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Knife Crime

I very much agree with the hon. Lady and congratulate her on her excellent sound effects earlier in the debate. I certainly agree that criminalising a generation of young people who have become involved in knife crime, rather than addressing the reason why they become involved—exclusion from school, fear, peer pressure, gang membership, social deprivation and poverty or family breakdown, to name but a few—does the young people of this country a great disservice. What we need, in addition to more effective stop and search and the wider implementation of the Cardiff model, is an end to the blanket criminalisation of young people. Of course those convicted of serious and violent crimes need to be dealt with proportionately, but we need to stop young people from turning to crime in the first place and help those who stray into it to get back on the right track. Preventive programmes, such as a youth volunteer force, should be created to give kids something to do and to provide skills for later life. There should be more youth facilities to stop the devil making work for idle hands. There should also be more dedicated youth workers in safer neighbourhood teams and an effort by schools not only to identify kids at risk of being sucked into gangs at a young age, but to contact and enrol their parents in the fight to stop that from happening. For those who are beginning to commit low-level offences, acceptable behaviour contracts and positive behaviour orders should be used, which, unlike antisocial behaviour orders and curfews, require offenders to take responsibility for making amends for their actions without criminalising them unnecessarily. Custodial sentences are of course necessary for serious and serial criminals, but they should be the last resort, not the first. That is a major point of difference between us and the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, who talked about the presumption of a custodial sentence for carrying a knife. It is already possible to send someone to jail for four years for carrying a knife, but we cannot punish anyone unless we catch them first. What is needed to tackle knife crime is a lot less posturing about punishments and a lot more catching criminals by using the obvious tools that we have to hand. Labour cannot change its policies and the Conservatives have barely scratched the surface of what needs to be done.