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Crime and Security Bill

I shall be brief so as not to labour the point. We accepted in Committee that in some circumstances gang injunctions can be useful for tackling adults involved in gang-related violence, and we supported the Government on the Policing and Crime Bill last year on the basis that such injunctions would not be applied to children. However, that commitment has been broken in this Bill and we cannot support their use on children. The penalties for breach of the injunctions are draconian and they blur the line between civil and criminal law for children in a dangerous way. The proposals do nothing to address why children are in gangs or how to help children get out of them. Instead, they add to the criminalisation of children. Gun and knife crime need to be tackled using intelligence-led policing, hot-spot policing, which we discussed earlier, using accident and emergency data, and better use of intelligence-led stop and search. Although I understand the purpose of the official Opposition's amendments, and that they are trying to make a Government proposal more palatable by introducing the new clause, we are not in favour of the powers being used on children, so we will not support it even though it is clearly well intentioned and aims to make the provisions work better.