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Knife Crime

I welcome my hon. Friend's contribution, and pay tribute to his service in the Government as well. Knife amnesties have played an important part, and they are one of the tools that we can use to raise awareness of the need to tackle knife crime and to provide opportunities for some of the very dangerous weapons that can be found in households to be presented to an appropriate authority for disposal. When I was a Northern Ireland Minister several years ago, we had knife amnesties and took some very difficult weapons into proper police care. The same can apply elsewhere. That is an important strategy, and we need to consider it. The issues raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East and the report that his Committee has produced have made extremely useful contributions to the debate. Obviously, he will not expect the Government to respond to the report tonight. We will have to consider it in detail. In his speech, he mentioned culture, enforcement, family, violent video games and the use of custody. Those are important issues, not just for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the Home Office but for the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the National Assembly for Wales in relation to education, and for the Ministry of Justice in regard to the responsibilities of the Youth Justice Board. I hope that the House will make no mistake: the Government are committed to tackling these issues in a detailed and effective way, especially in the light of the tragic case of this week's knife crime incident involving Claire Wilson, which was brought to our attention by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes. That case, and the meetings that I have had with victims of knife crime, bring home the real and tragic impact of such events. We need to focus on the issues that have been mentioned in the debate, as does the report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East and his Committee. We have put in place the youth crime action plan, which has been given an additional £100 million of new money to tackle some of these long-term issues in the community. We are also focusing on the knife crime action plan, and on prevention, intervention, enforcement and education. Given what the Government have tried to do through those programmes over the past couple of years, I hope that the House will share our aspiration to tackle these problems effectively. The knife crime action plan initially put £7 million into 13 areas—that has now been extended to 16 areas—to have a serious impact on high levels of knife crime and to tackle the issues that we have discussed today. The plan includes the use of stop and search and of search wands to detect illicitly carried knives. It also involves extra policing positively to deal with these issues. This is about partnership. The plan also involves raising awareness, and encouraging schools to undertake wider education programmes. Only this morning, I visited Croydon, where I looked at a reparation scheme, visited a local school and met local community support and police officers who are undertaking alternative activities such as evening football clubs. They are trying to provide alternative activities to divert young people from falling into crime. We now have 5,300 safer school police patrols, and extra money is going into family intervention. Money is also going into Friday and Saturday night activities under the knife crime schemes and the youth crime action plan. Thanks to work done by my predecessor and other colleagues, £3 million is going into advertising campaigns, because it has been found that showing young people the consequences of knife crime has given rise to a greater awareness among 73 per cent. of 11 to 16-year-olds. Through the sterling work of the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth, we now have great support from retailers who are signing up to not selling knives to under-18s, and we are working on online knife crime activity and looking at schemes such as the knife amnesties that my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, East just mentioned. There have been 200,000 stop and searches in one year, which discovered 3,500 knives and gave an element of enforcement at the same time. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh that we need to improve our data sharing. We strongly support the Cardiff model; Jonathan Shepherd came to the knife crime action steering group earlier this year. Already, 45 hospitals in the tackling knife crime action plan areas are sharing data—twice as many as only a year ago. We are also putting hundreds of thousands of pounds into the Department of Health and the Home Office to train NHS staff and the police to share data. The hon. Member for Woking mentioned literacy and numeracy. We have talked about these vital subjects on many occasions. Education, training, sport and purposeful activity in custody provide the route to preventing reoffending. There is agreement that short-term sentences are not the most productive use of custody for individuals in our community, and we are now working on the intensive fostering projects that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and on the use of alternative community penalties. Later this year, a new reparation order will come on stream through the Ministry of Justice, providing another step before custody needs to be considered. There is general agreement among Members—with the honourable exception of the hon. Member for Monmouth, with whom we often disagree on these matters—that alternatives to custody are important. We need to look at partnership working, and to work with not only the police but youth offender teams, local councils and the voluntary sector—as mentioned by the hon. Member for Putney—when dealing with these issues. We also need to look at sentencing. Under this Labour Government, more people are being caught, more people are being sentenced, and more people are receiving longer sentences. We have seen the doubling of the maximum sentence for the possession of knives and an increase in the minimum age for buying a knife from 16 to 18. People are now 55 per cent. more likely to go to prison for these offences than they were last year. The number of offences resulting in immediate custody has gone up by 23 per cent., and the average immediate custodial sentence has risen from 133 days to 184 days during that period. The outcomes mean that we have secured a 22 per cent. fall in knife-crime hospital admissions for teenagers. We have a culture of change, and we have had fewer deaths so far this year than last year. Those are all objectives that the House shares. I commend the Government's work and I thank the Opposition for their constructive approach. I give a commitment on behalf of this ministerial team that we will continue to press hard with our Education and Justice colleagues to ensure that we drive down the incidence of knife crime and, ultimately, the deaths resulting from it. Question, That the amendment be made, put and agreed to. Main Question, as amended, put and agreed to. Resolved,"That this House believes that teenage knife crime and the increased incidence of carrying knives in many communities is one of the most critical social and law and order issues facing the country; welcomes the contribution made by the Home Affairs Select Committee in its Seventh Report, Session 2008-09, on Knife Crime, published 5 on 2 June 2009; commends the work done by voluntary sector organisations like the Damilola Taylor Trust to tackle the problem; and expresses the belief that the solution to knife crime will only come from cross-community co-operation to address its root causes; further recognises that tougher penalties are being implemented against those who commit knife crimes, including a rise in the proportion of those caught carrying knives getting custodial sentences; supports the expectation to prosecute for knife possession and doubling of the maximum sentence for carrying a knife in public from two to four years; recognises that the Government has backed tough police enforcement action in the Tackling Knives Action Programme areas, including increased use of stop and search, noting that there were nearly 200,000 stop and searches, resulting in the recovery of over 3,500 knives, between June 2008 and March 2009; welcomes the additional investment going to providing targeted youth activity, including on Friday and Saturday nights; and welcomes recent provisional NHS figures showing a reduction in hospital admissions of teenagers following assaults by sharp objects."