentence for carrying a weapon in public from two to four years. It allowed teachers to search pupils if they thought that they might be carrying weapons. The Knives Act 1997 prohibited the marketing of knives in a way that suggests that they could be used for combat. It is illegal to carry a knife in public without good reason or lawful excuse, and the stop and search laws mean that the police can stop people if they believe that they are likely to be carrying knives.
I welcome the Government’s legislative changes, and I am not against increased sentencing, which is what people called for, but ultimately it is not legislation, or even doubling or tripling sentences that will make a difference. One thing that will make a difference for both knife and gun crime is certainty of prosecution, so for some time I have tried to stress to Ministers not just the sentencing framework, but the protection that we give to witnesses and the extent to which we build confidence in the community. In many ways, knife crime is like gun crime. In those small networks of young people, it is no secret who has committed the offence, but they are often too terrified to come forward and to be witnesses.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love), I believe that although legislation and law enforcement must be the short-term answer, particularly because we want to build confidence in our communities, we must consider youth services. I have been an MP long enough to have seen during the 1990s the collapse of the youth service as local authorities such as mine came under financial pressure. It was a non-statutory service, so it was easy to cut. A project here and a project there, however lovely, with short-term funding that has to spend the first 12 months setting itself up and the final 12 months looking for other funding to replace its term-limited funding, is no substitute for a stable youth service that knows its community and whose youth workers are out on estates and streets engaging with young people and bringing them to the services and facilities.
Jeremy Corbyn: Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be helpful if there were a statutory requirement for a youth service which was clearly defined with ring-fenced funding accordingly?
Ms Abbott: If we are talking about joined-up government and are concerned about knife and gun crime, the Government should consider making a youth service a statutory provision. It is precisely because it was not statutory that it collapsed in Hackney. It was replaced with many different little projects, but a patchwork of projects with time-limited funding is not the same as a stable youth service that can offer continuity and personal relationships with young people and communities going forward.
As with so many things, education is at the heart of the matter. Young people who become involved in knife and gun crime have almost invariably fallen through the education net. We must focus on educational underachievement, especially of young black men and Asian men. The idea has always been that a colour-blind approach is helpful when talking about deprivation and so on, but what has happened is that despite the money that has been pumped into schools in London and so on, young black men and some recent young male asylum seekers remain at the bottom of the education pile. Starved of any opportunity for self-esteem and pride in themselves within formal education, they look for that self-esteem and pride in the negative culture of the world of gangs.
This is a serious problem. Sadly, people’s fear and perception of the prevalence of the problem is greater than the figures, but that does not mean that we do not have to deal with people’s fears and reassure them. The Government have done a lot through legislation and there may be more that they can do. We need to consider the long-term strategic issues on the provision of youth service and education.
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