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Martin Salter (Reading, West) (Lab): It has been a pleasure to serve, with colleagues from both sides of the House, on the Select Committee. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, as we recognised in our deliberations, there is a danger of demonising all gangs, and that gangs per se do not lead to an increase in knife crime? Instead, what happens is entirely dependent on the activities of the gang, and on whether a knife has become almost a fashion icon, before moving on to become something much more insidious and dangerous.
Keith Vaz: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to him because the Committee was initially keen to produce a quick study and report on knife crime following a recent spate of knife attacks in London, but he said that the report needed to be much longer and more in-depth, and should examine a wide variety of issues.
What my hon. Friend says about gang-related violence is right. We are not here to demonise gangs. I am sure that the Scouts would not want to regard themselves as a gang. You may well have been a scout, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not one, but I know that the hon. Member for Colchester was. The Scouts gave evidence to the Committee, telling us that it is important to provide purposeful activities for young men—and, in the context of the Girl Guides, for young girls—to undertake.
In conclusion, the top few things that I would like the Government to do—the new Minister may announce all this at the Dispatch Box in his reply; who knows?—are as follows: ensure better data sharing about knife violence at a local level; implement the Select Committee’s domestic violence recommendations from 2008; ban violent video games and DVDs in young offender institutions; and provide early intervention. Those are just four of the points that the Committee made in its detailed report.
I would also like better activities to be provided for young people to ensure that they are engaged in constructive, rather than destructive, activities. The Committee looks forward to the Government’s response; we know that we published our report only last week, but I am sure that the Minister will respond within the due time. We will continue this conversation with the Government and we want to continue it with the Opposition too, because only by working together can we have a set of policies to which all stakeholders will be able to sign up. Let us keep the party politics out of this and ensure that the House of Commons is united in dealing with this terrible form of crime.
5.21 pm
Mr. Humfrey Malins (Woking) (Con): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) on the way in which he introduced this motion from the Front Bench in a very thoughtful speech. I also thought that the Home Secretary’s first foray from the Dispatch Box in his new role was very thoughtful. He is clearly concerned and interested, and he listens to arguments. I look forward to his period as Home Secretary, although I hope it is not as long as perhaps he hopes it will be.
I also congratulate the Select Committee on Home Affairs, whose report I read with interest. I should say how much I agreed when the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) said, at the end of his
contribution, words to the effect that the House should try to unite on some of these difficult issues and put its best constructive views.
I have spoken about crime and knife crime for what seems like many hours in this Chamber over the past few years. I have spoken in Committee for what seems like many days or many weeks on the same subject; I well remember the Violent Crime Reduction Bill being discussed, day after day, in Committee in 2005, and knife crime featured heavily in our debates. I managed to obtain figures showing that at that time some 60,000 children in our country admitted to carrying a knife, for either defensive or offensive purposes—a truly horrifying statistic.
I have also spoken in this Chamber about the very real fear that I have seen on the faces of witnesses in court who are forced to relive a moment of terror when a knife was waved at them; it is a truly horrifying experience. All through these years I have wondered what we can do to reduce this awful crime, which puts so much fear into so many people and which blights so many of our inner-city areas. I was, therefore, pleased to see that the motion talks about tackling the problem and about solutions.
May I be forgiven for putting forward some of my own solutions to the House for a few minutes? They apply not only to knife crime, but to crime in general and to young people in particular—mostly it is young men who carry knives. I shall start with a statistic and ask whether we are getting value for money.
Let us assume that we put a young man away in Feltham remand centre for carrying a knife. The average cost of a place in a young offenders institution is £32,800 a year—a lot of money.
David T.C. Davies: Would my hon. Friend not acknowledge that the net cost to the taxpayer is considerably less than that, because that young man would probably be on benefits anyway?
Mr. Malins: My hon. Friend makes his own point. Given net and gross costs, maybe so, but I simply remark on the fact that while that young man is in the young offenders institution, it costs the taxpayer £32,800 a year to look after him.
David T.C. Davies: Perhaps I did not get the point across. It is obviously not costing the taxpayer that much, because the taxpayer is not paying for him to receive benefits while he is in prison.
Mr. Malins: Yes, and of course my hon. Friend may say that while the young man is in custody, he is not committing crimes outside. I much look forward to hearing his speech on that point. I merely point out that Government figures show that £32,800 is the average cost. Yet we know that when the young man comes out, he will offend. There is a 70 to 80 per cent. chance of his reoffending four or five times officially, and perhaps 25 to 30 times in fact, in one year. My first question, therefore, is whether we are getting value for money from our young offender custodial estate, and my answer is no.
Let us go back to the time before that young man was put into the custodial estate. Who is he? Where is he from? What is the problem? I have come to the conclusion
that there is a great link between crime and school exclusion, and between school exclusion and literacy. An important inspection report in 2004 told us that 83 per cent. of boys under 18 in custody had been excluded from school, and 50 per cent. had been excluded permanently. Why? It was because they had behaved badly. In my judgment—I believe that others share this view—there is a link with literacy. A young man may fall behind in class and begin to behave badly. He cannot keep up, and his behaviour gets worse. He begins to truant, perhaps partly because of the fear of being called stupid or because of embarrassment. He is behind, he is out of school and he has huge literacy problems.
Let us step forward a bit. I have done a trawl around a number of young offenders institutions in the past 12 months, and person after person who runs these places tells me that 80 per cent. of their youngsters aged 15 have the literacy and numeracy levels of an eight-year-old. That is not good news. Although it is not a rule right across the board, there is a link between that and the youngster who gets on badly at school and cannot keep up. He starts to behave badly, has very low literacy and numeracy levels, plays truant, gets excluded, gets permanently excluded, goes out and joins a gang, and does not want to go back to school because he is frightened and embarrassed. It starts off with literacy, which is a big problem.
When I look at our young offenders institutions, I ask, “Well, what are doing about it there? What is actually going on?” Are the youngsters in those institutions getting 20 hours a week of education? No, they are not. Government figures show that at Feltham, they get seven hours’ education a week. At Rochester, they get three and a half hours, and at Reading five hours. It is just not enough.
Martin Salter: The hon. Gentleman mentioned Reading and touched on a particular cause of mine, which is the causal link between illiteracy and reoffending. Does he agree that our current reoffending rates are nothing short of a national disgrace? Some 70 per cent. of youngsters on a first-time custodial sentence in young offenders institutions will reoffend within two years. It is utterly ridiculous for the first period of internment to be short and without training.
Mr. Malins: The consensual atmosphere of this debate comes through again, and the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.
What would I want to happen to that young man who entered a young offenders institution aged 15 or 16? First, I would make a thorough assessment of his literacy and numeracy abilities. An individual plan would be drawn up for him. If, as is probable, he had been statemented earlier in his life, the statement would form part of his papers on admission and would be acted on. I would also ensure, if possible, that he had proper literacy and numeracy education for 25 hours a week, and I would make that compulsory for under-16s in custody.
I am very depressed by Government statistics that tell me that in fact our young man would be locked up for 16 or 17 hours a day out of 24. What kind of a world is this? That means that he is out of his cell for seven hours a day, maximum. How much sport would he play in that
time? Never mind pumping weights in the gym for a couple of hours—as has been pointed out, that just makes them stronger and fitter and able to run away faster. Where the devil do team sports come into the picture? I am old-fashioned—I cannot help it—and I believe in team sports. They create self-discipline and teach people to win or lose and to take a knock. I have seen young men playing rugby at Feltham and it has been like a breath of fresh air to see how it improves their characters. Team sport is very good for them, as is pursuing the Duke of Edinburgh awards, but hardly any of that happens in our young offenders institutions. Team sport is a terrific thing to do for a young person and their self-esteem and confidence.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points. In north-east Lincolnshire, some excellent work is being done with young men, in getting them to play football, and with young women, getting them into street dancing. This is being done before they offend. Does he agree that such work should be extended across the country so that we can get people to work co-operatively and make use of their energies before they are ever arrested?
Mr. Malins: The hon. Lady makes a good point and I support what she says.
Now I come to a revolutionary idea. I do not think that it is mine—I would be very surprised if it were—and I must have heard it somewhere. In any event, I have written about it and published work on it. I think that sending a young person into custody for anything less than eight months is a total waste of time. I have spoken to many judges about this, and my view is that there is no point in putting a young man into a young offenders institution for anything less than 12 months. If he is in there for only five, six or seven weeks, he lies low, joins a gang, does not do much, comes out and goes straight back where he came from. If the offence is not serious enough to merit 12 months in custody, it should be dealt with in the community. Only in a period of nine to 12 months can we really do some good and turn that young person around.
Paul Holmes (Chesterfield) (LD): I am pleasantly surprised to say that I agree with every word that the hon. Gentleman says, given our previous exchanges in a debate on drugs and alcohol when we did not agree on everything. Does he agree that if we adopted the policy that short sentences should be served in the community, it would relieve some of the pressure on prisons and we could have more training and education in them? In the last Parliament, the Education and Skills Committee’s report on prison education found that all the good intentions in adult and young offender institutions were being destroyed because there were not enough prison officers to take people from cells to training areas, and there were so few hours available it was meaningless.
Mr. Malins: Another way of saying that is that if young offenders institutions are going to do real good—there is no point in having one if they are not going to do good—they should do good not just for three or four weeks but all the way through a proper-length sentence.
What about the last three months of the sentence? First, where is the emphasis on resettlement? We should have resettlement wings in all our young offenders institutions into which people who are about to leave
them should move. The emphasis should be on preparing them and the outside for when they come out. These wings should get the family, the housing and the job ready and should deal with resettlement. There is just not enough emphasis on resettlement.
I commend the intensive fostering programme, which takes place in Hampshire, I think. Families take young offenders on remand as an alternative to custody. I would not mind seeing that extended to young offenders who leave custody. If they leave the custody estate and go back into exactly the same circumstances they were in—where the home and the scene are miserable, where there is no job and where there is no education—they have had it. It is as simple as that. There is not a cat in hell’s chance that they will stay straight. Where is the huge emphasis that we must have on proper resettlement so that people go back into education, get themselves into a job and, possibly, get themselves away from the communities in which they have lived so far?
Finally, where are the mentors? Gosh, we should have more mentors in life. I would love to see those in their last three months in a custodial estate for young people being given a permanent mentor who came to see them once a week, tried to help them get a job, filled out their CV and went to interviews with them. We have to make our young offenders institutions places that give a real chance to young people to reform themselves and in every respect to come out better than when they went in. We want them to come out with many more chances than when they went in—chances in education, jobs and hope. Only if we focus on those areas, in my judgment, will we ultimately reduce the incidence of crime among young people and, in particular, the incidence of knife crime.
5.37 pm
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes) (Lab): I appreciate the tone in which the debate has been conducted. It has been very consensual, and that is a refreshing change from some of the partisan debates about crime that we have had in the past, and in which there has been too much point scoring.
My speech today will not be long. I will focus, in particular, on one recent case, which was briefly mentioned by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, and that is the death this week of Claire Wilson in Grimsby. On Sunday afternoon, 21-year-old Claire was walking to work at the Pizza Hut in the centre of Grimsby. She was just doing what people often do. Apparently, she was followed for a short while, and she was stabbed to death in what appears to have been a random attack. Claire lost her life, as did her unborn child—she was seven months pregnant and very excited about the prospect of becoming a mum. Her fiancé, Adam, was also excited.
That case is one of the saddest that I have had to deal with in my years as an MP. It is so, so senseless and shows the sheer horribleness of knife crime. A young woman has lost her life, and the life of her unborn child could not be saved. Her family, friends and neighbours are devastated. The nature of this crime has affected the entire communities of Grimsby and Cleethorpes. A 53-year-old man has been arrested.
Knife crime is not confined to young people. Gang culture and the attempt to stop the arms race among young people are very serious issues, but the case that I have cited shows that knife crime is not committed only by the young.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton, North) (Lab): I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I merely wanted to say that another horrific case happened in my constituency in Luton a year or two back when John Henry, a policeman, was killed. However, from what my hon. Friend has said, it seems that the person involved in the case to which she has referred was not involved in youth gang culture. Instead, he may have been seriously mentally disordered, because—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I think that we are going into dangerous territory here. We cannot have a discussion about a particular case, so I counsel the hon. Lady to keep more to generalities.
Shona McIsaac: I appreciate your advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not about to go into details about that particular case. Now that a person has been charged with the crime, I realise that we have to be very careful about how we discuss the nature—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I was fearful that she was going to be tempted down the wrong road by the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins).
Ms Abbott: It has happened before.
Shona McIsaac: Yes, it has happened before.
My constituents are understandably very shocked and saddened by this crime. As I was about to say, it horrifically echoes another case that happened in a nearby constituency. Tina Stevenson was murdered in Hull some four years ago as she walked home from antenatal classes, and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) mentioned a similar case in his constituency. When we are dealing with knife crime, we have to look beyond young people and take account of the danger posed by other people using knives on our streets.
People in my community are in a state of shock, and they need to be reassured that the criminal justice system will not let Claire and her family down. Because of this crime, the mood in Grimsby and Cleethorpes is that residents feel that their towns have become lawless. They also feel that they cannot go out: the randomness of the attack means that everyone is more fearful of becoming a victim of crime. That has wiped out a lot of the good work that the police have done in tackling volume crime and antisocial behaviour. Sadly, it has wound the clock back on people’s fear of crime, which is often out of kilter with the likelihood of their becoming a victim.
I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson) is the Minister of State who is here listening to the debate, as he is familiar with the justice system. There is certainly a mood among people at the moment that sentences for knife crimes are far too low. I realise that progress has been made, but people certainly feel that knife crimes are not taken seriously enough.
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