Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Serious violence, HC 1016
Tuesday 19 March 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 March 2019.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Rehman Chishti; Chris Green; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; John Woodcock.
Questions 179–235
Witnesses
I: Dr Carlene Firmin MBE, Principal Research Fellow, University of Bedfordshire; Dr Simon Harding, Associate Professor in Criminology, University of West London; Junior Smart, Business Development Manager, St Giles Trust
II: Sir Denis O’Conor CBE QPM, former Chief Inspector of Constabulary
Examination of witnesses
Dr Carlene Firmin, Dr Simon Harding and Junior Smart
Q179 Chair: I welcome our panel to the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into serious violence. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Would you introduce yourselves, very briefly?
Dr Firmin: I am Carlene Firmin, Principal Research Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire.
Dr Harding: Good morning. I am Professor Simon Harding. I am a Professor in Criminology at the University of West London.
Junior Smart: Good morning. My name is Junior Smart, Founder and Business Development Manager of the SOS Gangs project at St Giles Trust.
Q180 Chair: Thank you very much for joining us. Could we start by asking you to give us a sense of what you see as being the key factors that lie behind the increase in serious violence that we have seen over the past few years?
Dr Firmin: What we have heard over the past couple of weeks is some very helpful input into this debate that articulates that there is a number of intersecting factors that we need to consider.
One of the primary ones is the lack of available resource to respond and support young people, which has been developing over time, particularly the loss of youth services around the country, which impacts the amount of available safe space for young people in the areas. We work within the Contextual Safeguarding project and we hear of young people congregating in a range of public spaces where they are exposed to violence without access to any sort of support from youth workers or any other kind of active community guardians who can keep them safe and a lack of other organised spaces in which they can spend their time. This is combined with cuts to local authority budgets over recent time and the struggle that they are experiencing to adequately safeguard young people and put in the appropriate responses.
I think what we have had is an increased recognition that different forms of violence are child protection issues and an assumption that when we say that the child protection system can respond, but for them to respond without any additional resource, using a system that was really designed to deal with abuse within families not abuse outside of families, does not really enable a response.
The last thing is that we need a much more detailed conversation about the impact that relocating young people around the country has had on the ability of services nationally to provide adequate support and whether there is any connection between that and the phenomenon of county lines, as it is referred to. In 2007, 2008, 2009 we had increases in knife crime and shootings and we moved a lot of children out of urban spaces and into rural counties in care placements, into areas that would never have been equipped to offer an adequate response to those young people. Those areas are now struggling with levels of violence that they would not have been seeing 10 years ago. I am not saying that is the only cause, but I do think we need to investigate both the impact of relocation and the cost to local authorities to move children around the country when children continue to return to the areas they have come from and we provide new bases for people who want to traffic drugs around this country.
Q181 Chair: You highlighted the issue of youth services and interventions. Is there any particular evidence base on the importance of that issue compared to other factors?
Dr Firmin: What we have to think about is the intersection between how people act and the environments in which they are spending their time. Young people will describe senses of fear that they experience when travelling to and from school, and particularly the window after school, feeling like the support structures disappear and experiencing or feeling the risk of robbery on a bus: how do you protect yourself; do you have a sense that anyone will step in to keep you safe when spending time in public spaces? We offer support to young people in sanitised rooms where they come in for, say, an hour, they do a knife crime awareness programme, and then they are back out into the unsafe environments that they have to navigate every day.
The value of detached youth service provision is that those workers are in the places and spaces where young people actually feel unsafe, so we are not just telling young people, “This is the decision you need to make, off you go and make a good decision when you are confronted with a very high risk situation”. I have observed detached youth workers working with young people in a space where they have relationships with the parents, the wider community, the business owners who then wrap around these young people and provide them with guardianship and support in that 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock window where it is not easy to just approach them and start grooming them into violence because other people are looking out for them. When you strip those things away, you leave an open window for other people to come in. I don’t think we can underestimate the impact of that loss.
Young people’s voices need to be heard here because they have routinely described how fearful they are in some public spaces and the value they place on open access youth services, not because they are the subject of a referral and then that referral closes in six months but because there is a consistent person or set of people who they know they can go to if things are going wrong. We need to think quite clearly about that. It is not an intervention; it is about creating safety for young people in a consistent fashion. Those things take time, they take relationships and they cannot be based on a case management referral system where you drop a young person and then pick them back up when something has gone wrong.
Dr Harding: I would very much echo what Dr Firmin has said. I think adults have created unsafe spaces for children. The young people that I interview—and I spend a lot of my time interviewing young men and young women who are gang involved and gang affiliated—tell me that they don’t feel secure or safe in those places. My particular expertise is around youth violence and youth gangs, for example, so I am going to focus on that.
What I have learned through my research over the past few years is that there has been an evolution of youth gangs and street gangs in the United Kingdom. This is not something that we have imported from America. This is something that has been home grown from our own degrees of poverty and alienation and deprivation. What has happened most recently, perhaps in the last five or seven years, has been an evolution in how the gang is formed and the internal dynamics. The key area is the age groups. At the young end of the gang spectrum we are seeing people now joining youth gangs, street gangs, aged about 12 or 14. At the other end they are not maturing out, so when they reach the ages of 21, 24, 25, instead of maturing out, they are getting stuck in the gang. The gang has become a very adhesive place for young people. Also if it is adhesive it means people stay longer, so it is broader at both ends and deeper and that effectively means you have more people in the context of the gang.
If you have more people in the context of the street gang and in its orbit, you have more people per se. That means there is greater competition among the gang affiliates to raise their reputation, raise their status, and to rise above their peer group. Increased competition means they have to do something really dramatic in order to gain the attention of their peer group and raise their reputation. It has evolved into a form of hyper-violence, ultra-violence if you like, and that is where we are seeing some of these knife crime attacks where there is almost a stab-on-sight imperative for some young people.
Add into that the increased competition around drug supply. What I call 24-hour “dial a dealer” where drugs are now delivered directly to your door has led to increased competition in drug markets in the large metropolitan cities. To address that and to build a competitive advantage, the gangs have now expanded their drug markets outside of their turf or their territory and we have the county lines phenomenon and the huge amount of violence that comes with that in control, debt bondage, sanctions against the runners, sanctions against the dealers, sanctions against the users, anybody who grasses or snitches. It is a very violent world.
The final element that acts almost as an accelerant to that is social media. This is a new online space for gangs to act and develop. It used to be that if you wanted to be part of gang life, gang culture, you had to live perhaps on a social housing estate, you had to be part of the turf and part of the territory. Social media removes that boundary and it creates a whole new online space that young people can inhabit, most of them not gang affiliated at all, but gangs will adopt and adapt that space and inhabit that space. That means young people will use that space to provoke each other, provoke rivalries, to build their own brand and their own reputation. That is what we see when we see the postings of rap videos, personal videos where they display stolen goods and money and drugs and that type of thing.
I think a combination of gang evolution, social media and county lines is certainly driving a lot of the violence we see at the moment.
Q182 Chair: What is it that is driving more younger people joining or the 21 year-olds not leaving gangs? What is driving that change?
Dr Harding: I think it is a mixture of things. It is partly austerity. Austerity has deepened and sharpened the edges of poverty and deprivation. Certain communities find a reduced access to opportunity. I think that ethnic communities definitely find that a great challenge. I imagine if you are a member of a BAME community you are going to find reduced opportunities. That is certainly a factor. The other issue is what I would call a retraction of the state, almost an abandonment of some communities. When I speak to young people they tell me, “Simon, we only ever see the police when they come to kick in our doors and we only ever see the council when they come to take our children away”. Their engagement with public guardians, with authority and governance is now very much reduced and that leaves a security gap for a lot of those young people. The way to address that is to sometimes empower themselves by carrying a knife.
Q183 Chair: You described increasing competition, either competition for status as a result or competition within the drugs market. Can you explain a little bit more about what is driving that competition, what the link is between what you have described as the gang situation and then what would create that competition?
Dr Harding: The gang is sometimes referred to commonly as a kind of alternative family, but in actual fact levels of trust are highly variable and contextualised. Young people may trust each other for a short period of time but over time ultimately they are in competition with each other. They are in competition with rival gangs and they are in competition with people within their own gang. What they are trying to do is reach an elevated status, a position of distinction or authority at the top, to be top boy perhaps. In order to do that, they have to build a reputation and a status that is validated by other people, by their peer group, and that is much more difficult if everybody is trying to do the same thing. They will do criminal activity, perhaps, which may get them noticed. They may develop a signature style such as never backing down in a fight or always having good quality drugs or being able to exit a housing estate if they are being pursued by the police.
Those kinds of things develop what I would call street capital. It is a way of elevating yourself among your peer group. That is what they are all trying to do in a very competitive world, competitive arena such as the street gang, and they will go to some new extremes now in order to do that.
Q184 Chair: Thank you. Mr Smart?
Junior Smart: In the work that we are doing, what we have been seeing is, to echo what Carlene and Dr Harding were saying, there has been a counterbalance. You simply can’t take away weight from one side of the weighing scale and expect the same outcome. In my varied role I work not only with the young people, but I train professionals and one of the common factors that is coming up in addition to safe spaces is the lack of resources that the services have. For example, if you look at it like this, social services have had their numbers reduced through austerity and whatever other measures there are. They then have raised their thresholds. This means now that more kids go under the radar. There is a reduction in safe spaces for the young people to hang out and be in the company of an adult or a safe space in terms of an informal educator. What you have there is: in the closure of those spaces where are the young people going? They are hanging out in the local parks and that is attracting intimidation from local residents and attracting the attention of authorities but also from each other.
The thing I would like to add is that when we talk about safe spaces one of the big things that young people tell us is that online is no longer a safe space. It is incredible that we have a space that is unregulated and unpoliced by any means. Yesterday I was training professionals and they had no idea what young people are exposed to. When I got them to go online and access normal social media platforms—because I think the misconception everywhere is that it is the dark web where all the bad stuff is happening and actually you can go on Marketplace, Google, you can find Up Parties, you can find this stuff, you can order drugs—they had absolute shock horror.
Another key thing that we come across is lack of cultural competency, lack of the cultural understanding of what these young people are facing. This has led to being presented at partnership meetings as, “That young person has just asked for it. Why doesn’t he just leave?” or “She is promiscuous” when in fact she is under age. There is a very serious video that is now circulating online of this young girl. They may have the will, but they don’t have the resources or the cultural competency. This has led to kids drifting under the radar over and over again. We are seeing record numbers of this.
I know there is a large focus on gangs and county lines. To add to Simon’s point, the battle on the streets at the moment is for concentration of drugs. That is one of the key factors that are pushing the county lines and the idea that county lines is violence. Actually it is a little closer to home; it is missing children. One of the key things that we have to be aware of as professionals is there is a great number of crimes in this arena that are under-reported anyway. From the Children’s Commissioner report that was announced a couple of weeks ago, the numbers that are involved are over 40,000 kids. That is just those that are recorded. If we look a bit deeper, we want to magnify that number, double it or even treble it.
My real issue in this area is to stop the exploitation and criminal involvement of young people. That is our work. The youngest client on our caseload is just eight years of age. He has been involved in this thing for a year and this stuff is very, very serious. Of course, the gangs are—as Simon Harding was saying, it is criminality evolved. Why would they target someone who is eight years of age? It is because that person is likely to be under the radar for longer and they are malleable, they are easier to manipulate, and they don’t understand the risks of what they are getting involved in.
Q185 Tim Loughton: The analysis from all three of you was fascinating. Can you describe a typical recruit? Professor, I think you said 12, 13, 14 and, Mr Smart, you have just talked about potential eight year-olds. I know from my experience when I spent some time doing a documentary about gangs in Birmingham 10 years ago I was seeing embryonic gangs in playgrounds of schools, so you can see how they graduate to become actual gangs. What is the average recruit? Some of you mentioned “recruit”. How is that person drawn into a gang? Are they actively seeking to become a member of a gang or is there talent spotting, effectively, by gangs? How does that work and what aspect of that is social media-driven?
Junior Smart: I think the first thing is careful use of the language. We have used the word “recruit” and also there is the whole idea of the sophistication of grooming. The reality is that to recruit or groom any young person is very easy. Any child wants to be seen as an adult. We misconstrue that there is going to be an enticement period and the young person is going to get drawn in. Actually, the easiest places to recruit are outside schools. The kids that leave school last will be the ones that are often in detention, the ones that are socially excluded. You only have to look at our county lines evaluation work where 100% of the young people who are involved in county lines came from pupil referral units or alternative learning establishments. That increases the exposure tenfold. You can go to any local authority children’s home or any youth hostel—it is very common.
The other thing that we have to think about is that thanks to social media and its drive and its pollution and glamorisation of this, the young boys and girls that we are working with are attracted to it. There is no longer this enticement over. I was speaking to a young kid last week and he was saying, “No, you’re saying that I’m a criminal but actually at the end of the day when I’m pushing packs for the man I can put food on the table, I can look after my younger sister”. The whole criminality aspect fails to take into account the context in which the young person is situated and how they view themselves and how they view the world around them. That is one of the things that the law has to catch up with, because hitting a young person with a £200 fine is not going to have a deterrent effect when they can make that in a day. Also chastising the parents, blaming the parents, the sins of the parent on the child, when the child sees everyone that challenges Mum or Dad as the enemy anyway, is just going to drive them further into it.
There is a lot there to take into account but, yes, the youngest person on our caseload is eight years ago. At the moment we are still working with him to ascertain how he was brought in, drawn in, whether it was through family members or even through the school, but thanks to social media, this thing is very common.
Dr Firmin: There are two things I want to say. The first is that there will be cohorts of young people who are more vulnerable by virtue of the situation that they are in. Therefore, we have far more typical situations than typical children and variation, types of factors that will mean that they are easily accessible. You have a situation in which you can access that child, whether it is through the pupil referral unit or outside a chicken shop and you offer to buy them some chips.
The reason why these situations vary so much is an interaction between the child’s individual nature, the situation they are in and the fact that they are adolescents, by and large. You are going to get some younger and some older, but you are talking about an age period between 10 and 25 where there are four things happening for you a lot of the time.
You are motivated by risk and that is often a good thing. That is why people often pass their driving tests when they are younger because they don’t have as much fear. It is also why they have very high insurance. As someone who just passed their driving test two weeks ago, I was nervous about every pedestrian, so I was a risk in a different way. That is going on. You are also motivated by the weekend. Think about five years’ time? You can’t think about five years’ time. Short-term gain is where you are at in being able to understand motivation. Your emotions are all over the place. One minute you hate this person, the next minute they are your best friend, then next minute you hate them. You don’t understand what is going on for your emotions and this is the time in your life when you just want to make your own decisions; you are 13 now, you know the world, and everyone is trying to control you.
The problem with that is that it comes against a system that wants to control young people’s choices, wants to motivate them by a 10-year promise, “If you do this now, in five years’ time you will get this job. You don’t want to take any risks. You want to contain all of that”. It battles against a service that is very poorly equipped to deal with adolescents and exploiters are adept at utilising that. They offer a short-term gain, acknowledge the emotions that the young person is feeling, enable them to make some choices, give them risk. It is an absolute dream.
Q186 Tim Loughton: I understand that. Before coming on to the Professor, in the profile of the average recruit, you describe what I would call slightly exaggerated behaviours for teenagers, behaviours we all recognise but more exaggerated. Do those recruits inevitably have more problems? We have the poverty issue, which is a whole different subject in itself, but do they have attachment disorders, for example? Are there mental health problems there or family problems or what?
Dr Firmin: There may be concentrations, but we get calls at the Contextual Safeguarding programme from parents of children who are in very good schools, living in middle class families, who have also been drawn into this and we miss them. As Junior said, we miss them because we are looking for the obvious child. Unfortunately for us, you could have a child who is in care, for example, so we know they are disproportionately vulnerable but if that child is in a stable placement, close to secure peer relationships in a safe educational environment where they have good quality health education and they have access to safe spaces in their community where they can socialise, they are not just going to end up running drugs. There has to be a situation in which you can access that child to utilise that vulnerability. Likewise, you can have a child without any of the individual characteristics that we associate with this cohort of children who is surrounded by peers where there are problematic behaviours, fears for themselves, brings in a knife to school because they are afraid, gets excluded, goes into a pupil referral unit, and all of a sudden you have created a situation for that child.
We have to be very careful about how we think about the cohort. Of course if you layer on multiple adverse experiences, you increase their exposure to these situations, but they in and of themselves will not result in them being groomed.
Q187 Tim Loughton: Professor, and could you perhaps comment on: is social media all negative in this respect?
Dr Harding: Okay, I will come to that in a second. I agree with what my colleagues on the panel here have said. Growing up on a social housing estate can help socialise or malsocialise some young people into criminal activity. They see it occurring in front of them all the time. Whether it is somebody buying and selling stolen goods or whether it is somebody shifting drugs or selling drugs, it is around them, it surrounds them. Stepping into a gang or affiliating with a group of boys who are criminally active is a very small step. For a middle class person like me it might be quite a significant step but for many it is a small step and it is a logical step for some young people. It offers a degree of security, a degree of employment. They recognise it as part of the gig economy. They will be brought in to do certain types of criminal activity and they may decide not to do others. There is that element.
There is also the fact that some young people may be connected to family members and friends who are criminally active. In a sense you always have a group of people who are what I would call in the pool of availability. However, there are some people who resist the attraction of the pull into gangs, usually because of very strong family ties.
Picking up what Dr Firmin said, I think there are stereotypes at play here that get over-emphasised. One is the dysfunctional family, and another is the absent father. These are stereotypes and tropes that tend to be played out a great deal. I have worked with young people on estates in south London where the young person has both parents, both civil servants, both gainfully employed, bringing in income. The boy goes to church on Sunday with the parents, but on Sunday afternoon he is selling crack to local prostitutes on the council estate. Those kinds of things can happen. You may also find parents who are working two or three jobs in order to put food in the fridge and something on the table—that is very common—and what I would now call parenting by social media or by smartphone where they get a text to say, “Your dinner is in the microwave or the fridge” and the parents don’t see their children for a few days.
Social media has altered it too because it has now widened the pool of availability. It used to be that if you really wanted to be part of that particular turf gang you had to live on or near the territory. Social media has altered that now, so you don’t necessarily have to live on that territory to be part of that particular gang or to affiliate to it if you wish.
We have also seen the recent development of what I might call gang fans. These are young people, quite often young women, who become very attracted to what the gang presents and its branding and mythology and how it is presented online, whether that is done through rap videos or grime videos or drill videos or whether it is the reputation that the gang itself develops locally. They can cosy up to the gang online and eventually someone from the gang will make a representation to that person and say, “I see you have been liking us. You have liked our video, you have liked this. Shall we hook up? Shall we meet up?” There is almost a kind of grooming process that can take place there.
Social media can have a range—it has changed the game. It can act as an accelerant. It can act, obviously, as a place where young people scrapbook their own personal biographies; of course that happens. We, as adults, perhaps use Facebook for similar activity. But it can at times create problems because young people can be very free with their opinions and where a particular activity has taken place they will add in their opinions and you can very quickly lead to a ratchet effect that you cannot back down from.
The other thing with social media is that it brings what I call an emotional proximity to the event. For example, a young person may be sitting in a classroom on their phone—perhaps they shouldn’t be, but they are—and looking at something and it may be a live streaming of their best friend being beaten up outside or somebody being stabbed. The very fact that it is live streamed, or the information is communicated to them within seconds brings an emotional proximity to the event that heightens their anxiety, heightens their energy, amplifies their emotions and they want to get involved. Sometimes that can mean revenge and retaliation.
Junior Smart: Also, not just emotional proximity but it is out there if they are continuing. You will see this footage tomorrow, the week after next, the week after that. It is like it is a never-ending thing. To be clear, it is not really to rubbish them, the platforms are great and all of that stuff, but young people tell us there are no uniform ways of reporting at all across all of the sites. They are all different; they are unregulated; they are unpoliced.
I think one of the issues that we have to bear in mind is that they have a responsibility to the young people. I have seen stabbings as recently as the weekend just passed. I believe that they have to take responsibility because there are algorithms in place where you are on a site and you can see certain stuff like the last thing you viewed a few weeks ago but nothing for those people who have looked up a knife, for example. They are not getting hit with an anti-knife crime message. These organisations are not going into the communities where young people are accessing their platforms and reinvesting, helping the community build, reaching out and touching these young people. I have found it is quicker to find negative messages online than positive ones. That needs to be reversed. Something needs to be done. As long as young people are dying, we have a responsibility to do something.
Dr Harding: Could I add one last point on social media? There is no switch-off here for young people. It is a 24/7 life and the information and the volume of information that comes into them via their laptops, their handheld devices, their mobile phones is a constant iteration of information that they may struggle to process. It heightens emotions and brings a level of anxiety and trauma that they may never get to fully process. That has a cumulative effect on mental health, even generating post-traumatic stress disorder among some young people.
Q188 Chris Green: Mr Smart, you made a reference before to cultural competency. That is a really interesting phrase. For me, that highlights a resilient individual, that you know what is going on locally and you understand what is going on, so you can be robust if anything happens in your own community. Is that a reasonable sense or what does it really mean? Where does an individual gain their cultural competency from? Is it, as has been highlighted, things that can help an individual such as youth work and contributions by organisations, perhaps funded by the state whether local or national government, or is perhaps what people may often think of as a strong family, perhaps church and other organisations, community organisations? How would those organisations help that cultural competency? Is it something else that we ought to be looking for?
Junior Smart: SOS largely consists of ex-offenders. The majority of my team have lived experience. We have seen remarkable benefits when we go into schools, for example with SOS Plus, setting up that safe space where young people realise that they are not going to be judged. They can talk about the issues that they could not talk to a teacher about, they couldn’t talk to a parent about and they are definitely not going to talk to a police officer about. Having that first-hand experience has paid dividends for us, not only in the dedication of my staff and my team. A few months ago when this country ground to a halt because there was a couple of inches of snow, my workers still made it out to prisons to meet those young people who were getting released, because they knew first hand that if they were not there at the gate those young people would just drift back into negative circles.
That is what I mean, that it is about understanding the reality, the complexity of what is involved in gangs, understanding that it is not as simple as to say to a young person, “Right, don’t carry a knife”, because if they are not carrying a knife they may very well become a victim. It is about talking to young people and saying, “Listen, there is going to be some really difficult choices. The next time you are faced with ops or oppositions where you live, you are going to have to run for it but that will be safer than carrying that knife”. It is understanding and being able to position yourself and understand what is happening for the young people directly where they are coming from.
Q189 Chris Green: One interesting thing in this would be if someone were employed by the council or by the state directly, perhaps they would have to be quite cautious about how they would approach those individuals and the conversations they would have because they are a state employee. Do you think there is a benefit, whether it is arm’s length or the charitable sector, where other organisations can have the conversations and interactions that these people need but the state perhaps can’t provide?
Junior Smart: I absolutely agree. I think it is a combination of all of those three: the voluntary sector, arm’s length and hands on the ground. Also from the work that I have been doing in training professionals, I believe that professionals can adapt and understand and appreciate the complexities and the realities. Some of these are very shocking realities that young people are facing. What we want to have is that level of cultural competency instilled at every stage: support and guidance to workers on the ground, on the front line, training for the managers because often they are the ones that will stop workers escalating a case.
Also we need it at governmental and societal level because I honestly think that part of the problem with the legal framework is that it does not take into account the complexity of the young people who are involved in these criminal lifestyle choices. Therefore, the consequences that the law presents are not having the desired effect on the young people. It is not deterring them from carrying out their criminal activity.
Chris Green: Thank you. That was really interesting.
Dr Firmin: Can I pick up on a point that was made there? I think it is really important that there is a statutory response alongside a community one. Ultimately you are talking about child abuse and there has to be a statutory response in equipping statutory agents to thoroughly investigate and safeguard young people. We can’t just leave this to community organisations because we have to have a recognition about the severity of the harm. We are talking about children dying, so you do need a statutory response. Unfortunately, we have not equipped our statutory agencies to respond effectively and it links to the point about thresholds and families that you mentioned.
I want to tie those things together because schools and other agencies are referring these cases into children’s services and they are being told that this case has not reached a threshold for further children’s social care support, including children who have already been stabbed but not fatally will not always reach a threshold for further social care support. That is in line with and an accurate reading of our legislation.
This is what people don’t seem to understand. It is not just: is the harm significant? It is: is the significant harm attributable to the parenting and the care that is offered by the family? In a number of these cases the parents are concerned, the parents are present, the parents are trying to do all they can to keep the young person safe. You push them through the child protection system and all you get is an assessment of their parenting. An assessment of their parenting, parenting classes, boundary setting is not going to create safety for that child when they then have to travel to school, or they are in the pupil referral unit or wherever they are.
Q190 Chris Green: If the parents approach the system and say, “Can you help me?” they feel as though—
Dr Firmin: They are being punished, they are being judged, they are being assessed. Parents don’t understand: why am I now subject to assessment? Of course there will be cases where things that are happening in the home are related to these issues but there will be plenty of cases where they are not. Even when there are things that are happening in the home, say if a child is living with domestic violence, everyone becomes focused on the domestic violence as if we solve the domestic violence and this child is no longer going to be at risk of being stabbed, when that vulnerability is being created. They still have a drug debt and that drug debt is not going to go away because the domestic violence has been addressed.
We need an adequate safeguard in response to significant harm outside of the family and unfortunately at the moment we do not have it. We are asking local authorities to innovate with pockets of practice to create an entire systems change. When we talk about budgets, we very much focus on policing budgets. Of course policing budgets are important, but what is the multiagency budget, what is the multiagency spend and the cost of this?
Chris Green: We might come on to the funding in a short while.
Dr Firmin: We have to be very clear about family, because family is obviously integral but at the moment we are not supporting families and we don’t have statutory systems in place to do it.
Q191 Chris Green: If we were to give you £1 billion and you can spend it where you choose, where it would have the most impact, most benefit, where would that £1 billion go?
Dr Firmin: I think there is a few things. One would be a significant investment in the youth service and not just in pockets of youth clubs but detached, on-street provision I think is very important.
Q192 Chris Green: What do you mean by that?
Dr Firmin: What we tend to do is conflate youth work with outreach youth support and detached. Detached is having youth workers on the street in places and spaces where young people are regardless of an incident. Outreach often happens after an incident; people are deployed into an area after the fact. Then we have inbuilding youth service offers. We definitely need a combination of all but particularly detached. That is where we have had significant losses, so I would reinvest in that.
I would also work alongside local authorities and wider safeguarding partnerships to create a child protection system that is adequately designed for adolescents from 10 through to 25 where we can give an appropriate assessment of the needs of those young people and families and build community supports around them, which would mean you would then have partnerships with the SCS organisations and others, but they would all be based in community. We have seen excellent detached health work, for example, with health workers in public spaces doing mental health outreach rather than referring children into CAMHS appointments that they don’t attend, where you have community guardians active in takeaway shops and off-licences and bus drivers who are all part of that partnership. They are not part of the partnership so that everyone makes calls to social care, refers all these kids and then expects it to be solved, but they all play a role in creating safe spaces to make it a hostile environment for anyone who wants to approach a child and groom them in exploitation.
That needs to be co-ordinated through a statutory piece of work. It cannot just be something that you commission to organisations. It needs to happen within a framework, and I would spend that money creating and implementing that framework.
Q193 Chris Green: I think there is a broad consensus. Do you have anything else to add, Professor Harding or Mr Smart?
Dr Harding: Yes, I have, if that is okay. I think Carlene’s emphasis on community engagement and the youth voice is absolutely critical. I would like to see a cohort of youth champions, a youth champion in every secondary school who can advocate peer-to-peer learning around youth violence and reporting. Many young people simply don’t report, and we also find that schools don’t report. Even where they know someone has come in with a knife, they are so frightened of Ofsted they perhaps don’t report that.
Q194 Chris Green: That is because it is a black mark against them?
Dr Harding: Indeed. On partnership working, alongside the reduction in police staff, we have seen the reduction of approximately 50,000 project workers and staff in community safety. I have a background in community safety in Hackney and Islington and as director of community safety in Lambeth. I managed 56 staff, including crime analysts, drugs staff, anti-social behaviour staff, gang workers, project workers. All of that has gone, effectively, and over the past 10 years throughout England and Wales that has largely withered away. In addition to a reduction in police numbers, we have an enormous reduction in staff who once worked on community engagement, partnership working, setting up the projects, multiagency partnerships. That has largely gone.
I have found two or three good examples of effective practice and those tend to be where there is heavily integrated working. I have been doing ride-alongs with the police in Kent and Medway recently, which is hugely fascinating, and staying over in crack houses in Kent and Medway. I have seen the police engage with stop and search, engage with drug dealers and drug users. A large volume of what they do is connected to mental health issues but it struck me that if the police are driving around these estates and driving the town centres to address the issues, why not have a youth worker in cohort with them, a mental health worker, a housing officer, a medical practitioner, so you have integrated services and integrated service provision, peripatetically, going out, very similar to what Carlene was saying, and not being cemented into buildings where people may or may not come?
The final two points I would make are that we need to reduce the demand for drugs. The easiest way to do that is to enhance the service provision for drug misusers. There is an entire community of drug misusers who get the very basic, rather shoddy, level of service provision. They are at the bottom of the food chain here, certainly in terms of county lines, and that needs to be addressed. I have been taken aback by the lack of provision for them.
The final point I would make is around early intervention for schools. I am also a trustee of an organisation called Growing Against Violence. It goes into schools and teaches young children, largely at the last year or two of primary and the first couple of years of secondary. It teaches them how to be resilient, how to be resilient in relationships, how to recognise a fake relationship from a real relationship, how to capacity-build them and their decision-making processes, so that when somebody approaches them to hide a weapon or carry drugs, they feel as if they can say no and they have the vocabulary and the peer-group support to say no. I think that kind of early intervention for schools is critical.
Q195 Chris Green: I am surprised a little that no one has mentioned that of that £1 billion that you would save to deal with—£100 million that the Chancellor announced last week to reduce knife crime, you would reserve £100 million for the Chancellor’s plan or the Chancellor’s scheme. Do you think that is going to have the impact we desire?
Junior Smart: To be completely honest, I think it has not been a lack of will over this last year. We have had record numbers. We have seen Sadiq Khan put money in, the Home Secretary has put money in. My big question is does that tally up with the numbers that are involved. Going back to the Children’s Commissioner report, we are talking about huge numbers.
One of the things that has not been mentioned yet and that I think is the quickest win ever is to deal with the—most of the services have a rapid, almost like a cliff’s-edge drop-off with social services, women’s support services. Cover that gap. Get rid of that gap. Some of the best examples I have seen with regards to, for example, female support services that I was doing work within in Essex, is they changed the cut-off age from 18 to 21. Those huge numbers of girls now are not going off the radar; they are getting support.
I think all that is happening is people are trying to save money now by cutting back on the services, but we are just creating a cost-heavy service later on, a heavier burden on the police, for example, with the cut, but they are getting called out for quite a lot of mental health issues now. They are the only service that operates over the weekend. No matter how good the gang services are, I have not seen that happen yet.
Chair: Can I interrupt you for a second? Unfortunately John Woodcock has to go to another parliamentary debate. You can come back and add those answers shortly, but I will just bring John Woodcock in.
Q196 John Woodcock: That is kind, thank you. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about so-called county lines. Dr Firmin, I was interested in what you said on this having been partly created over the last decade by the placement of young gang members or gang victims in rural areas. To what extent have you or other members or the panel done or are aware of research into that?
Dr Firmin: I think we need research into that. The Government do not even know how many children are moved out of area due to gang affiliation every year. We have no figures on it. We do not collect that kind of information. We have information on out-of-area care placements, but they will be related to a number of issues. We need to understand when children have been moved away from an area, where we think they are vulnerable, into those areas and where we think they have gone.
If you take Kent as an example, we have moved a number of children into Kent and continue to move children into Kent. Kent will talk about that experience being exactly what I have described, which is the importing of risks from London and other places into Kent, into an area where they had no infrastructure to adequately deal with the fact that these children will still be in touch with the people who have exploited them.
We have seen the same patterns with sexual exploitation. It is what you do when you do not have a response to keep children safe where you are. You ship them around the country, assuming that if you move the child the risk has gone. You do not deal with the risk. The risk follows the child, it goes into those communities and into the other children that are in the care placement with them or in school with them. It is a common-sense consequence. There was no intention, obviously, but we have facilitated it. We need to understand it so that we prevent this ongoing problem, because it has not stopped. We are still moving children.
Q197 John Woodcock: What is your sense of how that has triggered, effectively, a decade-long rise with the spike that we have seen in recent years?
Dr Firmin: What I think you have is an intersection of multiple things. You are not going to have just that and then you have an issue. There have been changes to the nature of drugs markets, changes to the nature of how organised groups are functioning and their use of younger people. There is a range of things that have happened at the same time. The big one obviously is the loss of early intervention, street-based services to disrupt those things. All of those have happened at the same time, so it is part of that process, but we do need proper analysis of it to prevent it in the future.
Dr Harding: Can I add to that? I completely agree it is a very serious issue. I have spent the last year interviewing partner staff, social services staff, housing staff in a range of different authorities. They tell me that young people and sometimes families are relocated from London or other metropolitan cities out into areas such as Essex and Kent, and quite often the local authorities who are the recipient of those individuals have never even been told that they are coming or that they are there or at risk, or they are perhaps under an Osman warning, which is a threat of life. I find that staggering, really quite staggering.
We have looked after children placements. We have gang exit programmes, family relocation programmes, social housing relocations, families moving out because of welfare cuts. There is a whole range of things that mean individuals or families are planted. My real worry is that we are secretly propagating street gangs and criminal activity in a way that we simply are not sighted on. There is not the research. I cannot get any funding for this kind of work; I would love to have. It is a real challenge.
Not only that, when the children and young people are placed, specifically they are put into houses of multiple occupation, maybe on a floor with three sex offenders and five drug misusers and somebody with alcohol abuse or misuse problems. Situationally it is disastrous, and they are pulled into all kinds of sexual and criminal exploitation.
Q198 John Woodcock: Thank you. Finally—and, Mr Smart, please answer on this as well—obviously it is very difficult or impossible to be scientific in assessing the different weight given by different factors, but in your mind is the explosion of this long-distance drug running, this opening up of markets, the primary factor of the increase in violence? Is it a primary factor? Broadly, where do you think it sits in the pecking order of factors?
Junior Smart: In our experience, violence happens much later. If you take an area such as Margate, you will see four county lines converge on the same spot. That is because in one square mile there are 21 children’s homes, large pockets of drug users and the market can sustain it. We have to see county lines as a business model. It is supply and demand. Where the market is big enough to sustain it, the gangs will coexist because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Where there will be violence is often where one group does not want to give up their territory, or one group’s specific style might be more violence, or a few young people might be robbed by one group.
Q199 John Woodcock: The evidence that we have been presented with says that only about 10%, very roughly, of the county lines operations fuel violence. Does that feel right to you?
Junior Smart: To be honest, there is a lot of hidden harms. The problem that we have is that the information does not follow the offender and neither does the risk, as Simon Harding has said. It is quite common as well for young people to—we have been told that the child will get injured and then they will travel out of town to another hospital. I think that will be the next big thing—violence displacement, harm displacement—because in the hospital they are effectively a John Doe. We do not have a grip, and even if you go to some areas they do not know whether it is their locals who are creating the criminal activity and the violence or whether they are on the import or the export end. Much more research has to be done.
Dr Harding: I would add debt bondage is a huge issue for young people. If they screw up on a drug deal or they miscalculate, they can fall into debt.
Q200 John Woodcock: That is driven by the drugs market, which is primarily being fuelled by this county lines model?
Dr Harding: Indeed, yes, and once you are in debt you are at risk of violence, you are vulnerable, you may be forced to work for free for several months to pay off the debt, you may be sexually exploited. The debt may reverberate back to the family, so the family may be at risk. Sometimes if the trap phone or the drug phone is sold between one gang and another, you can inherit risk from that phone as well, without knowing that there is some kind of beef attached to this particular phone.
Q201 Rehman Chishti: Professor Harding, I completely agree with you on the point you made that where individuals are relocated from larger cities to neighbouring areas to move them away from the problem that exacerbates the problem. You mentioned Kent and Medway. I am a Medway Member of Parliament and I grew up in Gillingham. The reason there is a massive problem with that is the connectivity between those areas outside of London is 45 minutes to 50 minutes on the train back into London. Therefore, simply a local authority may buy up houses, say, for example, Bromley, down into Medway or down into Canterbury, and move an individual or a family over there without that combined support. That is a complete recipe for disaster. How does one get those host authorities who are doing this to do the right thing and look at the bigger picture?
I have said to the Government that this is completely wrong and daft. It is not simply Kent and Medway. You get the same problem in Manchester, in Birmingham. Nearby areas will then have exactly the same problem. How do you get them to do the right thing on that, Professor Harding?
Dr Harding: Sadly, it is made worse by social media. It is almost an antiquated concept, this idea of moving children out of the metropolitan slums to the seaside. It feels very antiquated. With social media these young children are back connecting to their parent gang, if you like, within weeks if not days.
I think information sharing has to be a key element here. I continually speak to partners who throw up the Data Protection Act and the GDPR as barriers to information sharing. There appears to be a complete lack of understanding there as to how those provisions work. I do feel there is perhaps a role for the Information Commissioner to clarify exactly the relationship around GDPR and information sharing, because it is not clear.
Q202 Rehman Chishti: On the GDPR thing, just speaking to my colleague Mr Loughton, who was a brilliant Children’s Minister, it is utter nonsense. You can share that information. If they are not doing it, then some action should be taken. I agree on clarification.
Dr Harding: Certainly education around it is very poor.
Rehman Chishti: It needs to be done.
Dr Firmin: There are two things. I want to pick up on the information-sharing point, but I do think preventing this movement issue comes back to how local authorities are being supported to keep those children where they are. You are asking them to hold extreme levels of risk. If any of those young people are murdered, the question will be why were they not moved away, because that is the only offer we have at the moment. We are very much struggling, as a multiagency partnership, to create safety for that young person. The levels of anxiety that social workers sit with to think, “If this child goes missing again, what is going to happen to them? They have already been stabbed, the house has been shot at, Mum is saying she wants to go, Dad is saying they want to go, they are fearful”.
We have to have a completely different approach to that type of referral. You cannot just not move them, you have to have a, “We will do this instead”. The, “We will do this instead and we will resource you to do this instead” is the bit that is missing. You need an initial investment because you would hope over time you would save because the costs of those placements, as Tim Loughton would know, are extremely expensive. You are talking about thousands of pounds every year for every child that is moved. You could reinvest that but in the middle you need a way to resource developing the alternative. That is a whole systems change piece of work because this is a cultural activity. The police will push local authorities to do the move. It is not just the local authorities doing it. Everybody wants that child off their patch and to be someone else’s problem.
Q203 Rehman Chishti: Let me just put this, Dr Firmin. I am limited with time with my question. You say there is a risk with the individual concerned and therefore those where this individual is initially from will think, “Gosh, a risk, we did not do enough” and then something tragically happens to that child. But then, you tell me, as a Member of Parliament down in Gillingham, if that individual with that risk is moved to my constituency and that individual is linked to a tragedy in my constituency, that is completely unacceptable.
Dr Firmin: Absolutely.
Rehman Chishti: Let me finish. Tragically, I did lose a youngster in my constituency through knife crime and gang crime and people raised these questions. The point I make is that of course every child needs to be given the support they need, but it is the primary responsibility of the authorities that place them, with their Members of Parliament, to go to the Government and get the resources, not shift the burden over here, which then means—
Dr Firmin: They are.
Rehman Chishti: I know they are, but I think they need to do it more because otherwise it means it is shifting the problem to areas like mine nearby and that is completely wrong.
Dr Harding: I think it is completely wrong and it is why I have raised it, but I do not think we can just tell them not to do it.
Q204 Rehman Chishti: I agree you cannot tell them not to do it. What I am trying to say to you, as Members of Parliament—and I am—from there, a larger authority, an area like London—there are similar Members of Parliament near Manchester or Birmingham who then feel that—I know people say you cannot tell them they cannot do it. What I am trying to say is the Government and the authorities need to find a solution that placement authorities have to get that right.
Dr Firmin: Absolutely.
Rehman Chishti: Mr Smart, can I ask you a question linked to what Mr Loughton touched on, the issue of the internet? The problem that we have, sadly, at the moment—and the same thing with radicalisation and extremism—is there is certain material that goes online that does not pass the criminal threshold. The incitement has already been done, inducing somebody in, similar to what Tommy Robinson has done, and also Anjem Choudary from the other side, al Qaeda link, the same issue with knife crime and gang crime, because all these organisations—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook—have their own policies and guides but it is about implementation. How do you stop that material going on, which may not pass the criminal threshold, but the damage is done in sucking in those individuals? How do you do it?
Junior Smart: Here is what happened. We joined what was known as the trusted flagger scheme, underneath Google, which means that we were part of the trusted flagger scheme. If we see content that we deem to be against the best interests of a young person, we can get the content removed. It sounded very good in principle, but in actual practice the client’s video is still out there, despite numerous attempts and having to break down the video and using cultural competency and all of that stuff.
I think what we need is a cultural shift in regard to it. What I mean by that is there is information out there about who is watching what video, for example the content. Why is that not being heat-mapped? Why are prevention interventions not being placed into those schools? Like in any good business, you want to know who your market audience is and that is who you reach. They are the ones because that is where the reprisals will come out of.
Both sides, the Home Office and MOPAC, have these positive messages about not knife carrying. That needs to be a blanket approach to anyone within a certain area under a certain age. They need to be inundated with positive messages, just as we have done off the back of these serious—
Q205 Rehman Chishti: The counter-narrative. Somebody puts up something and you put a counter-narrative, or you stop it from going on there but then you replace it with the positive narrative.
Junior Smart: Yes, a short statement—
Rehman Chishti: Is that not being done as much as it should be done? Is it being done?
Junior Smart: No, nowhere near, nowhere near.
Q206 Rehman Chishti: We get told the Home Office has launched a counter-narrative initiative on gangs and of knife crime, but you are saying it is not doing it?
Junior Smart: No. It has all the best will in the world, and I totally applaud it for the efforts that have been made. I know the White Bill is coming up, but I do think their platforms have a lot more responsibility. When I am speaking to young people, one of the key things they tell me is there is no uniform way of reporting content that is bothering them, scaring them or shocking them. You are telling me that they have all of that ability to create these platforms but there is no uniform way of reporting stuff in to the relevant—everybody knew about CEOC but there is this grey area where nobody knows what that falls under and who it should be sent to.
Q207 Rehman Chishti: A similar point was raised before from us to experts who came. First that comes down to glorification of carrying knives, the music and all that kind of thing. The counter-narrative to that is absolutely vital to get right. It is good to hear from you to say that we are nowhere near what the Government and the agencies need to do to counter that.
Can I quickly come to Professor Harding? On the issue of early intervention we often hear the phrase the public health approach. Scotland has used the public health approach to reduce its knife crime and gang crime. So the audience gets it, how do you define a public health approach? Can you also clarify the public health approach that has been used in Scotland? Are aspects of that being used here in England and Wales? If not, would your recommendation be to follow that approach?
Dr Harding: I think the public health approach, which is effectively looking at crime as a disease, as something that can be communicated and is transferrable, is certainly part of the current vogue. I have a slight nervousness about the vocabulary that surrounds it. I feel a little uncomfortable at times where we talk about levels of infection and communities that may be infected. I maybe have a little trouble with that; it seems to extend the metaphor too far for me.
I agree with the underlying ethos of it because I think crime and the way crime is tackled and addressed can become very political very quickly, whereas a public health approach appears to run up a banner around which people can coalesce and perhaps may be less political, so I do applaud that. The Scottish approach, which I am very familiar with, which is based on work from Cincinnati, Boston and Chicago—which I am also very familiar with—certainly worked in Glasgow. I have reservations about its full employability and workability in London and in other parts of England.
Q208 Rehman Chishti: Can I ask you a question on that for clarification? Why did it work in Scotland and why would it not work in London, Birmingham, Manchester, in other large areas around the country?
Dr Harding: Glasgow is approximately the size of two London boroughs. It is only 600,000 people. It is a single unitary authority and a single political colouring. In London we have 32 boroughs plus the City of London, each of different political colouring. There are huge challenges there. The Glasgow City Council is very close in its proximity to Government; it is a very flat structure. In England and in London, that is extremely difficult; it is a very extenuated structure.
In Glasgow the street gangs are quite different. They are almost exclusively, about 98%, ethnically white, whereas in London we have different ethnicities involved. I think that presents a major difference. Also, in Glasgow the gangs are quite often what is called recreational. Alcohol is involved and alcohol-driven violence and fighting is involved. Some of the gangs in Glasgow have been in situ for 50, 60, 70 years—they are intergenerational. Grandfathers have taught fathers to fight in this way and fathers have taught their sons to fight in that way. It is not driven by county lines. The patterning and the dynamics behind it are really quite different. I caution about a wholesale adoption of it as a way forward. The ethos of it, the idea behind, it is fine, but you cannot take it simply off the peg and expect it to work here in London.
Q209 Rehman Chishti: The question is that there is a strategy there were aspects of it may be workable over here. On that basis, to say it has worked—I completely get that. Sometimes you have to take into account the demographics, the area and the challenges but the vision overall, the public health approach as you have defined it, can certainly have merits in helping reduce violence?
Dr Harding: Indeed it can.
Rehman Chishti: Can I ask another question? I have two more and I will finish on that.
Chair: You can do one, Rehman.
Q210 Rehman Chishti: The one question I have for you is this: you talked about the issue about diverse individuals being sucked into gang crime and knife crime, and the issue of deterrence. I used to prosecute cases and defend cases before I came to Parliament. The issue is for some individuals who continuously get involved in gang crime and cause problems. We used to have individuals in gang crimes who used to target individuals on different parts of the body, limbs and buttocks. Now there are individuals who go straight for the lethal kill. On that basis the current Metropolitan Police Commissioner, in 2017, said that for some individuals you should have a lengthy sentence to rectify their behaviour and take them away from their problem. I know there were mixed reviews on that, but looking at where we are now with the lethality of this, we should say—of course I take into account all the other issues about referral units, expulsion, deprivation, every other factor, but that factor, would you now say, has to now be revisited to say that for those repeat offenders you have to look at what the Met Commissioner said in 2017? Would you agree with that?
Dr Harding: I think for repeat offenders and multiple offenders that is probably the case. I would add, however, that prison holds no fear for some of these young people we have been dealing with, because you can conduct your gang business in prison as easily as you can outside of prison.
Q211 Rehman Chishti: It is not about just the deterrent. This is about if you take them completely away from the scene where they are and if there is a sentence that looks at the rectification of behaviour away from the gang culture. That is one of the reasons that was outlined in that speech. I agree with you that deterrence for some of them is a tag to say, “Hey, I have been to prison” and that kind of thing. But to get them away for a tougher sentence and with rectification I think is something you would say certainly needs to be looked at?
Dr Harding: I think it does need to be looked at. It is part of the solution.
Q212 Stuart C. McDonald: I have a quick follow-up from what you said about the violence reduction unit. You described the differences between Glasgow and London, but you also said that Glasgow had learnt from the experience in Chicago and New York. Surely Glasgow is as different if not more different from those cities as it is from London. Nobody is saying to take it off the shelf or off the peg. It is about learning from the approach and tailoring it to a particular city or circumstance.
Dr Harding: That is very true. There are elements to how these systems and policies worked in America that simply do not or could not work over here. One aspect that is critical I think is what they call the moral voice of the community. This is where community engagement, which we have talked about, is absolutely critical. I think there are elements of that that could work, or could work much better, here.
Q213 Stuart C. McDonald: Can I ask about the link between adverse childhood experiences and violent offending, which we have begun to see some evidence about? What are the implications of that for Government policy and at what sort of age should we be starting with intervention and prevention work in schools?
Dr Firmin: The adverse childhood experiences piece of work is one that is helpful in some quarters and highly dangerous in others and it has to be carefully managed. A number of people who are in professional jobs, have done very well, have very high ACE schools. Simply having a high ACE score does not necessarily help you predict what will happen to that child. We have to be very careful that utilising adverse childhood experiences does not lead to labelling, “We know what is going to happen to you because you already have a score of 4”.
What we can do, though, is think about how we reduce the number of adverse childhood experiences that young people are exposed to, and how we ensure that those who have had those experiences have access to supportive services to create spaces in which they can flourish and have opportunity rather than have had those experiences and then be exposed to routine violence in their community or feel like there is no route to support. If we are using them it has to be in relation to understanding the lived experience of that young person and how they may or may not aggravate the circumstance.
Junior Smart: I think that anything that can be done to rectify—for us it is always to do with the young people. Anything that can be done to enhance their experience—it is always about that counterbalance. If you do have adverse childhood experiences, again the sums dictate that if we can remove or reduce the elements of that, the amount of savings that you have later on as a society id huge. Anything that we can do to counterbalance that can only be a good thing.
Q214 Stuart C. McDonald: Professor Harding, you spoke about resilience building. Is that related to adverse childhood experiences or is that something more general?
Dr Harding: I saw it as slightly more general. It is about developing the counternarrative for young children and using peer support groups to develop a new counternarrative and a new vocabulary, particularly around the challenge that young people have with relationships, not being able to recognise a fake from a real or an exploitative relationship. It is those types of things, I think.
Q215 Stuart C. McDonald: We have received lots of written evidence about the worth or otherwise of the various localised programmes that we see warning children not to get involved with carrying knives and not to get involved in county lines and so on. How effective are they? Is it just a case-by-case basis? If that is true, should we be looking for a more national and strategic approach rather than leaving it to local authorities to fund on an ad hoc basis?
Dr Firmin: For me personally I think any educational programme is only going to be effective if it is twinned with actual investment so that it reduces the likelihood of children being exposed to those risks and, if they are, there is someone they can go to for help. What you do is if you just educate children to say no, for example, which we have seen in other walks of life, if they do not, who do they blame? Themselves for the poor decision that they made to be exploited. We would not be going down this line with sexual exploitation. We would not be going in and saying, “If someone is trying sexually exploit you, just say no”.
We try our very best to disrupt groups of people who are sexually exploiting young people. We teach them the value of healthy relationships but do not assume that just knowing what a healthy relationship is means you are going to be able to access one. You have to have actual access to healthy relationships, be in places that are safe, have access to protective professionals and, within that, utilising the value of adolescence at a time when you want to make decisions, equipping young people to make the best decisions they can but also supporting them to recognise when those decisions are not within their gift and that they may need support from others, and “Who are your safe people?”
One of the things we have seen when we are trying to develop a more contextual approach to safeguarding in local authorities is to give young people a map of their local area and ask them to colour code it red, amber, green, “Where do you feel safe, neutral, unsafe?” Sometimes the whole map is red, sometimes there are areas of green. What we see is then professionals talking to them, “Who are your safe people? If you are in that area and something is happening, do you know anyone you could go to? What shop would you go into? Who are the people around you?” It is supporting young people to actively make safe choices in the place they are rather than these abstracted ideas of just saying no, without a recognition of how do you say no when someone is threatening your younger brother or saying they are going to set fire to your house, or they are going to put that image on. How do you just say no? How do you manage that consequence? Who is going to help you? Who is going to make sure that is not the result of you saying no? These are the conversations we need to have with young people: building critical reflection and ability to challenge rather than just holding them and their decisions as a cause of what is going on.
Dr Harding: I agree. I often feel as if many of these media productions have been produced in absentia of asking the young people themselves. They feel crafted by designers and not really by young people. I think we need a national conversation with young people. This is what seems to be missing. Young people are inventive, intelligent, creative and they have the solutions where we do not have the solutions. We simply do not understand the world that they are inhabiting at this point in time. There has become a dissonance between their world and our adult professional world. We need to bridge that, and we need to understand it better and the answers will come.
Q216 Stuart C. McDonald: Mr Smart, any further thoughts? There must be some of these programmes that are useful.
Junior Smart: This is a bit of a bugbear of mine. In my experience, what I have seen is a great different spectrum of different types of programmes that have been rolled out with various different levels of quality. Some of the other stuff around the ex-offender model is more along the scared-straight model, which we know backfires. What I think needs to happen is someone has to be responsible for making good practice somewhere to making the best practice everywhere. If the system absorbs it, it will become very systemic and not case by case.
I do feel where good practice exists it needs to be shared. While we are at it and doing that work, we need to find ways of centralising that information so that all the elements around the community and the young people can be collected and collated so that if young people are later moved, that information follows them.
Q217 Stuart C. McDonald: A final question building from that. Some of the evidence today, and indeed in previous evidence sessions, seems to suggest that the response to serious violence has been a local one and an operational one rather than national and strategic. To what extent is that a fair criticism? Does there need to be more national Government-level leadership and to what extent does the serious violence strategy fill that gap? What improvements would you want to see to that strategy?
Dr Firmin: Absolutely I think there needs to be an increased strategic response, a cross-Government response. We see local authorities developing practice in the absence of any national strategy for safeguarding adolescents. There is no consistency at all, no recognition that the system is not fit for purpose, so local authorities are having to work it out themselves. There is no leadership on that at all, no cross-
Government strategy on exploitation. You have an action plan on sexual exploitation, you have a separate action plan from the Home Office on youth violence and exploitation. There is no co-ordination across them. Local areas are merging their sexual exploitation and criminal exploitation groups but that is not happening nationally.
In the serious violence strategy the section on opportunity talks about the opportunities that are being created for violence to occur. There is no mention of the loss of services creating an opportunity for exploitation to occur, no mention of the use of relocation creating opportunities for exploitation to occur, no mention of expensive housing and overcrowding pushing young people on to the street because they do not have any privacy because they are sharing bedrooms with all of their siblings. There is no mention of these opportunities, these state-created opportunities due to the reduction in levels of support to families.
It is very much focused on social media, which is of course relevant, or the actions taken by those who are recruiting young people, but all of these things are relevant. We need some strategic leadership to ask which of our policies are creating opportunities that those who want to exploit children are utilising, and what is the cross-Government position on safeguarding adolescents, rather than syphoning this off as, “We need a knife crime strategy now, we need this, we need that”. Next month it will be a different issue. Two years ago it was sexual exploitation. All of them are in the absence of a system that was designed to keep our young people safe. We cannot put a sticking plaster over that; we need leadership and we need it urgently.
Dr Harding: I completely concur. Locally the issues vary, and we need to ensure that each local area has an up-to-date, contemporary profile of its young people, its provision, its substance misuse community, and so on, because things are moving very, very, very quickly. In many ways, county lines and the people who run them are two or three years ahead of us and we are perhaps two or three years behind. There is a lag of data, of information and intelligence there. We cannot just pick things off the peg and hope that they will work across the country. There has to be bespoke provisioning and projects and partnership working in each area.
That said, there is something of a crisis of leadership and direction here. I hear a great deal of talk about multiagency partnership working and occasionally about information sharing as if it was invented yesterday. It has been a statutory duty for the past 21 years, since the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. Information sharing is a statutory duty; partnership working is a statutory duty. Much of this has become focused on the police and police cuts but very little about the statutory-duty role of the other providers—probation, health, local authorities and so on. All of that needs to be reinflated, reenergised and reinvigorated.
I have a slightly downbeat note in front of me, which I wish to read, if that is okay. It says, “We do not have the policing or partnership structures to address this successfully or over the long term. This is a 21st century problem and we are stuck with 20th century structures, policies and organisations. These are culturally siloed, operationally slow, unresponsive, unmodernised, unadjusted, technologically ill-equipped, inefficient, underfunded and unsuitable”. That is not a very happy prognosis there but that is what we have to fix. There are many good children out there who have been pulled into doing bad things. They are salvageable and they are valuable, and we need to act now.
Junior Smart: There is nothing I can say after that. That was great; I think he said it all. I think they both said it all, thank you.
Chair: Can I ask one final question? Mr Smart, you raised it earlier, when you were talking about online and whether you could do heat maps and so on. I was interested in what you said but we are obviously short for time now. If there was anything more that you could send us on the way in which you think ideally social media would respond, when you have a particularly horrible or violent video that goes viral in a particular area and so on, what, in an ideal world, would we have in place? If anybody else has any further points either on that or on any of the other things that you think we should have asked you about that we did not get to cover. That was an extremely interesting evidence session, so thank you very much for your time.
Examination of witness
Sir Denis O’Connor
Q218 Chair: Thank you so much for giving us your time this morning, and apologies for the late running of our evidence session. We are very grateful for your patience and for giving us your time. I think it is probably a few years since you have sat before the Home Office Select Committee.
Sir Denis O’Connor: It is a few years but thank you for asking me. They are going to be a hard act to follow.
Q219 Chair: We are interested to have your reflections. You have obviously seen patterns in knife crime over time and different periods and changing patterns of serious violence and also attempts by the police, by the Home Office, by different local councils and agencies and so on to respond, and then patterns change again. It would be helpful to start with your thoughts on, given the things that have worked in the past, should we be doing the same sorts of things again or should we be looking for something new?
Sir Denis O’Connor: I think it is always worth reflecting on what you have learnt, as long as you are not absolutely beholden to it in the environment you are in now. I would concur with some of the things the professor said about the dynamic of the situation now. We are in a fast world with the communications and everything and that speeds things up, so some of the past remedies may not serve as well.
We have gone through different strategic approaches from Government hands on and hands off. We are definitely in the hands-off period now in relation to a number of these issues. There were pluses and minuses with the hands-on world of the late 1990s and the 2000s. It is not fashionable now but there was a cross-departmental way of bringing action with the mandate and clout that comes from the involvement of senior politicians to issues that arose, whether they arose in the health service or in the police. I know that. I was on the receiving end of it as well as part of it. It was not all good.
The street crime initiative comes to mind when we had the Prime Minister chairing meetings. It certainly made people turn up and pay attention, and 11 Ministers, I think, were allocated to different areas that were a problem. At the moment we have seven police forces, areas where this is a very obvious problem. It is a problem in other areas. The numbers are not impossible if the will is there.
The upside of it is that brings a kind of mandate and a will to do things that cross the boundaries, the departmental boundaries, that we all suffer from. There is a degree of departmentalism. Members here must see that. This drives through it. It also promotes analysis. The data at the time was not great. The data is better now, but as I can tell you from a study that has been done in London—which might be directly relevant to your work here—by Detective Chief Inspector John Massey, there is still a bit of a problem with accessing this data in sufficient detail to know what is going on in boroughs and wards, because you have to get right down into these things. Whether you treat it as a disease or just crime, you need to get right down into it.
There was a problem with data then, but they worked through it and they did not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They did learn to a degree as they went about the tactics, about the evidence, such as it was—hot-spotting was a relatively new thing then—and they had some impact on it. Yes, there was a downside, some perverse effects of targeting and the rest of it, but what it did over a period of about six months, as a case in point, is it did have some effect.
Is that the perfect mechanism for now? No, but I think the strategy of self-reform—we have had nine years of it, and I would say you with your stocktake, if you look at the HMIC reports, which I still keep an eye on from my past life, there is an accumulation of evidence that the police capability to respond to this new dynamic is not there. It is recognised within the service. At times I think it is repeated and woeful. I think we could remedy it.
I am chair of a charity as in Surrey, where they have their problems too. It is hard to imagine that, isn’t it, but I am, so I can relate to this being more of a problem than the police. We do need to have some kind of Government grip on issues that affect the safety and the lives, in this case, of our people, and I don’t think we do at the moment.
Q220 Chair: Can I ask you a bit more about that? Our Committee has raised issues of policing resources and so on before, so we have been very clear about the importance of that. Putting resources to the side for a second and just thinking about organisational structures, direction and grip and so on, there is one issue that could be about policing and what the Home Office’s role might be around the policing and co-ordinating or supporting. There is another, which is the wider cross-Government role and co-ordination. Are you talking about the policing structures or are you talking about the cross-Government ones or both?
Sir Denis O’Connor: I think phenomena like serious violence—but there are other competitors that have some of the same issues around them—do need the cross-Government piece. The police are important, but this is too important to be left to the police alone. They cannot reach everything.
Where I think we have gone a bit wrong is to talk down deterrence, which is remarkable to me. It is a bit like in nation building abroad. Nobody tries to build a core cross-Government piece without taking the ground and occupying the space and trying to establish some of the basic elements of deterrence that allow other things, allow fear, to slowly go away and parents and schools and everybody else to play in behind it. It is a cross-Government issue, definitely.
Q221 Chair: If you were going to try to address that cross-Government issue and you were going to have some more Government drive or Government leadership, and suppose you were going to take a 2000s style approach, either a street-crime approach or a knife-crime approach and so on, and some of the things that were done then, what would that involve doing?
Sir Denis O’Connor: There was supposed to be—and I do not know how profitable it has proved to be—a serious violence taskforce attached to the serious violence strategy, which has its strengths and weaknesses, but there was a taskforce. I think possibly the difficulty for that taskforce is I tend to look at it as a mechanism to deliver and change things.
At the moment I work at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge. I am quite happy to have a narrative of possibilities around promising evidence, but when something is as pressing as this, I also want the strategy to have some point of delivery. The problem for that serious violence taskforce, which could give you some of the elements of cross-Government, is the analysis in the document is really inadequate. I can say why in a minute.
The aim is not absolutely clear beyond to make things better. If you really want to engage people and professionals and you want to drive some change, you have to have some aims so you know whether you are on track or not. Here we are a year on. I wonder what the serious violence taskforce does. Does it say, “A bit more evidence here but the figures do not look so good there”? I do not how it engages with the agencies that are supposed to be delivering change and making things safer.
If you could blend some of that with what we learnt from—and it is a sad word—deliverology, and it may be unfashionable, but children are dying and if I were one of their parents I would want to give them something that is looking like it could get up, wash its face and do something. I am afraid that strategy, as it is, is much more concerned with its narrative and less than action, as I would expect it in the world that I have inhabited. Even at Cambridge University if something does not look like it has application, it does not have traction, we are not that interested because we want things that are going to change things and made things different.
Q222 Chair: Sara Thornton told us that she thought it was hard for the Home Office to lead this as a cross-Government strategy, because you are effectively persuading other Government Departments as your peers. She thought it should be led from No. 10. Do you think that is right?
Sir Denis O’Connor: That takes us back to the street crime model. What do I know about the politics of this, but I think some people may find that off-putting. It may not be so off-putting if No. 10 is sufficiently interested in these issues and not preoccupied with other things to start it off. Secretaries of State from different Departments—but certainly you would expect the Home Secretary—take turns at doing this work, working to the same theme of, “Here is what we propose. What date do we have for what is happening and who is working on this?” If that helps to get past any awkwardness about copying the past, so be it.
What I would expect, of course, compared to the past, is that the quality of the analysis and the material in front of people would be a lot better and it would be a lot less about shaming than finding the solution. I would be absolutely rigorous about the quality of the recording by the police and others so that we were not getting shenanigans about downgrading things or whatever else to make the numbers look better. But it is entirely possible to conceive how that might happening, blending the old and the new.
Q223 Rehman Chishti: Can I ask you a specific question with regards to stop and search? I know there has been a lot of discussion where some say that as a result of the changes in how stop and search is applied, that has led to the increase in knife crime. Starting on my first point, are you able to clarify if that is the case or is not the case before I ask the next question on what further steps need to be taken in relation to stop and search?
Sir Denis O’Connor: The best evidence around that at the moment is a piece by the College of Policing, Paul Quinton, which suggested that—we need to be careful about the frame of this. At the macro level there is some slight evidence of effect, but it is not enough to win the game. I am summarising it, probably brutally, but that is what it says. What I would say about that is it is one tactic. If it is done well—I am short in my recollection of this, of another tactic that helps you recover weapons in the same way on the street. What I think the evidence and the test for stop and search should be is how effective it is in the small areas where this problem really occurs.
Can I illustrate this for you to give you an example? Detective Inspector John Massey has just completed his pieces for his degree at Cambridge. He studied knife crime in London. It is the first large study where somebody has done some real data. He had to go through 6,000-odd manual records to get to it, but the bottom line is this: he found that looking at it in terms of wards or whatever else did not really work because there was too much noise in the system, so he went to lower super-output areas. They are much smaller areas, about 800 households, 1,700 people.
You are right down now in a smaller space, on your question on stop and search. What he found is, first, unlike the current violence strategy, there are no hotspots. That is first. This is a different kind of crime; this is why this dynamic issue matters. No hotspots in the way we normally see them for convergences of night-time economy, other things that happen, burglaries and so on. That is one; that is different.
Secondly, there is some hope in here. What he did find is if you look at preceding knife-crime attacks that do not end in homicide—and that is often in the hands of the gods—if you look at those attacks that do not end in homicide, they are a good forecast of the lower super-output areas that are going to get a homicide. That is what he found. Those areas would be potential candidate areas for an intelligent approach for a stop and search, where you are in a small enough area to do the work with the community, to explain the rules of the game to everybody.
But I have to give you some idea of the scale of this so that we do not get carried away. To cover off about 40%, to put some treatment into those lower super-output areas, about 4,800-odd in London, if I give you an idea, you would have to cover off about 790 to get about 40% of the risk covered. What am I thinking? I am thinking about, if you just look at the police, some work in schools, which I would say is de rigueur. I would say that is a given that police have come out to schools. In those areas this is a big mistake. Secondly I would look at deterrent patrol. There is a lot of evidence, contrary to what people may say, that it works.
Q224 Chair: Deterrent patrol for 790 areas?
Sir Denis O’Connor: Yes. It sounds like a lot but—
Q225 Chair: How big is an area? When you talk about an area, what do you mean? How big is an area?
Sir Denis O’Connor: This area is about 1,700 people, about 800 households. It is a few little streets or maybe a tower block or two. This is a small area. Your patrol can be relatively short, but they have to have a regularity around them. There is a decay effect if they do not, but we do know there is evidence in this. It works at other things. Then you might consider stop and search as one of your tactics. With those small areas you have a better chance of treating it.
If you want to get, though, to 70%—and I am sure you would want to get higher than that—you need to cover off about 2,000-odd of these areas. You need to go and do this very focused, “What are we doing in here?” You can imagine with the other agency elements, whether it is to do with youth clubs, what is happening with people who are excluded from school, if you are at a very large scale it is an “oh, my god” problem. But if you can take it down to smaller areas, you can potentially get hold of it.
Q226 Rehman Chishti: Can I ask you a question on that? The section 60 stop and search, once it is issued, applies for 24 hours. There are some experts who say, just touching on your point, that if you identify an estate where there is a real problem, look at if that stop and search power can be extended for two weeks, three weeks, providing there is judicial oversight, so that you are targeting those specific areas where there is a real problem. Would you say that kind of measure would have merit or not?
Sir Denis O’Connor: Section 60 has some merit, I think, as long as it is used selectively. It has effectively been elevated, because of interventions of the Prime Minister, to a chief officer oversight within the police. In law it is still an inspector but in fact what is happening is it is chief officer oversight and it will have somebody like a superintendent. The result is it is being used much more selectively. Does it have merit? Yes, it does, but it does not have merit very much for me, if you want to rebuild your way out of this, as a tactic by itself. That is the point I would make.
Q227 Rehman Chishti: I completely agree it is not a tactic by itself, but it is one of those features that has to be looked at and used. I was asking specifically if, rather than for a short period of time in targeting areas where there is a real problem with the correct data, having it for an extended period of time in those areas would be one thing that needs to be considered?
Sir Denis O’Connor: It would. I have one reservation about the data piece, and I do not have a reservation about the general intent. It is that I am conscious that the police are not—I know this is something you have probably heard—digitally equipped to easily track exactly what has happened in the last 24 hours in any detail and what assets, whether they are from other services or the police, are being applied in picking up the effects of that. It could be done; you could marshal it in a way with paper and so on
As it stands at the moment, unless they prioritise that above all other things, the information will not be as strong about the input and the outputs you are getting. You do need that to be intelligent.
Q228 Rehman Chishti: Of course we can all understand why the Prime Minister made those changes to stop and search, the issue of individuals from certain diverse backgrounds being stopped far more than others. Linked to that, knowing that issue had been raised then and a change brought about, how do you now ensure that those concerns are addressed but giving police more flexibility to use this power in a more constructive way? How do you do that?
Sir Denis O'Connor: There are two things I would do. First, my default position is that I would get some evidence of the application in those small areas to see exactly how well it works and how well it works in relation to this proportionality and other issues. There is absolutely no doubt that the officers will know—and it is in John Massey's piece of work—that unfortunately BAME black kids are at least four times more likely to be victims of that than white kids.
The stop and search will work if there is a dialogue that goes with it to the community. I think the way we should judge it is whether there are complaints in the community or a consensus in confirmation about what the police do. That could be part of trialling it in those smaller areas. They should be well aware by now there is evidence of a cultural shift, because of the severe decline in stop and search. What we need to do, though, is rebuild so it is done intelligently and in a highly focused way. That way I hope we will get the best of both worlds.
Q229 Tim Loughton: Sir Denis, was it a superintendent's dissertation you mentioned?
Sir Denis O'Connor: It is a detective chief inspector from homicide command appropriately.
Q230 Tim Loughton: Still a serving officer?
Sir Denis O'Connor: He is indeed.
Q231 Tim Loughton: Has it been published? Can we have access to it?
Sir Denis O'Connor: I am certain you can have access to it. I am sure the Commissioner would agree to that. There is an article to go with it you and there is a little presentation that will show you the effects about covering off the risks, which I will make available.
Q232 Tim Loughton: I think that would be useful. Can I go on to the issue of funding? In your experience, what is the correlation between funding levels and frequency of levels of violence and the knife crime we are talking about at the moment? Where do you think the Government could get most bang for their buck on this £100 million allocated to deal with knife crimes?
Sir Denis O'Connor: This may sound a little bit of a repeat but if you go back to the serious violence strategy, which is the extant document we have for government policy, I would commend that we did the kind of analysis of places that is absent in that document. There is an assumption about hotspots. This is basically our methodology at Cambridge: we look at the places, the victims, the offenders and we look for repeats. I would get the analysis of places done, particularly in those seven forces. If you did that, alongside an analysis of victims, who a lot of people are talking about, but I have not seen a single really strong piece of work about their world. I am prepared to accept lots of candidate issues around it and social media and other things.
I would spend a bit of money on this because it is a bit like if you are unwell and people say to you, "Just have a physio" or whatever, my inclination is, "Let's have an MRI and look at your back". I think we need a bit of an MRI for this. We are smart enough surely now to do that. If you keep talking about disease—for goodness sake, Dr John Snow did this, didn't he, in 1854 and tracked cholera back to a pump in Broad Street? I would want to get a much better hold of the scale and how we might tackle the risk in order to make a good recommendation to you about spending the money. But I certainly think that money will be well spent because it will give a method to tackling these things, where they sweep beyond one police force and they generate lots of public concern. This will not be the only event we come across like this.
That kind of methodology is a good methodology to use. If you look at that strategy you have quite a lot about offenders, almost nothing on places apart from one reference to Bedfordshire and again a gap on victims. It is silent on deterrents. As a sequence to do things, to come back in a very long-winded way to your answer, I think spending some money on deterrents, providing it is focused, is a good thing. I am sure there is a calculation to be made there on overtime, but if you were asking me as ex-Chief HMI to do that, I would do quite a lot of scrutiny of it before I gave you a good answer. The way I would get to the answer would be to look at the scale of the problem, what risk we wanted to cover, and I would set out how I would do that.
Q233 Tim Loughton: Even after all of the studies and the taskforce and the roundtables and everything that has happened, we are still unsure about the nature of the underlying problem and that it is certainly not simply a question of the numbers of boots on the street from uniformed or ununiformed officers. How big a part do you think that will play as a potential solution? Why is it spiking at the moment, do you think?
Sir Denis O'Connor: I am not going to claim to know all of that. What I do know is that since 2010 there has been a significant reduction in the deterrent effect of the police. There are some numbers in your own stocktake that reflected a rather generous take on neighbourhood policing at a 35% reduction. I would say it is much greater than that. You are after all talking to the person who ran the programme to produce the evidence for it. By neighbourhood policing I mean problem-solving neighbourhood policing. I do not mean something that is labelled as neighbourhood policing because it is a good brand.
I have a number of studies that show a pretty significant reduction in the response by police to calls where things are actually being graded out on calls. There is a reduction of that. We know that there is a reduction in patrols and presence because if you look at the HMIC numbers it says in 2010 about 50% of policing was local policing. It is currently running at about 35%. Part of that has been to take people who might have been patrol officers, who might have been response officers, out of neighbourhood police and it has a cumulating effect. First, you have fewer of them and, secondly, they are doing more complex things. To give you a feel for that, if you look from 2007 to 2017 at their work in dealing with high harm crimes—sex offences, child abuse, domestic abuse—all of that kind of territory has more than doubled.
What you often get is people talking about one thing, but you have to look, like any business, at the trade-offs. If they are doing that and there are fewer of them, there are significantly fewer deterrents. To the point, and your point in your previous report, about relevance in some people's eyes is an issue. There are remedies to that and because the police service—and we have to acknowledge this at some point—is less of a Rolls-Royce and more of an everyday car where all the bits are not as perfect as we would like them to be, so when we want to change them we need to be aware of that.
There are things I would do now about neighbourhood policing because of the dynamics we are in and this is just one of those problems. I would go into a restorative programme about neighbourhood policing. I would definitely do something about digital policing and capacity, and I would do something about capable leadership of police capability to help manage the trade-offs better.
I do not know anyone who could tell you why this has all come together, but what I do know is that our first line of protection—we went through this sort of thing in the Olympics—our first layer, is the police, police deterrents. That has been breached and it continues to be breached. We need to restore that and suffer the fact it will be a less than perfect solution. If we can focus it, I have indicated how we might do that. You will get some value for money. More important than that, you will get some effect on what is happening, this chemistry that we have heard about this morning. That is what I could say with confidence. It needs scrutinising.
I want to leave you with the point that I think if you look at all the issues where you have found them wanting in your stocktake and you look at the HMIC issue, we really have to grip the idea that police capability—and it is not the fault of the individuals who are serving now—rather like the capability of Government in some ways, is not up to this dynamic. The question then is what to do. That is the point and that is where I would tend to focus this.
Chris Green: I was going to say about the funding, but I think it has been covered.
Q234 Chair: A final reflection. How much do you think that the changing drug market is behind the current increase in serious violence?
Sir Denis O'Connor: Another piece of work of ours, about three years ago, by a guy called John Hallworth, took Essex as a case study. It is a case study of county lines and it shows how the mechanism went to work. Reading that, it looked like a franchise operation supported by quite extreme violence. It was as though we found Kentucky Fried was the best thing ever and how were we going to move that into this area, and he documents that over a period of time.
It undoubtedly contributes to what is going on, but I think it is too much to attribute that as being necessarily the major effect. We would need a lot more work to unravel exactly what is going on. What is going on is a lot of areas where a number of things in relation to kids and schools and the absence of police and other agencies are a fact of life. Of that much I am sure.
Q235 Chair: Sir Denis, thank you very much for your time this morning. We appreciate it.
Sir Denis O'Connor: Thank you. I will make that study material available to you because I think you will find it interesting.
Chair: That would be really helpful. If there is anything else that strikes you that would be useful evidence for us, that would be really helpful as well.