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Knife Crime

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.