Serious youth violence Contents

6Prevention, early intervention and youth services

Introduction

152.The Government’s commitment to a public health approach suggests that prevention should be the most important aspect of its Serious Violence Strategy. This chapter considers the risk factors for serious youth violence, the role of school exclusion, youth service provision, early intervention, and evidence we received about what sort of services might be most effective at reducing serious violence. We will also look at some of the main funding changes over the last decade, and consider the need for increased investment in public services linked to serious violence.

Risk factors for serious youth violence

153.The Serious Violence Strategy analysed a number of factors influencing whether or not an individual becomes a perpetrator of serious violence. These include:

154.As we touched on in Chapter 1, there is also evidence that serious youth violence is having a disproportionate impact on people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. NHS data shows that 27% of knife crime victims admitted to hospital in 2017/18 were from a Black, Asian or ‘mixed heritage’ background,247 even though they represented approximately 14% of the UK population (this also reflects the concentration of knife crime in metropolitan areas, which are more diverse).248 In addition, 38% of people sentenced to a knife or offensive weapon offence in 2018 were classified as Asian, Black or “other”.249 This indicates that the majority of knife crime offenders and victims are White: a fact emphasised by the journalist Gary Younge in his ‘Beyond The Blade’ series for The Guardian, in which he criticised the media and politicians’ focus on young Black teenagers and drill music.250 Trends in recent years are nevertheless concerning: between 2013–14 and 2017–18, there was a 43% increase in hospital admissions for knife crime among ethnic minority groups, compared with a 17% increase among White people.251

155.Clearly, data on suspected and convicted offenders should be viewed in the context of a complex relationship between race and the criminal justice system (CJS), such as the increased likelihood of being stopped and searched, as well as the treatment and experiences of people from minority ethnic groups in society more widely. David Lammy MP’s 2017 review of race and the criminal justice system noted that “many of the causes of BAME overrepresentation lie outside the CJS, as do the answers to it”:

People from a black background are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than those from a white background. Black children are more than twice as likely to grow up in a lone parent family. Black and Mixed ethnic boys are more likely than White boys to be permanently excluded from school and to be arrested as a teenager. These issues start long before a young man or woman ever enters a plea decision, goes before a magistrate or serves a prison sentence. Although these problems must be addressed, this cannot be done by the justice system alone. Prisons may be walled off from society, but they remain a product of it.252

156.The journalist and commentator Afua Hirsch explored the relationship between race and knife crime in a recent Guardian article, in which she criticised those who depict victims of violence as “gangsta”, and as the result of absent fathers:

[Researchers] have found young people living in an “alternative cognitive landscape” in which you stab first and ask questions later; where distrust of the authorities and hostile strangers results in people—and especially young men—arming themselves and acting in aggressive and threatening ways in order to pre-empt attacks.

It turns out there are many predictors of violent behaviour more relevant than “absent fathers”: weak social ties, an absence of constructive social activities in which to invest energy, antisocial peers, poor experiences at school, psychological problems, high activity levels and poor eating habits. All these factors relate to poverty, the lack of resources, opportunities, or—frankly—any love from the institutions whose job is to protect, stimulate and engage young people.253

157.In his concluding article for the ‘Beyond the Blade’ series, Gary Younge argued that treating knife crime as “a criminal issue that affects black kids in London” can have a number of negative effects, including increased levels of stop and search against Black people. It also “makes people who aren’t black or living in London complacent that their children are not vulnerable”. Instead of drawing on stereotypes, he argued, a public health approach to knife crime must “tackle all the contextual elements—housing, employment, mental health, addiction, abuse, as well as crime—that make some people and communities more vulnerable to it”.254

158.Witnesses also warned us against buying into “stereotypes” such as the “dysfunctional family”, with experts telling us that they have worked with young people from stable homes and two working parents who have been drawn into criminal activity and violence. Professor Harding highlighted that parental absence may be driven by “working two or three jobs in order to put food in the fridge and something on the table”, which can mean that they “don’t see their children for a few days”.255 Dr Carlene Firmin warned that children without obvious vulnerabilities may be “surrounded by peers where there are problematic behaviours”; that young person then “fears for themselves, brings in a knife to school because they are afraid, gets excluded, goes into a pupil referral unit”, and “all of a sudden you have created a situation for that child”.256

159.Nevertheless, many witnesses emphasised the significant risks that can be generated by the environment in which young people live and socialise. One of the Project Future community consultants stressed the importance of the role models available to young people:

[ … ] if they were to wake up in the morning and see businessmen going to work and whatnot, they would not get into it. They are waking up and seeing the sorts of people that we are talking about and drug addicts, so it is in our face [ … ].257

Dr Hannah Stringer, a Project Future psychologist, highlighted that the risk of violence could be linked to a young person’s postcode or housing estate alone: “That young person might not affiliate themselves with any gang at all, but just the fact that they have grown up in an area is enough for them to be seen as a target by another area”.258

160.Chief Constable Dave Thompson argued that the Serious Violence Strategy lacks a “place-based focus”, and pointed to a “strong correlation” between violent offending and deprived communities. We were also told how easy it is for some young people to become affiliated with ‘gangs’ in some areas. Dr Bhandari, who founded Project Future, told us that in the community in which the project operates, “initial chances and the options available to you are really reduced, and becoming involved in a life of crime is normalised”. Her colleague Dr Gore told us that “exploitation is part of the culture” locally, so “you need interventions at multiple levels”.259 Similarly, Professor Harding argued that, for some young people who are surrounded by criminal activity “all the time”, “Stepping into a gang or affiliating with a group of boys who are criminally active is a very small step”.260

161.Using data from University College London, MOPAC has identified that individuals living in top 10% most vulnerable wards in London are six times more likely to become victims of knife crime than the 10% least vulnerable wards. Vulnerability is measured through a number of factors, including average household income, GCSE scores and rates of criminal damage. Gun crime and sexual offences are twice as likely to happen in the most vulnerable wards compared with the least vulnerable.261 A separate analysis published in July showed a very strong association between indices of “Multiple Deprivation”, such as low income and poor health, and the likelihood of being a victim of serious youth violence.262

162.There is very strong evidence linking deprivation and vulnerability with knife crime and serious youth violence. This points to the need for a broad, population-wide approach to prevention, with enhanced interventions to support the communities most at risk of violence.

School exclusion

163.Evidence to this inquiry has emphasised the vulnerability of children expelled from mainstream education, and their potential exposure to criminal exploitation. Junior Smart told us that the “easiest places to recruit” for gangs are outside schools and pupil referral units (PRUs):

The kids that leave school last will be the ones that are often in detention, the ones that are socially excluded. You only have to look at our county lines evaluation work where 100% of the young people who are involved in county lines came from pupil referral units or alternative learning establishments.263

Government figures seen by the BBC reportedly showed that almost a quarter of children in England who said they had carried a knife in the previous year had been expelled or suspended from school, compared with only 3% of children who had not carried a knife.264

164.One of Project Future’s community consultants explained how school exclusion can lead to trouble:

When you are excluded, you are at home and you’re bored. Mum’s gone to work. The rest of your brothers and sisters are at work. What are you going to do with yourself? You want to get up to stuff. So you go out and see what you can do. You might meet someone else who’s been excluded. He’s not up to anything. “Alright, cool, let’s go down the road. Let’s see what we can do.” And that is how it starts.

Dr Bhandari also told us that children who are excluded “hang about and get up to all sorts”:

They are hanging about with what we refer to as gangs, but they are just with their peers, and these are in very deprived areas [which] are really very threat-based environments, so they end up carrying knives for their protection. Then, of course, they get exploited in terms of county lines and so on.265

165.A review of school exclusion by the former Conservative MP and Minister, Edward Timpson, was published in early May, with 30 recommendations for the Department for Education (DfE) and other public bodies. It referred to evidence of “perverse incentives to exclude or off-roll children who might not positively contribute to a school’s performance or finances”. Mr Timpson said that it is “right to recognise exclusion as one indicator, among others, of a higher risk of exposure to and involvement in crime, and we should therefore fully consider the form and content of the education a child receives following exclusions, in efforts to prevent and tackle serious violence”. Analysis conducted for the review found that 85% of all mainstream schools did not expel a single child in 2016/17, but 0.2% of schools expelled more than ten pupils in the same year. Children who have a Child Protection Plan are around 3.5 times more likely to be permanently excluded than those who have not been supported by care services.266

166.The report called for:

167.The review found that Black Caribbean children were around 1.7 times more likely to be excluded than White British children, and mixed White and Black Caribbean children were around 1.6 times more likely to be permanently excluded. These figures are only partly explained by other factors associated with exclusion, and the report suggests that “a range of interwoven, local factors [ … ] rise to these differences”. For example, there were “some cases where cultural misunderstanding led to behaviour being misinterpreted, unconscious low expectations of some children or—in a small number of cases— ‘labelling’ of pupils”.268 Dr Zubaida Haque, Deputy Director of the Runnymede Trust, criticised the Timpson Review for failing to “confront racial disparities in exclusions”, and for “the absence of recommendations on closing the racial disparities in school exclusions”. She suggested a number of actions that could have an impact, such as mandatory training on race equality and exclusions for teachers.269

168.Giving evidence to the Education Committee in July, Edward Timpson said that the “totality of the recommendations” should benefit all children, and pointed to proposed actions that would help address racial disparity, such as tracking children to identify trends, and extending ‘diversity hubs’,270 which offer training and progression to underrepresented groups in the school leadership workforce.271

169.The Children’s Commissioner suggested to us that funding for pupil referral units and other forms of alternative provision would be better spent on support in mainstream schools, pointing out that it costs £33,000 per year to send a child to a PRU. She called for this funding to be directed towards “additional support round the school to keep that child in school”, such as help with communication, speech and language, mental health, and family support: “all the things that that child is going to need to succeed”.272 Evan Jones told us that the PRU model was “originally ‘fix ’em and return ’em’, but now they don’t get fixed and they don’t get returned”. Instead, “They go into PRUs and then they go into young offenders institutions—it is a bit of a one-way street”. He argued that being excluded from school should be a “red flag” for support; it should immediately result in resources being pushed towards that young person, “but sadly that is not what happens”.273 Other witnesses highlighted the risks created by part-time timetables in alternative provision. Lucy Dacey said that these were a “particular bugbear”, because “you have young people with lots of free time on their hands and perpetrators who know that, and there is no support available to them”.274

170.We are concerned about the links between school exclusion and knife crime, which suggest that our education system is currently failing many children, including those most in need of holistic support and early intervention. There is a pressing need for more investment in wraparound support to keep a child in mainstream education. The presence in a child of multiple risk factors for school exclusion should be an instant ‘red flag’ for additional support, and the Government must act quickly to implement the recommendations of the Timpson Review. Providing only part-time timetables in alternative provision is also a very serious failing. Most of those who have been excluded from school are in need of more social, educational and emotional support—not less. They are already more vulnerable to being drawn into exploitation or risky behaviour, and they should not be left to spend even more time on the streets. Urgent action is needed to ensure that they have full-time support.

171.The Timpson Review has been criticised for its lack of recommendations on closing racial disparities in school exclusion, despite evidence that Black children are excluded at a higher rate than White children, even when controlling for other risk factors. Given the links between school exclusion and serious violence, we are particularly concerned about this form of disparity, and do not regard Mr Timpson’s recommendations as sufficient to address it. The Department for Education should take action to tackle racial disproportionality in school exclusion, if necessary via a separate independent review.

Youth service provision

172.Witnesses told us that there had been a reduction in safe spaces for young people to congregate, and to protect them from those who groom them to join gangs. Dr Carlene Firmin said that “the loss of youth services around the country” had resulted in “young people congregating in a range of public spaces where they are exposed to violence”, without access to “any sort of support from youth workers or any other kind of active community guardians who can keep them safe”. Professor Harding concurred that “adults have created unsafe spaces for children”, and Junior Smart agreed with them:

There is a reduction in safe spaces for the young people to hang out and be in the company of an adult or [ … ] informal educator. [ … ] in the closure of those spaces where are the young people going? They are hanging out in the local parks and that is attracting intimidation from local residents and attracting the attention of authorities [ … ].275

173.Our 2018 report, Policing for the Future, criticised the manner in which the police are being left to fill in the gaps left by other public services, arguing that “In too many areas, the police are the only emergency service for those in crisis”.276 This inquiry has heard similar concerns among policing leaders regarding youth service provision, and the lack of early intervention to prevent children from being exploited by criminal gangs, or from entering a life of crime themselves. Chief Constable Dave Thompson said that the notion that the police are going to “solve” this problem by “increasing the stop-search or enforcement activities” is “a million miles away from what this problem is”, adding: “This is about the resilience of children”.277 He later highlighted the cost-shunting that occurs when youth provision is cut:

You can decommission youth, and nobody keeps phoning you up to say, “Can you come out at 11pm? I need a youth worker.” The police service can decommission very little, so [ … ] the demand piece is getting stretched and stretched because of [the] lack of protective factors.278

[ … ] I would look at the particular groups and schools, and I would invest more resourcing into improving the resilience of young people, their families, and their community, in terms of driving up social capital around those young people.279

Cressida Dick also emphasised the importance of upstream interventions. If she was given additional funds for non-policing services, she said, she would target it at “those young people who are already getting sucked in, to give them youth workers out on the street in the places that they are and diversion schemes in hospitals and in custody and in other places”.280

174.Community consultants from Project Future linked the rise in youth violence to a lack of opportunities, as well as cuts to youth services. ‘RN’ told us: “I think it is boredom”:

For me as a teenager, and for most of the kids that I see out there now, there is nothing to do. There is only one Project Future [ … ] and not all people might feel safe going there, because of conflicts they might have, and stuff like that. There are only two active youth clubs running in [***] [ … ], so people have nothing to do at all—they just stand around, and when they get bored, they start getting into trouble. I think they need way more things to do, like apprenticeships and stuff like that.281

He added later: “One thing I’d do is sign some money off for more youth clubs. As clichéd as it sounds, there ain’t none—literally”. His colleague added: “I’d probably have a Project Future in each of the areas that need it”.282 Further information on the Project Future model is outlined below.

175.The community consultants also talked about the value of sport for keeping young people occupied: ‘SC’ told us that he had seen people get involved in criminal activity “when they stopped playing football or doing things that they like”,283 and RN said that sport “brings people together”.284 Commissioner Dick agreed that sport and “adrenaline-filled activities in which you can get out frustrations are very good”, particularly for “young boys”.285 In April, the Conservative Peer and former Chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, Lord Coe, reportedly linked youth service cuts to rises in knife crime. He criticised the Government for failing to recognise the “bloody obvious”: that properly funded activities are “the most potent social worker in any community”, adding: “We’ve strangled the life out of the youth services in this country, yet we are surprised that we have big problems in our inner cities [ … ] Politicians, they still really don’t get that. They don’t understand what sport is doing at community level.”286

176.The Children’s Commissioner also called for investment in youth work, warning that there are “many areas now without any statutory youth services”, despite the “recognition in the public health approach in Glasgow and elsewhere that youth workers are a vital part of that solution”. She emphasised the value of “positive role models” who disrupt and divert young people from negative influences:

There are alternatives to the kind of relationships we have seen some of the most vulnerable kids turning towards in gangs. They want to belong, they want to feel protected and they want to have things to do, but there have not been youth workers there in the numbers or with the kind of skill set needed to be able to divert them to a better place.

[ … ] I would like to see them populating schools after school and during school holidays. I would like to see them in the estates where at the moment no one dares go.287

Her written evidence asserted that “There is an urgent need to re-establish a high-quality, targeted youth service, starting in the areas of the highest risk”.288 The Ben Kinsella Trust also spoke of the importance of role models, stating that “many of the young people we have worked with describe not having role models in their local community who can help them navigate the challenges they face”.289

177.Early intervention and youth service provision was a key priority for the bereaved parents who gave evidence to us in October. Yvonne Lawson, whose son Godwin was killed in 2010, told us that she is “passionate about prevention and intervention”, and pointed out that there is a “correlation between crime and mental health”.290 Darren Laville, whose son Kenichi Phillips was murdered in 2016, also called for more safe spaces and early intervention:

More visible people that are employed to be able to do the work that engages young people early, and that are accessible. It would be about having safe spaces for young people to go to, for me, and the joint working, strategically looking at how we review a lot of our safeguarding within schools and how the notification process with Ofsted considers issues around county lines and youth violence.291

178.Analysis by Committee staff shows that youth services were cut by £800 million between 2010–11 and 2018–19, or £967 million in real terms, and youth justice by £152 million in the same period (£211 million in real terms). Combining these two figures suggest that councils now spend around £1 billion per year less on youth justice and youth services, in real terms, than they did in 2010–11.292 Between 2012 and 2016, more than 600 youth centres closed and almost 139,000 youth service places were lost across the UK.293 In March, it was reported that the number of London youth clubs had halved since the 2011 riots, with over 100 closures.294

179.The Government has announced a series of new youth initiatives aimed at tackling serious violence, including the Early Intervention Youth Fund, the Youth Endowment Fund and the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund, which will be invested in community-backed projects in 21 areas to help families who are vulnerable to the effects of knife crime. Committee staff have estimated that these announcements amount to around £40 million per year in additional funding for youth projects.295 These programmes mostly require community organisations and local authorities to bid for funds, and are considerably smaller-scale than the youth services that have been cut. The Government has also introduced the National Citizens Service (NCS), which provides a three to four week summer programme for young people aged 15–17, some of which is residential, and some follow-up activities—but there has been some criticism that this may have displaced funding for universal youth services elsewhere.296

Community safety teams

180.As well as cuts to youth services, Professor Harding also lamented the loss of community safety teams from local authorities:

[ … ] we have seen the reduction of approximately 50,000 project workers and staff in community safety. I have a background in community safety in Hackney and Islington and as director of community safety in Lambeth. I managed 56 staff, including crime analysts, drugs staff, anti-social behaviour staff, gang workers, project workers. All of that has gone, effectively, and over the past 10 years throughout England and Wales that has largely withered away. In addition to a reduction in police numbers, we have an enormous reduction in staff who once worked on community engagement, partnership working, setting up the projects, multiagency partnerships. That has largely gone.297

181.The LGA undertook a community safety survey of local authorities in England and Wales in 2016. Just over two-thirds (68%) of the local authorities that responded indicated that the number of staff working on community safety had decreased, with the majority of others (24%) indicating that it had stayed about the same, and 9% indicating an increase in staff numbers.298

Effective youth interventions

182.Witnesses to this inquiry were almost united in recognising the value of preventative approaches that seek to diagnose and tackle the root causes of violence, in line with the ‘public health’ approach, and there were strong views about what sort of interventions are the most effective. In line with the evidence outlined above, several witnesses emphasised the importance of focusing on the most deprived areas of the country. Chief Constable Thompson told us that “the much-vaunted public health based approach is often mentioned and rarely understood”, and argued that the strategy “has to be to increase protective factors around young people [ … ] particularly in the most deprived communities”.299 He added later:

You treat a disease where it happens; you fight battles where they are happening. If you concentrate on these places and take a more transformational approach to how services are spread, stuff that is very hard to do on the ground now for policing, we can leverage more from what we have. But do I think there is a capacity problem in those areas? I look at my colleagues in Birmingham City Council; in dealing with a knife crime issue, we are talking about the deployment of maybe 20 youth outreach workers. One million people live in Birmingham, and half of them are under 25. There is a real capacity problem in services.300

183.Some witnesses argued that services need to take better account of the reality of young lives. Carlene Firmin called for preventative activity to support young people to “actively make safe choices in the place they are”, rather than “these abstracted ideas of just saying no, without a recognition of how do you say no when someone is threatening your younger brother or saying they are going to set fire to your house”.301 The Ben Kinsella Trust said in written evidence that young adolescents define their “culture and identity very differently from their parents”, so those delivering interventions must understand that context, and avoid causing “social isolation”.302 One of the Project Future community consultants, RN, told us that mentors were helpful, but “You have to relate to them”:

I couldn’t just sit down in front of someone who is telling me, “[***], you’re being bad; you’re doing this, you’re doing that,” if this person is living a whole different lifestyle to how I live. You ain’t asked me why I’ve been bad. That is what the mentors used to do—ask if you’re in trouble, in the sense of “Do you owe money?”, “Have you eaten today?”. Little things like that. Little questions like that go a very long way.303

184.To ensure their connection with the reality of young people’s lives, the majority of Junior Smart’s team at St Giles Trust have “lived experience”, including previous involvement in gangs and criminality:

[ … ] it is about understanding the reality, the complexity of what is involved in gangs, understanding that it is not as simple as to say to a young person, “Right, don’t carry a knife”, because if they are not carrying a knife they may very well become a victim. It is about talking to young people and saying, “Listen, there is going to be some really difficult choices. The next time you are faced with ops [opposition] where you live, you are going to have to run for it but that will be safer than carrying that knife”. It is understanding and being able to position yourself and understand what is happening for the young people directly where they are coming from.304

185.Alongside those with “lived experience of the issues”, Project Future psychologists also stressed the value of services that employ those with mental health skills, “who are able to think psychologically about why a person might be struggling to engage or to access services, or might be presenting in a certain way”.305 The Youth Violence Commission’s interim report highlighted the economic and emotional cost of failing to address trauma in young people, and recommended that “all professionals who have a statutory responsibility for the safeguarding and wellbeing of young people should be trained in the significance of ACEs, in recognising trauma and in the proper processes for helping a child who is displaying trauma-related behaviour”.306

186.Witnesses were enthusiastic about the value of “detached” youth service provision, in which youth workers are available, in Dr Firmin’s words, “in the places and spaces where young people actually feel unsafe”. She emphasised the value of “guardianship and support in that 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock window” (around school closing times), diminishing opportunities for criminals to “approach them and start grooming them into violence”, because “other people are looking out for them”. This sort of support also needs to be consistent: “people who they know they can go to if things are going wrong”. It is “not an intervention; it is about creating safety for young people in a consistent fashion”.307 Without these services, Junior Smart argued that “to recruit or groom any young person” into criminal activity, such as county lines, is actually “very easy”, because “Any child wants to be seen as an adult”.308

187.Evidence we received also emphasised the value of making young people the masters of their own destinies. Professor Harding said that a “national conversation with young people” is “what seems to be missing” at the moment: young people are “inventive, intelligent, creative and they have the solutions where we do not have the solutions. We simply do not understand the world that they are inhabiting at this point in time”.309 Later, he added: “There are many good children out there who have been pulled into doing bad things. They are salvageable and they are valuable, and we need to act now”.310

188.In April, we met community consultants and psychologists from Project Future, a youth project based in Haringey, North London, and funded by local partners, including the NHS and the local authority. Dr Suchi Bhandari, who launched and leads the project, told us that it provides a “co-production-based approach”, which positions “young people as experts in their own lives”, recognising that they are “resourceful young men with talent”. Project Future works on a peer-referral basis with boys and men aged 11 to 25, who are “usually described as socially-excluded, gang-affiliated and involved in serious youth violence”, with unmet mental health needs and a reluctance to seek help. The work that these young men have done through the project includes art exhibitions, cooking courses and film-making—during our meeting, we had the pleasure of viewing one of their impressive productions. Dr Bhandari told us that the service generates savings for the public purse:

We have found that young people who are engaged in productive and meaningful activities, keeping them off the streets will lead to reduced police arrests, accident and emergency admissions and criminal justice system/prison interventions, which are very costly services. We therefore have created financial savings and efficiencies in the NHS/statutory sector and the charity/voluntary sectors. We work across the whole system, because in our view the system has failed these young people.311

189.The Project Future approach shows some parallels with efforts to regenerate communities in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, to reach socially excluded groups in areas suffering from violence and economic downturn. The Community Infrastructure Measure was an intervention described to us in written evidence from Professor Susan Hodgett from the University of East Anglia, who was involved in its development. It involved 65 funded community-based projects; the Government gathered stories from community-based organisations delivering the projects on the ground, using a 1000-word template which enabled it to capture the opinions of hard-to-reach groups, such as young people and the long-term unemployed. This facilitated the design and development of projects by the communities that used and needed them, such as the Magherafelt Women’s Group, which bought its own premises and became involved in education, training, networking and social activities involving over five hundred women.312 Project Future’s written evidence referred to a “growing evidence base demonstrating the value of co-production”, and called for practitioners to be trained to coproduce services with children and young people.313

190.We welcome the Government’s recognition that it needs to take a public health approach to serious violence, diagnosing and treating the root causes, rather than dealing with the acute outcomes through the criminal justice system and the accident and emergency departments. However, greater thought needs to be given to what sustained and coherent preventative interventions should look like, and how to ensure that public funding is diverted towards the most effective approaches, using data on the populations most at risk. This is linked to the Government’s lack of understanding of the reality on the ground, and its failure to get a grip on this problem at the national level.

191.Clearly, it is far better to treat the cause of an illness or problem than to treat the symptoms. Although there will always be a need for a strong police response to serious violence, any criminal justice intervention is almost always an acute treatment for a deeper and longer-term problem. Nevertheless, the Government cannot just refer to any non-police intervention as the ‘public health’ approach. Its rhetoric does not match the reality of the actual interventions taking place in communities.

192.The current epidemic of youth violence has been exacerbated by a perfect storm emerging from cuts to youth services, heavily reduced police budgets, a growing number of children being excluded from school and taken into care, and a failure of statutory agencies to keep young people safe from exploitation and violence. Young people have been failed in the most devastating way, and they are losing their lives as a result. This country is full of resourceful, intelligent and energetic young people who need empowerment, opportunity, something to strive for, a safe space to spend their free time, and trusted adults to turn to when they need help or advice.

193.Witnesses to this inquiry were almost united in their calls for more youth services, but local authority budgets are being increasingly consumed by statutory services, such as social care. We welcome the Government’s additional funding for youth intervention projects, such as the Youth Endowment Fund and the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund, but these programmes are far too fragmented and small-scale. In addition, it is not at all clear how they fit together, where the strategic responsibility for youth interventions in each area lies, or whether communities and councils will get stuck in an endless bidding process to different departments simply to maintain existing services.

194.The Government needs to introduce a fully-funded, statutory minimum of provision for youth outreach workers and community youth projects in all areas, co-designed with local young people. This would be a national Youth Service Guarantee, with a substantial increase in services and ringfenced funding from central Government. It should include enhanced provision in areas with higher-than-average risk factors linked to serious youth violence, such as under-25 knife crime and school exclusion. It must also be coupled with proper mental health provision for young people, informed by an understanding of the impact of trauma and other adverse childhood experiences.

Public funding for tackling serious youth violence

195.In its submission to this inquiry, the Home Office outlined the range of funding commitments that the Government had made in relation to serious violence, under the heading of “Resources”:

We are providing £40 million of Home Office funding over 2 years to support the initiatives in the Serious Violence Strategy, including £22m Early Intervention Youth Fund, £3.6 million for new National County Lines Co-ordination Centre over two years and over £2.5 million over three years for the (anti-knife) Crime Community Fund. This is in addition to the investment already in place and being provided through previously announced commitments, including £13 million for the Home Office Trusted Relationships Fund; £920 million for MHCLG’s Troubled Families Programme (2015–2020); £7 million of Police Transformation Funding for Wales Police work on Adverse Childhood Experiences; £40 million for the Youth Investment Fund from DCMS and Big Lottery Fund.

The Home Office also referred us to the recent police settlement and rising police precept, as well as the significant investment of £1.26 billion a year in the National Citizen Service.

196.However, this funding comes against a backdrop of overall cuts to policing, youth services and local authority funding. Analysis by Committee staff set out in Chapter 5, along with figures provided earlier in this chapter, show a substantial overall reduction in police funding of £1.86 billion in real terms since 2010, along with £1 billion in real terms cuts to youth service and youth justice funding. Local authority funding overall has also reduced. The NAO’s latest assessment found that councils’ spending power fell by 29% in real terms between 2010 and 2018, following central Government funding reductions of almost 50%, and in the context of rising national insurance contributions and the National Living Wage.314 The Government has emphasised to us that the majority of central Government funding to local authorities is not ringfenced, so it is “for local authorities to determine how to spend their non ring-fenced income on the services they provide, including services for children”.315 However, Councillor Simon Blackburn highlighted that spending on many statutory services has increased due to higher levels of demand, so “it is everything else that has been squeezed”, including youth clubs and youth workers.316

197.NAO figures also confirm that councils have experienced a growth in demand for many key services: between 2010–11 and 2016–17, the number of households entitled to temporary accommodation increased by 34%, the number of looked-after children grew by 11%; and the estimated number of over-65s in need of care increased by 14%.317 Chief Constable Dave Thompson expressed particular concern about the funding formula for local authorities: he said that “Every time I look at violence, it is about deprivation”, but there is a “lack of capacity” in many areas: “Children’s services are often running at a critical level, and the Early Help offer is getting stretched in those [deprived] areas”.318

198.We heard compelling evidence about the cost/benefit ratio of investment in early intervention. Junior Smart highlighted that cutting back on public services is “creating a cost-heavy service later on, a heavier burden for the police, for example”, because “they are getting called out for quite a lot of mental health issues now”.319 One way in which local authorities are trying to mitigate risk is by moving children involved in violence or county lines to other parts of the country. As well as creating data-sharing and safeguarding problems, Carlene Firmin told us that this costs “thousands of pounds every year for every child that is moved”, which could be reinvested in services that work.320 Chief Constable Thompson also suggested that “Plenty of the money Government spend could be bent around this problem without it always necessarily being new money”,321 and Evan Jones and Vicky Foxcroft MP pointed to the problems generated by separate budgets held by different partners at a local level. Mr Jones said:

What we have found is that when the cost and the potential for paying out are within the same budget envelope, it is easier to make a case to a local authority for spending to save, but sadly, because so many budgets are separate, one organisation [ … ] think[s] that they are saving money, and they cause massive problems to other organisations, as well as to that family. So yes, I think there is a massive problem around the way budgets influence behaviour here.322

Vicky Foxcroft delivered a similar message at a later session, arguing that “the money should follow the issue, rather than each department being its own silo with their own budget”.323

199.Given the scale of the problem we face in relation to serious youth violence, we are concerned that public services do not have the resources that they need in order to address it. Recent spending commitments have been fragmented and are not based on an evidence-based understanding of where investment is needed most. In the context of a decade of reductions to police and youth service funding, current levels of Government investment in tackling serious violence are completely inadequate, and do not even begin to match the scale of the problem. Funding announcements have been piecemeal and far too short-term: spending needs to be committed over a three to five year period, to allow for proper planning and frontloaded investment where necessary.

200.Over the last decade, many of the ties that bind communities together have been severed, from youth workers and neighbourhood police officers to community safety teams and safer schools officers. Local authority finances are being increasingly consumed by statutory services such as social care, housing and looked-after children, and council budgets will not benefit directly from savings to the criminal justice system and the health service. The Government must ensure that additional funding is made available to invest in effective activity to reduce serious violence. It needs to recognise that prevention is a far more cost-effective alternative to spending so much money on reactive and acute responses later on, which cost the taxpayer far more in the long term.

201.This report has set out what structures and reporting mechanisms are needed to drive change rapidly, at a national and local level. We have outlined what the Government needs to do to get a grip on this situation. We have focused on the factors most likely to be driving the increase in serious youth violence, including drug use, deprivation, social and school exclusion, and a lack of support services for young people. We have argued for more support for neighbourhood policing and for shifting investment into the early intervention services that need it most, and that have the best chance of turning this terrible tide. We do not need to wait years for this to change: with serious action now, young lives can be saved.


243 e.g. NPCC CYP Portfolio (SVC0019), Standing Committee for Youth Justice (SVC0031)

244 HM Government, Serious Violence Strategy, April 2018

245 HM Government, Serious Violence Strategy, April 2018

246 HM Government, Serious Violence Strategy, April 2018

249 Ministry of Justice Official Statistics, Pivot table analytical tool for previous knife and offensive weapon offences, 14 March 2019

252 The Lammy Review: An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System, September 2017

253 The Guardian (Afua Hirsch), Rod Liddle is wrong about the causes of black teenage deaths, 15 January 2019

266 Timpson Review of School Exclusion (CM92), May 2019

267 Timpson Review of School Exclusion (CM92), May 2019

268 Timpson Review of School Exclusion (CM92), May 2019

269 Tes (Dr Zubaida Haque), Timpson Review: where was the acknowledgment of race?, 13 May 2019

270 House of Commons Education Committee, Oral evidence: Accountability hearings – 2 July 2019, HC 341

271 Timpson Review of School Exclusion (CM92), May 2019

276 Home Affairs Committee, Policing for the future (HC 515), 25 October 2018

288 Children’s Commissioner for England (SVC0054)

289 The Ben Kinsella Trust (SVC0057)

292 Excluding any funding they receive from other streams, such as the Troubled Families programme.

293 The Local Government Association (SVC0028)

295 This figure encompasses the Youth Endowment Fund, the Early Intervention Youth Fund, the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund and the Trusted Relationships Fund, assuming that they are allocated evenly throughout their designated funding periods.

298 Local Government Association, Community safety survey 2016, December 2016

302 The Ben Kinsella Trust (SVC0057)

306 The Youth Violence Commission, Interim Report, July 2018

312 Professor Susan Hodgett (SVC0056)

313 Project Future (SVC0032)

314 National Audit Office, Financial sustainability of local authorities 2018 (HC834), 8 March 2018

315 Home Office (SVC0058)

317 National Audit Office, Financial sustainability of local authorities 2018 (HC834), 8 March 2018




Published: 31 July 2019