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Through the Be Safe programme, 1 million young people will be able to attend workshops over the next five years on the dangers of knives and other weapons. We cannot be the slightest bit complacent, and one knife crime is one too many, but police forces tell us of encouraging signs that knife carrying is falling among
young people, and the statistics on NHS admissions and on crimes committed support that view. Between October and December 2008, there were seven fewer fatal stabbings compared with the same period the previous year.
I completely agree with the reference in the Opposition’s motion to “cross-community co-operation”. Community and voluntary sector organisations have a crucial role to play in tackling knife crime. The motion is right to praise the work of the Damilola Taylor Trust, and I mention in particular Damilola Taylor’s father, Richard Taylor, who was appointed by the Prime Minister in February to be his special envoy on youth violence and knife crime.
Keith Vaz: I am most grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way a second time. We in the Select Committee were very keen to ensure that our report was not a knee-jerk reaction to another tragic death; that is why we took six months to complete it. We have also decided that, at the end of July, we will bring the stakeholders together to consider the report’s conclusions thoughtfully. I am very pleased that the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), has agreed to participate in that seminar, and I hope that the Home Secretary will also find the time to come along and give us his views on the issue—as a way of keeping the issue going and retaining the consensus, which is extremely important. Without the stakeholders working together, no single agency can solve the problem of an increase in knife crime.
Alan Johnson: That is a very important development. Around that time, after the first year of the tackling knives action programme, we will be hosting an event, so perhaps we could combine the two in some way. I shall talk to my right hon. Friend about that.
It has been acknowledged that projects that work with young people and provide peer mentoring, diversionary activities, education and training can help prevent them from becoming offenders. That is why investing in better local services and activities for young people is so important, and, through the youth opportunity fund and the youth capital fund, and schemes such as the myplace programme, we are providing a total of £900 million to improve local services for young people. The best providers of such services are often local and community groups, which have a profound knowledge of the area and the needs of the people with whom they work. Over the next three years, we have specifically earmarked £4.5 million to help up to 150 local groups that are working to tackle knife crime, gun crime, and gang-related activity. We will announce the successful bidders for money from that fund next week.
Alan Johnson: I will give way one final time.
Justine Greening:
On that point, apparently 20 per cent. of volunteers in Britain are male, and 80 per cent. are female. Obviously, many of the issues that we are discussing relate to male role models, or a lack of them. Does the Home Secretary have any views on what we could do to encourage more men in our communities to
get involved and play a role in helping to be role models for young adults—younger males—whom they could probably help with the benefit of their experience?
Alan Johnson: The Minister of State, Home Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), just reminded me about Baroness Neuberger’s report on volunteering. Also, I know from my constituency that every year, in volunteers’ week, a special push is made to get people who do not normally volunteer—sometimes that is men, but it is other groups in our community, too—to realise the benefits of volunteering. There is more that we can do in that regard.
The issue of knife crime among young people is serious, and the motion rightly reflects that fact, but the tackling knives action programme is showing encouraging early signs of success. Through tougher action on those who offend and a greater focus on the causes of knife crime, and through excellent leadership and strong partnerships between the police, schools, social services and community groups, properly organised and adequately funded, I believe that we can address an issue that is rightly seen by the public as absolutely critical to the well-being of our society.
The issue will be one of my major priorities in the coming months. Along with the Secretaries of State for Justice and for Children, Schools and Families, I will host an event in July, as I have said, to discuss the outcomes and experiences of the first year of the tackling knives action programme, and will consider what further steps need to be taken to keep knives off our streets. I commend the Opposition for tabling the motion, and I commend the amendment to the House.
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Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) (LD): I, too, very much welcome the tone and the approach taken by the official Opposition, who have given us an opportunity to discuss this key issue. I also very much welcome the approach taken by the Home Affairs Committee in its attempt to build cross-party consensus, which hopefully can make real progress on the issue. May I also welcome the new Home Secretary to his post? I look forward to lively debate with him in the coming weeks and months, in the hope that I may agree with him on Home Office policy as much as I do on electoral reform.
The official Opposition are absolutely right in their motion: knife crime is one of the most serious problems facing Britain today. The number of children admitted to hospital having been assaulted with knives has gone up by 83 per cent. in five years. That is frankly shocking, but sadly there are no simple solutions, as we have heard; there is, perhaps, consensus across the House on that. We need a response from the education and health services, the police and the criminal justice system, so I was heartened to see the emphasis on cross-community co-operation to address the root causes of knife crime in the motion, and to hear it in the speech of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). That appears to us to be a new emphasis, which we welcome.
There is, however, still a clear distinction between the approach of Liberal Democrat Members on the one hand, and the approach of the Opposition and the Government on the other. That is highlighted in the addendum to the motion that the Government propose.
Those two parties still continuously seek to try to outdo one another by advocating tougher penalties, which in the main serve to criminalise young people. By contrast, we believe that what is needed is an effective system of prevention that tackles the root causes of why people, particularly young people, carry knives, and which is coupled with targeted, intelligence-led, visible policing. We need to reassure young people that they do not need to carry knives for their own safety, and we need the support of the community to catch and convict those who threaten others.
Last year, 43 young people died from stab wounds. Of the 773 homicides in Britain in 2007-08, 270—35 per cent., or a little over a third—were caused by sharp instruments. That is the highest number of knife killings since records began in 1997, and it represents an increase of a third since that year. There was a 48 per cent. increase in stab-related hospital admissions between 1997-98 and 2006-07, and nearly 50,000 people, including 4,510 children, have been treated in hospital for knife wounds since the Government came to power.
Knife crime disproportionately affects young people. Between 2003 and 2007, stab-related hospital admissions for under-16s increased by 63 per cent. The Youth Justice Board’s 2008 MORI youth survey found that 17 per cent. of 11 to 16-year-olds in mainstream education had carried a knife in the previous year; the figure rises to 54 per cent. among young people who have been excluded from school. Some 85 per cent. of young people who carry knives claim that they do so for their own protection.
Those statistics speak for themselves. The toll of knife crime is horrendous and its increasing regularity is rightly fixed in the public consciousness as an overwhelming problem. There can be few more graphic or horrifying thoughts for any parent than that of their child being attacked with a knife. The images that we have seen in the media of the devastation wrought by knife crime over the past few months and years remain a harrowing reminder of the damage that these crimes can do.
The Government have made progress in tackling knife crime, but the problem remains far too large. In the eight months to November 2008, 3,259 people were admitted to hospital in England with stab wounds; that was a fall of 9 per cent. on the same period in the previous year, but it still represents a very substantial level. Furthermore, 604 of the victims were teenagers.
The tentative improvements are welcome, but they are far from being enough. Despite the evident escalation in the problem during the Government’s period in power, Ministers have clearly not given the sustained priority to tackling the problem that it deserves. We had some sense of the issue in the exchange between the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee and the Home Secretary earlier in this debate, but to our continuing amazement Ministers have not fully implemented tactics that have been proven to work dramatically to reduce the problem. I shall come back to that issue in detail.
The effective policing of knife crime is about intelligence-led stop and search. Many people on estates where the problem is most serious know exactly who the menace is, but they are afraid to say. Visible and approachable policing is essential, not just for reassurance—as I said, many young people carry knives because they are afraid, not because they intend to use them—but for intelligence gathering. Metal detecting arches and wands used by
police have helped to tackle knife crime, with outstanding success in areas such as Newham in east London, where I have seen them in operation.
However, one of the most effective means of reducing knife crime has not been rolled out nationally—in part, I suspect, because it needs co-operation between the Department of Health and the Home Office. I am referring to the so-called Cardiff model, which was created six years ago by Professor Jonathan Shepherd, a surgeon in Cardiff. The aim of the model is to improve police effectiveness and reduce emergency department admissions for violent crime-related injuries.
The accident and emergency department collects anonymous data on the precise location and time of the violent incident when patients first attend. Those data are shared by the hospital trust with the crime and disorder reduction partnership. The partnership then produces maps of violent crime, including knife crime, for its area, allowing the police to track violent crime trends and allocate resources to violent crime hot spots accordingly. That proven technique has cut hospital admissions for violence-related attendances by 40 per cent. in Cardiff. That information is from a peer-reviewed study: it is good, hard, solid evidence. In Cardiff’s Home Office family of 15 similar cities, it went from mid-table in 2002 to safest city in May 2007. In a recent study for the think-tank Reform, Cardiff was 51st out of 55 towns and cities with a population of more than 100,000 in terms of incidences of robbery or assault.
In other words, the experiment clearly worked. It began in 2002, and the Department of Health commissioned a paper from Professor Shepherd in 2004. It was updated again, explicitly for the then Health Secretary, who is now Home Secretary, in October 2007. However, a parliamentary question that I tabled both to the Home Office and to the Department of Health in November 2008 revealed that information on hospitals running such a scheme was not centrally collected. I am pleased that the Home Secretary has provided some evidence of progress in rolling out the scheme, but when will all hospitals be applying it and co-operating with their local police services? When, indeed, will all hospitals in TKAP areas be co-operating? My office had to submit a freedom of information request to all English NHS trusts, which revealed that as of today, of 135 relevant trusts that answered my request, only 29 share data in this way—just over 21 per cent.
I am pleased that the Home Affairs Committee has picked up on this point, which I made to it in evidence. At paragraph 39 of its conclusions, it says:
“We were disappointed to learn that this has not been fully implemented throughout England and Wales and recommend that this is done immediately. All agencies within partnerships should have an equal duty to share.”
This should not be a political issue: it is very straightforward. We know that the scheme leads to dramatic falls in cutting knife crime—it is an easy hit—but it has one major snag: it involves two Government Departments working together on a matter of overwhelming priority for the public, and I am afraid that until now they have signally failed to do so.
Alan Johnson:
Will the hon. Gentleman place on record, for the sake of my successor as Health Secretary, that he is saying that we should insist from the centre
that every local acute trust must adopt this system? I say that because I have spent the past two years being lectured by Liberal Democrat Front Benchers about the need to devolve power to the front line and not to engage in central direction.
Chris Huhne: That is an absolutely splendid smokescreen from the former Secretary of State for Health, not least because he knows very well that the only elected person in charge of the national health service is the Secretary of State for Health. I am convinced that if the NHS had accountability to elected people on the lines proposed by the Liberal Democrats the change would have been far more dramatic. People want knife crime to be tackled, and they do not want a load of excuses from one part of Government about not delivering on an objective set by another part of Government.
Keith Vaz: I thank the hon. Gentleman for the evidence that he gave to the Select Committee and the useful comments that he made about Cardiff. I agree with him. Of course it is important that local areas should make decisions on their own, but where, as in this respect, there is a clear-cut case for the sharing of information because it will help other agencies to ensure that knife crime is reduced, it is important that the Government accept that recommendation and implement it.
Chris Huhne: Absolutely. We have had so many examples, over so many years, of this extraordinary Gosplan centralism applied to the NHS and to many other public services, in theory delivering the same standard of service across the country but completely failing to do so because the levers are not connected. Perhaps the former Health Secretary would like to come back to the Dispatch Box to explain why it has taken so long for the Department of Health to deliver on this overwhelming public objective, which, after all, came as an initiative from within the Department—from a surgeon who was fed up with fixing the faces of young people who were damaged by knife crime.
Why has it taken so long? The Government launched the tackling knives action programme in June 2008, part of which was to implement data sharing between hospitals and the police. In none of the nine TKAP areas were all A and E departments sharing data in that way, and in three areas—Essex, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire—no A and E departments shared data. Perhaps the Home Secretary would like to tell us why even the areas that were running the scheme did not apply it. There is such an obvious case for the scheme—for public health reasons and the objective that we all share of tackling knife crime.
Will the Home Secretary also tell us why the TKAP programme, despite its success, ran for less than a year before being incorporated into the Home Office’s violent crime unit? Surely any solution to knife crime must be a long-term commitment, not a flash in the pan and a headline-grabbing gimmick.
Further evidence, if it were needed, that the Government have not taken knife crime seriously in the past is the failure to collect the relevant statistics. The British crime survey started collecting data from under-16s—a significant group, as victims and perpetrators of knife crime—only since January. Police-recorded crime figures
included data specifically on knife crime only from July 2008, even though statistics for hospital admissions show that the problem has been escalating for several years.
The Government have consistently failed, on almost every count, to take opportunities to tackle head on the problem of rising knife crime. Meanwhile, the public debate about tackling knife crime between the Government and the official Opposition still revolves around tougher punishment. We had confirmation of that today. The Conservatives believe that the current system lets people off too lightly and that anyone convicted of possessing a knife should expect a custodial sentence. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) confirmed that in his speech—it was not in the motion. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has said:
“If you are carrying a knife and you are caught, you should expect to go to prison. Plain, simple, clear.”
However, the official Opposition have obviously not done their sums. Based on the annual cost of imprisoning somebody, the number of extra prison places that would be needed and the estimated number of new prisoners as a result of the policy, we calculate that they are looking at a cost of £4.9 billion a year. The policy, from a party that has pledged to cut all sorts of taxes in a recession—corporation tax, inheritance tax, VAT, national insurance temporarily, stamp duty—would be the equivalent of adding a penny on the basic rate of income tax. If the official Opposition would not pay for it through a tax rise, will the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell tell us how they would fund it? He is not attempting to rise to provide some explanation.
Putting the policy’s questionable arithmetic aside, it also ignores the evidence that tougher penalties are far less effective as a deterrent than catching more criminals. A Home Office-commissioned study on sentence severity, which leading criminologists conducted, concluded that there is
“no firm evidence regarding the extent to which raising severities of punishment would enhance deterrence of crime”.
We already lock up more people per head of the population than any other EU country except Luxembourg.
Knife crime is perpetrated primarily by young men, yet the reoffending rate for a young man serving a first custodial sentence is 92 per cent.
David T.C. Davies: I am sure that everyone is getting a sense of déjà vu at such exchanges, but the hon. Gentleman clearly knows that young men serving their first sentence are almost invariably given a short sentence and released less than halfway through it. That is why the reoffending rate is so high. If they were given a meaningful term, they would be much less likely to reoffend.
Chris Huhne: The hon. Gentleman assumes that if something does not work, it will begin to work if there is twice as much of it. A much more common-sense approach is to assume that, if a short sentence given to a young man leads to a 92 per cent. reoffending rate, it would be better to try alternatives, particularly since short sentences are given for relatively trivial offences. There was one thing that I entirely agreed with in the speech by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, which was his point about the need to head young people off—young men in particular—and stop them getting involved in a life of crime.
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