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Policing in London

I do not dispute that, nationally as well as in London, crimes by young people on other young people are the hardest elements to shift. I shall say more about that later, but the record of the Metropolitan police in respect of street robbery initiatives is as good, if not better, than any other force. None the less, the matter remains very difficult: in every set of quarterly crime statistics, the number of such crimes seems always to rise, or at least not to fall as much as other categories. However, I do not believe that crimes by young people on other young people can be resolved by yet another piece of legislation, and I would say that the same is true about crimes involving guns, knives and gangs more generally. After the latest horrendous round of crimes involving guns and knives in London, we made it very clear that we will do what is necessary in terms of legislation, but that our approach needs to be broader. We must look at how we do what we do, how we engage with young people and how we can work with communities to ensure that such crimes do not happen. We need to get it through to people that carrying knives is not clever or brave, or even terribly useful for purposes of defence, and that gun crime should be outlawed. We also need to understand the consequences of the successes that we manage to achieve. For example, it is well known that the Trident programme in respect of gun crime in the black communities across London has been enormously successful. Now we have to consider whether our success with getting guns away from adults has led to even younger people getting hold of firearms and using them. I am not sure about that, but investigations are in hand. However, we must get the whole of society fully engaged in tackling knife and gun crime, and in tackling the crimes that young people commit against each other. The theft of mobile phones, iPods, MP3 players and the other things that people in our acquisitive society carry around with them is a key element, but there is more to it than that. The hon. Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway) is right to say that we have still to crack all the problems of street robbery and the violent and non-violent crimes perpetrated by young people against each other. However, those are problems that need to be addressed collectively, with contributions from people in education and other disciplines. Some formidable initiatives doing precisely that are being taken in boroughs across London run by all parties. A range of voluntary and community organisations funded by the Government are doing a huge amount of work to assist in that goal, and the police are looking at the matter in much more detail.