Home Affairs Committee

Oral evidence: Serious Violence, HC 1016

Tuesday 26 March 2019

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 26 March 2019.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Sir Christopher Chope; Stephen Doughty; Kate Green; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald.

Questions 236–330

Witnesses

I: Professor Fiona Measham, Professor of Criminology, University of Durham; Steve Rodhouse, Director General (Operations), National Crime Agency; Harry Shapiro, Director, Drugwise; and Dr Michael Shiner, Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics.

II: Cressida Dick CBE QPM, Commander of the Metropolitan Police Service; and Chief Constable Dave Thompson QPM, West Midlands Police.

Written evidence from witnesses:

– National Crime Agency

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Fiona Measham, Steve Rodhouse, Harry Shapiro and Dr Michael Shiner.

Q236       Chair: Welcome to this Home Affairs Select Committee evidence session in our serious violence inquiry. I welcome our first panel here this morning. First, I will ask you to quickly introduce yourselves. Professor Measham?

Professor Measham: My name is Fiona Measham. I am Professor of Criminology at Durham University, and I am also a director of The Loop.

Steve Rodhouse: Good morning. My name is Steve Rodhouse. I am the National Crime Agency’s Director General for Operations.

Harry Shapiro: I am Harry Shapiro, and I am director of Drugwise, which is an online drug information service.

Dr Shiner: Hello, everybody. I am Michael Shiner. I am an associate professor at the London School of Economics in the Social Policy Department, and I am also a member of StopWatch, which is an organisation that campaigns for fair and effective policing.

Q237       Chair: Thank you very much. I have two initial opening questions to ask you. First, what changing patterns do you see in drug markets and in drug use at the moment? My second question is: how do you see that impacting on serious violence? Could I confine you first to the first question? Give us a quick overview of what you see changing in the drugs market. We will start with Dr Shiner.

Dr Shiner: Okay. If I could perhaps just row back a little bit, because I think it is really important that we are precise and careful when we are discussing increases in serious violence.

Q238       Chair: I do not want to discuss serious violence first; that is my second question. First, I just want to understand what is happening at the moment in terms of illicit drug use and drug markets. My second question, which I will come back to, is: how do you see that having an impact, or not, on serious violence?

Dr Shiner: I think we need to understand the role that violence can play in drug markets in order to answer that question, and I think there are certain characteristics around drug markets that would lead us to believe that violence could play a significant role. First, it is hugely profitable; secondly, there is no formal regulation mechanism whereby disputes can be resolved. That said, the evidence seems to indicate that the role of actual violence is often overstated.

Q239       Chair: Again, I am also keen to know about, for example, things like trends in drug use, or other trends in the drug market. I will just pause you on the violence links and will come back to that as the second issue. If you want to answer only the second question, I will come back to that, and I can just hear about the drug market first from the rest of the panel.

Dr Shiner: The drug market is never entirely stable, but if we look at the key indicators of prevalence, price and purity, then the drug market appears to be reasonably stable. Certainly in terms of prevalence levels, we are well below the peak that we were at in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Trends of the last five years have been pretty stable. That said, there does seem to be some evidence of an increase in class A drug use, particularly driven by ecstasy and powder cocaine. Purity levels have increased, and that may suggest an increase in composition. However, the trend in increasing purity goes back to 2011, so it predates the increase in serious violence. There has been no corresponding decrease in price, which would suggest that maybe that is not being driven by competition. I would say that in general, the drug market, broadly speaking, appears to be pretty stable.

Harry Shapiro: Yes, I would broadly agree with that. In recent years there have been upticks in ecstasy and powder cocaine use, and the report Public Health England published yesterday indicated an increase in crack use as well, which is, I am sure, linked to the availability and purity levels of cocaine that is around in the country. I think what has changed in recent years is less the nature of the market, and more the access points for people to obtain drugs, and that is very closely linked to new technology in all its guises—everything from being able to buy retail and wholesale on the internet, either through the dark web or the clear web, through to people having dealers on speeddial on their phones, drones flying over prison walls, and people buying drugs on social media, on Facebook and on Instagram.

I think the access points have dramatically increased. The stereotypical view of a guy hanging around on the street corner trying to sell drugs to people clearly still exists, but it has become much broader than that. Add to that the fact that we have what you might call a delivery economy now, whereby people can have anything delivered 24/7. There are dealers who go into pubs and clubs with little business cards that literally say, “24/7” and you just call the guy up and he is around there on his scooter. That kind of breadth of access has probably been one of the key changes, rather than necessarily an increase in the number of users.

Steve Rodhouse: I agree with what has been said. Here is some more context in terms of the production of class A drugs in particular: we are aware of significant increases in production of heroin originating in Afghanistan—even over the last year, there has been an increase of over 80% in production. Similarly, in relation to cocaine, largely coming from Colombia, there has been a 120% increase in production since 2012. That would appear to reflect strong demand worldwide. Absolutely we are seeing high levels of purity of those drugs—relatively stable, but high. That has been said.

In terms of price, again, we do not report any significant change in street prices. There are some fluctuations, but it is not significant. We are seeing some evidence of a two-tier market for pricing and purity in the cocaine market; effectively, you pay more for a purer product. We are seeing some evidence of that. In terms of new trends, I would agree with what Harry has said in terms of the prevalence of technology, but I draw a distinction between people using WhatsApp and other social media applications to order their drugs but then receiving it in a broadly traditional way, and people using the dark web. The dark web is a very small proportion of the drugs market, because the practicalities are that you need to order it, and you need to wait longer, and so it is not supporting the sort of drugs market that we might traditionally have been talking about.

There is a new trend that is concerning but very, very small, of course. You have heard of the prevalence of fentanyl in the States. We are seeing some evidence of the supply of fentanyl using the dark web. That comes from the Far East, and we would say that is linked to over 140 UK deaths. It is a small but obviously very significant trend. From our point of view, that is slightly harder to police, because the physical quantities involved are that much smaller and therefore easier to secrete. I will stop there, if I may.

Professor Measham: Echoing some of the things that have already been said, prevalence is high but fluctuating in the UK; it is high compared with the rest of Europe. Our prices are low in the international context. I think a couple of the key trends relate to purity; we have the highest purity rates of record, particularly for class A drugs like MDMA and cocaine, and as Mike said, without a rise in price. In real terms, drugs have become cheaper. That has had a knock-on effect, in that we have the highest drug-related deaths rate we have ever had. That is linked to high purity.

One of the things that has only been touched on, but which I think is probably one of the most important trends of the past 10 years, is the emergence of and the increase in new psychoactive substances, previously called legal highs. These are research chemicals that are very cheap, and often of very high potency. Fentanyl is one concern, but you also have synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones, which were originally replacements for illegal drugs, but now are illegal. We are seeing that they are starting to be mis-sold as the traditional illegal drugs—fentanyl for opiates, the cathinones instead of MDMA, and things like that. That is probably the biggest new concern, including for criminal justice and law enforcement, because there are hundreds of these new substances.

Q240       Chair: Can I ask you then—we will go back in the reverse order—what do you see as being the links between what is happening in the drugs market and serious violence?

Professor Measham: Picking up on what I said just then about new psychoactive substances, there have been challenges in terms of detection, because these are new substances—traditional methods of detection have not been possible—and also in terms of the rapidity of the scale of their manufacture and retail. Harry mentioned the internet, the dark web, and phone apps where people can buy drugs. The scale is something we have never seen before, and the same goes for the speed of development of the drugs and the speed of the retail practices in relation to them. Those are particular challenges, but this is predominantly being driven by the fact that it is an illegal market and there is massive demand, and supply will go to any lengths to reach that demand because it is profit-driven.

Steve Rodhouse: I would absolutely agree with that. In my 25 years as a police officer, the link between drugs and serious violence on the streets has become apparent. Whether it be around turf wars, enforcing respect, or enforcing debts, there is clearly a link between serious violence and drugs. Of course, that is not the whole picture. The serious violence picture is complicated, and it would be wrong to overstate the role of drugs, which is significant, but not the complete picture. I know the Committee has already taken evidence around the county lines phenomenon. This may be an update on the evidence that you took. The latest analysis around the link between the county lines model of drug dealing and violence would say that 13% of the identified county lines can be linked to violence. In 9% of county lines cases, we would assess that the lines can access firearms. There is a crossover there.

Q241       Chair: To be clear on that percentage, 13% of county lines are linked to incidents of violent crime?

Steve Rodhouse: Yes.

Q242       Chair: What was your second figure?

Steve Rodhouse: With 9% of those county lines, it is assessed that elements of that network will have access to firearms. There is a not very obvious crossover there between the distribution model for drugs and the use of violence. Of course, county lines typically will exploit young people to move drugs across the country and to control that market at their end destination. That involves young people and the prevalence of violence is that much higher. The very model of county lines—exporting a commodity from one place to the next—is aimed at taking over a market. Really, that is where the violence comes in—where you have competition, and a destabilised drugs market where two parties or more are competing for the same market.

Drugs is an industry driven by profit. Profit will motivate violence, and particularly where there are young people exploited to carry out the work of those organised crime groups, the violence can be quite prevalent, particularly where they are engaging with violent street gangs, where the use of knives and weapons is relatively common. That is where I think you see a crossover between the drugs trade and effectively a prevalence of violence in society, because there is undoubtedly a crossover between the individuals involved in violence and the drugs trade. That is not necessarily to say that the incidence of violence on that occasion is motivated by a drug deal. It could equally be a matter of respect or a falling out. It is very difficult, and policing colleagues will no doubt repeat this, to assess whether a violent incident in its own right has been motivated by a drug trade or something else.

Harry Shapiro: This is not particularly my area of expertise, except to say that county lines has made a difference. There was a time before people were talking about county lines when gangs would come out from the major cities and go into other areas, but would supply drugs to the local dealer networks and then go home again. That is not happening any more. Of course, when you have, as Steve says, people trying to take over turf, inevitably there is going to be some violence. I also agree that it is sometimes very hard to disentangle exactly what is going on and whether you are just talking about feuds and turf wars, where drugs may or may not be involved. It feels to me that this is more likely to be happening at a street level, the way it is reported in the media. 

In the main, violence is bad for business, because when you start going up the dealing chain, it attracts too much attention. It certainly attracts the attention of the police, the media, and all the rest of it. As you go higher up the chain, the people who probably never, ever touch the drugs and are certainly not involved in direct dealing do not want that level of attention. Of course, once it gets down to a street level, then all sorts of other factors come into play, as Steve has just identified. You have a lot of product out there now, certainly a lot of cocaine, and a lot of people involved because they can see the profits that can be made, particularly when you have people living in poor, disadvantaged and deprived communities where the opportunities to make serious amounts of money prove too tempting. Despite all the chaos, violence and mayhem that goes with it, nevertheless if you are a 15 or 16-year-old with literally fivers coming out of your pocket, the temptation is huge. But it comes at a price.

Dr Shiner: It is important that we do not think primarily of the link between violence and drug markets in causal terms. I would say that it is much better to think of those things as being symptoms of a common problem. It is important to note that the number of homicides in recent years that the police link to drugs has increased, but as a proportion of all homicides it has remained pretty stable. What that tells us is that drug-related homicide is increasing at about the same rate as other forms of homicide. If we look at the spatial distribution of homicide, we see clusters, and we see overlaps with other signs of distress. The communities that have heightened rates of homicide also tend to have heightened rates of suicide. They also tend to be the communities where drug-related harms are concentrated. They also tend to be communities that have high rates of poverty and high rates of deprivation.

I would say essentially that the best way of thinking about violence, and the relationship between violence and drug markets, is that these are both symptomatic of a common cause, which is inequality, poverty, and deprivation.

Q243       Chair: Is that the same if you look at stabbings, or incidents of knife crime, as opposed to homicides?

Dr Shiner: I do not know that data so well, but given that stabbings are the majority of homicides, I would suspect that, yes, absolutely that is the case.

Q244       Chair: Do you have an assessment of what proportion of those stabbings involve people who are involved in drug networks, even if the particular incident itself was not drug related?

Dr Shiner: That data has not been disaggregated by mode of homicide. We know that approximately 11% of homicides are linked by the police to people who are known to be drug dealers. We do not have figures—as far as I know, I haven’t seen the figures—disaggregated by mode of homicide.

Q245       Chair: Do you see any further links in terms of changing patterns of serious violence and what is driving the increase in serious violence?

Dr Shiner: I would say the increase in serious violence is a predictable outcome of the experiment of austerity, with sharp public spending cuts in the context of gross inequality. We know that child poverty is increasing. We know that homicide rates peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, approximately 10 to 15 years after we saw the sharpest rise in inequality in the post-war period. I suspect that the uptick that we are seeing now is part of a longer-term trend that is going to be driven by the experiences of children and young people in the context of austerity, in the context of increases in child poverty.

Q246       Kate Green: I will ask a little more about drug use. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, has been very critical of middle-class drug users. Are you able to say a little bit about the evidence of drug use among different groups and, if any, what impact that might be having on supply networks? I do not know who would like to start on that one.

Harry Shapiro: I was looking at the figures for this yesterday—the latest figures from the crime survey for England and Wales, and powder cocaine use by household income. For people earning under £10,000 in the household, it was about 2% of 16 to 59-year-olds using powder cocaine. For people earning £50,000 or more, it was about 3.4%. The percentage gap between rich, middle-income and whichever socioeconomic demographic is not huge.

I do remember that when Sir Ian Blair took over in the Met in 2005, he was making the same kinds of statements that we hear now about middle-class drug use. Anyone who is using drugs is making some contribution to the situation that pertains in far-off lands—in Colombia, Afghanistan, and places like that. I am not so sure that pointing the finger particularly at middle-class drug users is all that useful.

There also seems to be a trope that says something like, “These are the people who are also concerned about global warming, climate change and all the rest of it.” At the risk of being slightly facetious, if you are hoovering up cocaine in a posh west-end nightclub, are you really the same kind of person who is worried about global warming and climate change? I am not so sure about that. I was talking to an officer not that long ago whose patch is in the black country, in Stoke and places like that, which is a significant hub of social deprivation and poverty. He said the two most popular drugs on the streets there are alcohol and cocaine. This is an across-the-board situation not really focusing too much on individual socio-demographic groups, I would say.

Steve Rodhouse: From a National Crime Agency point of view, I do not have data on the socioeconomic groups that use cocaine, but I will make the point that regardless of who uses cocaine, they are contributing towards a market driving the demand for a product that creates misery both in the countries in which it is produced and the networks that lead it to the streets of the UK. It is absolutely right that people who take cocaine, from whatever their background, are contributing towards a threat. From a National Crime Agency point of view, our focus is on tackling the supply of the commodity into the country, and that is not differentiated by whose dinner table it is going to end up on. It does not impact on our strategies as an organisation.

Professor Measham: It depends why people are taking the drugs and which drugs they are taking. I would say for daily dependants, proper drug users, that is more likely to be linked to low-income groups and multiple deprivation, but that is probably under 5% of drug users. For 95% of drug users, we characterise their use as recreational—party drugs, club drugs, things like cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis. For them it is a much wider socio-demographic group. You are more likely to find more women involved in that drug use, and also more middle-income groups as well. It depends on which drug use you are looking at.

On cocaine and the impact on the environment, I guess there are groups who are concerned about responsible or ethical consumption of coffee, chocolate and possibly cocaine, but they do not have that option for cocaine. That might be a driver for some of their other purchasing and consumption habits, but is not really possible in relation to cocaine. It is an illegal market, and that is the situation that they are in. I guess their desire to buy the drug outweighs any ethical consumer responsibility that they might feel.

Dr Shiner: I will make a couple of points. It is important to say that while drug harms and drug use in their most harmful manifestations are related to class and deprivation, drug use generally is not very strongly. General rates, particularly for recreational drug use, are not strongly related to social class. Middle-class drug users have been at the forefront of drug trends in the UK since the 1960s, if you think of Bohemian youth, the use of cannabis in the 1960s, and the use of LSD. I would also say that the comments do not really reflect at all where street-level police activity is. If we look at street-level police activity around drugs, it is very much focused on ethnically diverse, deprived communities.

One of the striking findings of some recent work that I did is if you look at the percentage of stop and search that is focused on drugs, one of the forces that has the lowest rate is the City of London. I do not suppose that is indicative at all of the level of drug use, perhaps cocaine use, evident in the City. What those comments raise for me are fundamental questions about differential enforcement of drug laws and the way in which drug laws are really doubling down on already marginalised communities.

Q247       Kate Green: Picking up the points that you have made about drug use among the poorest and most deprived communities, one of the manifestations that I think many of us observe is what appears to public perception to be an increase, particularly in my city of Manchester, in the use of Spice among street homeless and other very, very marginalised people. Would you say that recent concerns about that substance and synthetic cannabinoids are proportionate to the scale of the problem the country is facing, and to what extent would you be worried about this emerging substance?

Dr Shiner: I would say there are probably other people on the panel that are best placed to talk specifically about these substances. My contribution would be to say that I think there is always a risk that we get preoccupied with specific substances and some of the mythology around the effects. That is not to say that certain substances do not have particularly damaging effects, but for me the key issue is that that is a distraction from the underlying driving factors at work. When we are talking about problematic drug use, the underlying factors are the same—trauma, emotional distress, poverty, and disadvantage—and they are the key factors that we should be focusing on, regardless of the specific substance being used.

Harry Shapiro: Yes. Most of the people who are using Spice are people on the streets who are homeless, and who are almost certainly heroin and crack users as well. They have mental health problems and they are in and out of prison. They fall between every kind of stool you can possibly think of, and Spice has just come along to add to the repertoire of anything that makes you forget about the miserable life that you are leading. It is no more complicated than that. Part of the public concern—or moral panic, depending on your point of view—about Spice is the fact that people were going around taking mobile phone shots of people zombied-out on the streets, and that has created a certain amount of media interest, whereas if somebody was in a similar state having drunk half a bottle of vodka, nobody would really have been that bothered, even though they would have been in a very similar state.

Obviously Spice has caused a lot of problems in prisons as well, with there being some very innovative ways of getting that particular drug into prisons.

As an aside on all of this, the whole phenomenon of synthetic cannabinoids, which have been around for about the last 10 years or so, does lead me to think that if we perhaps had taken a slightly more pragmatic and proportionate response to cannabis, per se, we might not have the problems we have now. There are other countries that have taken a different tack on cannabis that do not have a Spice problem at all, or only in a very small way. There is a level of unintended consequence going on here. That is a matter for an entirely different debate, but it is an important point to make anyway.

Steve Rodhouse: The NCA’s role is primarily around tackling the supply of these commodities. What we see is that organised crime groups will supply a wide range of drugs, including Spice. We will target the OCG rather than necessarily the commodity. Really, the NCA does not have great visibility on the impacts at street level. We do work incredibly hard with colleagues in the prison service, because as Harry has said, Spice as a drug is taken often by homeless people, but also quite a lot within the prison service as well. It is worth saying that there are challenges around the response to Spice. It is a very versatile substance. It can be absorbed in a number of different ways. It is very potent. It presents challenges for law enforcement, particularly in the smuggling environment, and particularly into prisons.

Q248       Kate Green: Why is that drug in particular being smuggled into prisons, and as Harry was saying, under new methodologies?

Harry Shapiro: Because, for example, the synthetic cannabinoid liquid can be absorbed into paper. People would send letters in, but the letters were opened by prison staff and photocopied before being given to the prisoners, so they could not do it. But prison staff, as far as I am aware, are not allowed to open letters from solicitors to offenders. What happened then was that people were creating fake solicitor letters. There is always an attempt to stay one step ahead and it is the particular formulation of that drug that makes it hard to detect, as opposed to heroin, crack, cannabis, or any of the other drugs.

Kate Green: I apologise, Mr Rodhouse, I interrupted you.

Steve Rodhouse: No, that is fine.

Professor Measham: To add to this, part of the problem with synthetic cannabinoids has been that the first generation was prohibited, so we had a second generation that was more harmful, and then those were banned, and then we had a third generation that were more harmful than those, and those were banned, and we are now on the fourth and possibly fifth generations of synthetic cannabinoids. This is part of the perverse consequence of Parliament having banned each of the previous generations.

Another  point to make is that before the first generation was banned, they were being legally sold in head shops. There was a concern about that, although some of the head shops were only selling to over 18s, and some were only selling to people who seemed to be compos mentis. In my research I found there were some responsible retailers of synthetic cannabinoids. However, the head shops were closed down and the substances were banned.

What we saw was a shift to street dealers. In my work in the north of England, we found that the street dealers would be selling to people of any age. They would take credit; they would take pocket money; they would even exchange the drug for clothes. They would have a cash-for-clothes scheme. I interviewed people from the local Salvation Army hostel, and they said that people were stealing the sheets off their beds to go and exchange them for synthetic cannabinoids. We have this totally unregulated street market, and these people would particularly be targeting the most poor and disadvantaged groups because it was a drug that was very, very cheap, and very potent, and would achieve a state of, basically, oblivion, which is what they wanted to seek for the reasons that Mike Shiner just mentioned: these are people who want to forget about the problems in their lives, and that is a drug that does that.

Q249       Kate Green: Mr Shapiro has already touched on one reason—but it was not, perhaps, drug harm and drug-related deaths—for why our rates of use of these substances are different from other European and other countries. Are there any other comments you would like to make to contrast the UK’s experience of drug harm with what we see in other countries that might point to a different policy response?

Professor Measham: A few things. We have among the highest prevalence rates in Europe anyway. We have very cheap, very easily available drugs, as we have said. We have high purity, and along with that we have had a massive cut to health services and to treatment services. I guess we have had a perfect storm, which has led to us having the highest drug-related death rate on record, and the highest drug-related death rate in Europe. It is a national disaster at the moment.

Q250       Kate Green: Why do we have the highest rates of purity?

Professor Measham: That is a good question. I think it is partly driven by demand, because we have the highest drug-related death rates in Europe. I think also there is recognition that the police are now focusing on organised crime and less on street-level dealers. I think more drugs are coming through into the country and getting on to the street. Generally, it has been recognised that we have a different enforcement situation, and we also have a different legislation situation form the rest of Europe. For example, several European countries have de facto or actual decriminalisation. We are probably increasingly out of kilter with other European countries in terms of our drug policy.

Q251       Chair: Any other comments? And do not feel you need to add something if you do not have an answer.

Dr Shiner: Looking at other jurisdictions, Portugal appears to have had a successful phase of drug policy. I cannot specifically comment on serious violence in Portugal, but many of the drug-related harms have decreased alongside the process of decriminalisation. Generally, the expert opinion seems to be that it is not so much the decriminalisation as the investment in inclusion processes that seems to have been key in driving that forward. Portugal is certainly worth looking at.

Q252       Chair: Are there figures on the serious violence front available?

Dr Shiner: I will have a look. I am not sure.

Q253       Stuart C. McDonald: Following up on one or two of the answers to Kate Green’s questions, Professor Measham, would you basically say that the Psychoactive Substances Act that we passed a couple of years ago was the wrong approach to take, based on what you said there?

Professor Measham: Yes.

Q254       Stuart C. McDonald: Okay. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Professor Measham: In my research and in other people’s research we have seen that it has been a driver to increased harm, because we have criminalised the whole market. We have had a situation where it has been a driver to increasingly problematic drugs—substances that we do not necessarily even know the effects of. It has escalated the speed of manufacturing and the speed of development of these new drugs. I guess the alternatives would have been to perhaps consider that across Europe they have had rankings of harm, rather than outright criminalisation of all substances. Elsewhere, they focus on health, rather than criminal justice responses to these different substances.

One interesting thing is that if you talk to drug users, there was not necessarily a strong demand for many of these substances. They have leaked on to the market and are increasingly being mis-sold as replacements for traditional illegal drugs. We are seeing that to be more and more the case now. It is not necessarily about demand; it is that they are getting into the hands of organised crime and being sold instead of the drugs that people would prefer. I think it is about stricter Government control over these substances.

Q255       Stuart C. McDonald: Any other comments on the Psychoactive Substances Act?

Harry Shapiro: To be honest, it was a political no-brainer, in the sense that you had powerful psychoactive drugs being sold on the High Street, and also there was this whack-a-mole thing going on where you would ban something, and then they would tweak the molecule, and then you would ban it, and they would tweak the molecule. It was an attempt to try to shut that down. Certainly in terms of head shop sales, it ticked the political boxes that needed to be ticked. However, as Fiona said, it is that old cliché about unintended consequences. It achieved its political aim, but there have been some health deficits as a result.

Q256       Stuart C. McDonald: Thank you very much. Turning to the more general overview of Government drug policy—Dr Shiner, perhaps I could start with you—what would be your assessment of the aims and the effectiveness of the current policy? Is there sufficient leadership at a national level, and in particular is it appropriate for the Home Office to be driving this, rather than, for example, the Department of Health?

Dr Shiner: Big questions. I would say that the direction that drug policy has gone in in the last five to 10 years is unfortunate in many ways. We have seen the marginalisation of harm reduction at the same time as we have seen increases in drug-related deaths. We have seen reductions in the numbers of people entering into treatment at the same time as we have seen reductions in the numbers of people who are on heroin scripts, all of which points to there being a link, potentially, between drug policy and drug-related harm. I think the explicit move towards a drug policy that is rooted in abstinence is at the very least optimistic, let us say.

We have heard about drugs in prisons. We cannot ensure that contained environments as security-focused as prisons are drug-free. Recent Governments have scarcely been able to ensure that the Cabinet is drug-free, if you can believe social media and the popular press. The idea that we can have a drug policy built around abstinence is optimistic. Crucially, it sets the police an impossible task. It ties the police into a series of activities that magnify the problem in many circumstances. Policing is an important factor in the way in which drug markets operate, and the police can do things that make drug markets more or less harmful and violent. Unfortunately, the effect of a lot of traditional enforcement activity appears to have led to increases in drug-market violence.

If we freed police from the idea that the aim is to ensure abstinence in a drug-free society, and we said to the police, “What we want you to focus on is reducing drug-related harm. Drug-related deaths are a metric by which we will assess you. Drug-market violence is a metric by which we will assess you”, then you would free the police to follow evidence-based policing in ways that could have a positive impact on those things. The current narrative and discourse around county lines is deeply unfortunate. It is failing to learn many lessons. It is, in many ways, pushing towards the traditional kind of enforcement activity, which can be counterproductive. It is further entrenching gross racial disparities in drug enforcement activity. 

We already know, for example, that more black people are being convicted and prosecuted for cannabis possession than for the supply of class A and B drugs combined. The reality is that the majority of street-level policing is focused on cannabis possession. It is not focused on organised crime and it is not focused on drug supply. We know that black people are being prosecuted for cannabis possession at 11 and 12 times the rate of white people, even though their levels of self-reported use are lower. County lines enforces all this, because county lines is racially coded. County lines, like gangs, is a way of focusing law-enforcement activity on black people without saying that is what you are doing.

Harry Shapiro: Drug policies generally do not fix drug problems on their own. We have made reference to homelessness, mental health problems, and people being in and out of prison. I have been in this field for about 40 years, and the only area where I could see drug policy making a difference to people’s lives is treatment and rehabilitation. In the decade of the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw a substantial increase in the numbers of people getting into treatment. I lost count of the number of people I have spoken to over the years who have said, “If it was not for—insert your particular rehab or community drug agency here—I would not be here”.

Treatment makes a huge difference to many people’s lives. It also helps to reduce drug-related crime and drug-related deaths. Drug policy’s main function, as far as I am concerned, is to help the people at the bottom, but it cannot do it by itself. I know we have a homelessness strategy at the moment. There has been talk about increasing money for mental health services, and we have had various transforming rehabilitations—I cannot remember the exact name of the policy to do with trying to reduce reoffending, and so on. However, none of these policies seem to join up, and where they do join up is for the people who are at the bottom on the streets who are suffering from all these things—from drugs, from homelessness, from mental health problems, and from constant reoffending. They are the people at the bottom, and you have lots of parallel strategies that do not seem to join up.

Then, of course, as has been mentioned, you have some serious cuts in public services over the last decade or so, and a youth service that hardly exists anymore. I know of treatment agencies that are refusing to pick up local council tenders for drug-treatment services because they are saying, “We cannot deliver a quality service for the amount of money you are offering us”. There are lots issues in your question.

Professor Measham: Yes, I think we need a holistic approach rather than a fragmented approach to drug policy. There are some benefits to having it based within one Government Department; whether the Home Office is the right one or not is up for debate. Some people would like to see it moved to the Department of Health, but I would say there is also a benefit to thinking about drugs not just as a criminal justice or a health problem, but also in relation to cultural aspects of UK life. I am thinking about the fact that we have a vibrant nightlife that is worth £66 billion to the economy. We have a vibrant festival industry worth £2.5 million to the economy. UK music clubs and culture are also linked in with recreational drug use. We have to see it as a complex issue that links in with all sorts of other aspects of British life.

In terms of what has been happening since 2010 with drug policy, the big concerns have been raised by the others—a shift to an abstinence-based recovery agenda and away from harm reduction. We have seen the closure of fantastic harm-reduction services, which existed 20 years ago but no longer do, and cuts to public health services and to the criminal justice system. However, one light at the end of the tunnel from my perspective is that this year the Home Office for the first time has given a licence for drug safety testing after the first festival drug safety testing was introduced three years ago. There could be some signs that things are moving in a different direction.

Q257       Stuart C. McDonald: On the other hand, an example of the shift in approach to abstinence is the Government’s resistance to the drug consumption rooms. It seems to work elsewhere. Is there any good reason why they are putting up this fight?

Professor Measham: I would imagine that that will be changing in the not-too-distant future. If we look at the evidence in relation to drug consumption rooms around the world, or the ones already existing, I know they have many, many overdoses in the Sydney and Melbourne drug consumption rooms, and no one has ever died of an overdose within those facilities. They do fantastic work. The more that people understand the evidence on that, the more they will see that drug consumption rooms are a no-brainer and they will be introduced, just as has happened in relation to drug safety testing.

Q258       Stuart C. McDonald: Finally, three of you have already spoken about the effect of cuts on drug treatment, particularly at a local level. Does that have an impact on demand for illegal drugs? Dr Shiner, do you want to go first?

Dr Shiner: I was going to support the point on consumption rooms and say that the same point applies to heroin-assisted treatment. The international evidence on heroin-assisted treatment is strong. We had a really important study led by John Strang in 2010 and 2011 highlighting the effectiveness of heroin-assisted treatment for entrenched heroin users, and it was on the Government agenda. There was a commitment in previous drug strategies to providing heroin to all of those who had a clinical need for it. As far as I am aware, that is erased from any official thinking around drug policy, and I think it really needs to be inserted centrally into that.

As for “Has austerity impacted upon demand?” I would have predicted it would. I would have predicted that we would see an increase in the more problematic forms of drug use. Increase in addiction has historically been very strongly related to deindustrialisation and economic deprivation indicators. That said, I do not see the signs of that. One of the key factors is that those kinds of social indicators tend to lead to sharp increases in drug use when they are connected to changes in supply. I do not think we have seen the big changes in supply alongside that.

When we saw the heroin epidemics in the 1980s, we also saw deep-seated economic changes in the midst of very substantial changes to drug supply. I think it was those things coming together that created the so-called heroin epidemics, as we saw them then. I do not think we have seen those changes in supply this time around, so we have not seen the big increases in problematic drug use in areas of poverty and deprivation in the way that you might expect.

Q259       Stuart C. McDonald: Does the underfunding of treatment in particular have a knock-on effect?

Dr Shiner: Yes. The issue is that if people are not on a script for heroin through treatment, they will rely more heavily on street supply of unknown purity and strength, and we would expect that that would lead to many more overdose deaths. Obviously, it is very complicated, and it is very difficult to isolate causal factors, but the key indicators seem to be pointing towards that as being an issue.

Harry Shapiro: Something like half the heroin-related deaths involve people who are not in treatment and have been nowhere near a treatment system. As far as I am aware, no one is looking specifically at why people are not coming forward for treatment. Part of the answer is that apart from the fact that opioid substitute treatment is not exactly flavour of the month these days, people need an incentive to come forward for treatment. This is going to be part of the problem that we have with crack cocaine; there is no particular reason for people to come forward for treatment for crack cocaine because apart from psychotherapy there is no particular treatment option for them. That could be a bit of a concern if the rates of crack cocaine use continue to rise, as they seem to be doing at the moment, where you have people using crack cocaine who were not necessarily pre-existing heroin users.

Chair: If you do not have something to respond to a particular question, do not feel a need to contribute. We want to get through quite a lot more and we have a second panel as well. Christopher Chope.

Q260       Sir Christopher Chope: The National Crime Agency has said that the United Kingdom is one of the most profitable markets for cocaine. Why is that?

Steve Rodhouse: I think it comes down to what seems to be resilient demand, more than anything else. The ratio of wholesale price to market price is broadly comparable across Europe. There is no huge differential there; it is merely the scale of the market, I think.

Q261       Sir Christopher Chope: How many cocaine users do you think there are in the United Kingdom?

Steve Rodhouse: I am afraid I do not have that information. Colleagues may be able to help me with that, but that is not something that I—

Q262       Sir Christopher Chope: Are we talking about millions, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands?

Steve Rodhouse: I would just be guessing. I do not think it is in the millions, but my colleagues might be able to help me out there.

Q263       Sir Christopher Chope: How many of that unspecified number, or what percentage of that number, do you think are what is described as recreational?

Harry Shapiro: I would think probably the majority of people who use cocaine would regard it as, if I can phrase it like this, a weekend treat, rather than something that is an enduring and sustainable addiction. There is no doubt about it: if you want to have a long-term, sustained powder cocaine addiction, you will have to have access to significant disposable income. There is no question about that. The private rehabs would be able to tell you about the people who are there because of what turned out to be a very expensive cocaine habit. I think with any of the drugs that we have been talking about, the majority of people will be what you might call, for want of a better phrase, recreational users, as opposed to people who have a serious addiction whereby all of their activity, all their lifestyle, and all their money is focused on just obtaining the drug. That would be a relatively small percentage of the total population.

Q264       Sir Christopher Chope: I hate the expression “recreational use”, but are you saying that the people who just use cocaine in those circumstances are not doing themselves or anybody else any harm?

Harry Shapiro: Back in the 1990s, the World Health Organisation was saying—this has been proved by their surveys—that very occasional cocaine use was unlikely to cause people serious harm, unless they had underlying health conditions, particularly heart problems or anything like that, because cocaine is a powerful stimulant drug. In the main, though, there was no indication that occasional use was necessarily, of itself, particularly harmful.

Q265       Sir Christopher Chope: We have a situation where the very large number of people who are using cocaine do it because they think it is harmless and it is not causing anybody any problem. In some other countries, the use of drugs is an offence. We have avoided doing that in this country. We say possession of illegal drugs is an offence, but although it is implied in the Misuse of Drugs Act that using drugs would be the offence, it is the possession of them. Do you think we should be going along the lines of saying, “If you use drugs, then you are committing an offence”? Would that deal with the situation, linking more with the public health approach to this? “You cannot smoke inside a hospital; if you do, you are liable to be subject to an offence”, maybe?

Harry Shapiro: That is exactly what the situation in Portugal was before they introduced their new legislation. Up until 1974, they were a military dictatorship; you could be stopped on the streets and if you had track marks on your arms, even if you had no drugs on you, you were sent straight to prison. The net result of that was soaring rates of HIV and AIDS in that country because people were scared to come forward for treatment. That, for that particular country with those sorts of problems, caused a major public health disaster. They had to take some fairly dramatic action to turn that around, which they did. Personally, I think we should be looking at other ways of looking at this, not trying to tighten up. In some countries, you can be executed for drug possession. It doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference. People will find a way.

Q266       Sir Christopher Chope: This takes us back to the turn of the last century, when using cocaine was commonplace. It was not illegal. Why are we in a situation where we are spending a fortune trying to track cocaine coming across from Colombia? The latest figures we have here suggest that 1,000 tonnes of cocaine are produced in Columbia, 30 tonnes of which reaches the United Kingdom, some of which is then confiscated by the authorities, and some of which leads to people going to prison. If the users of this cocaine are essentially regarding themselves as just similar to people who drink a couple of bottles of wine of an evening—it may do them some harm, but it is probably not going to cause them much harm—why are we putting so much resource into this aspect of crime prevention?

Harry Shapiro: Because we have signed up to UN enforcement treaties, the history of which goes back to the 1910s and 1920s. It has a very long and complicated history. Some prohibition is beginning to break down in some countries, but not others. It has a long and complicated history, is all I can say about where we find ourselves now in trying to tackle this.

Q267       Sir Christopher Chope: Do any of our panellists want to change the policy in the light of the question I have asked? Do you think it is going fine? Do you think everything is hunky dory?

Dr Shiner: I would broadly echo Harry. Largely it is about commitment. Policy change is a really difficult thing to bring about, because once people have made a decision about something, particularly a public, high-profile decision like how you are going to manage the drug problem, it is very difficult to row back on it. I also think it is important to consider in whose interests drug policy operates. There are some powerful interest groups for whom drug enforcement and the current system of regulation works to their interests.

As for whether I think it is working, no, I do not. It would be very difficult to make an evidence-based claim that drug policy is a success. We need to think fundamentally about reorienting it. I would echo the point that Harry made: drug policy is not the primary site in which you deal with drug problems. Drug harms are primarily driven by issues that are outside the remit of drug policy. Drug policy can do some things to make harms somewhat more or less evident, but broadly speaking, the greater influence is in other areas of social policy.

Q268       Sir Christopher Chope: If we took some of the money we are spending now on trying to catch cocaine smugglers and spent it on trying to deal with people who are addicts of drugs, might that be a better use of resources?

Dr Shiner: I suppose my answer would be that I am reminded of the conclusion of the book called “The Spirit Level”, which some of you may know. It essentially said that we are constantly engaged in a process of designing solutions to very specific problems, and we seem to be blind to the point that they very often have a common cause. That common cause is inequality. I would say that what we need is a broad political shift whereby inequality is an explicit focus of what we do, and that the answers to what is driving serious violence, or changes and fluctuations in serious violence, are to be found in inequality and poverty.

We do not know precisely the driving mechanisms, but that is because we are not looking in the right place. Yes, some revisions around drug policy could be helpful in moderating existing harms because policy is a net contributor to harm, but in broader terms, dealing with drug problems and drug harms is crucially related to other areas of social policy.

Q269       Sir Christopher Chope: We are concentrating on trying to reduce the supply of cocaine by deterring people from smuggling it in. That is not achieving anything because it will not alter the number of users. What it is doing is giving support and encouragement to illegal drug gangs. If we, for example, had no restrictions on the amount of cocaine coming into this country, would it lead to an exponential increase in the use of cocaine? It does not appear that it necessarily would, but it would certainly put a lot of people in the drug market out of business.

Chair: I will ask Mr Rodhouse only to answer that one, because we need to move on, if that is all right.

Steve Rodhouse: Thank you. I understand the proposition. I think the reality is that if you argue for legalisation, there will still be a market to undercut the legal market, which is a relevant consideration.

I am slightly conflicted here. I have been a police officer for 25 years and most of that time has been spent trying to tackle criminals, many of whom are involved in the drugs trade. But I do agree that it is unlikely that enforcement alone will create a situation where there will not be a market for drugs. The data bears it out. You say we are having no effect. Over the last year, the National Crime Agency, both at our borders and abroad, has had an effect. We have been seizing and intervening with more cocaine than ever before, and very high levels of heroin as well, but as we have heard, that does not translate to a meaningful effect on price, availability or indeed purity.

I do not advocate at all that we should stop having that dampening effect, but it needs to be a balanced law enforcement approach, supported—I could not agree more with what my colleagues on the panel have said—by demand reduction. The approach has to be to keep up the pressure overseas, balanced with targeting the most impactful and high-harm organised crime groups distributing across the country, and investing in the county lines work that is relatively new but has been quite impactful. I hear Michael’s challenges around that, but of course a lot of the work around county lines is tackling those people who are truly exploited to distribute those drugs, and to safeguard them.

Crucially, one of the areas where we must keep up our pressure is focusing on the profits of those crime groups that you talk about. Last year, the National Crime Agency restrained £302 million-worth of criminal assets; not all of that is from the drugs trade. It is a significant amount of money. We are investing in the National Economic Crime Centre, which draws together the private sector, law enforcement and operational partners to tackle illicit finance. The drug game is profit-driven. One of the most impactful ways to impact on those groups is to tackle the money. That has to be our objective.

Q270       Tim Loughton: It has all been pretty depressing so far. We have analysed the problem. Clearly, there is demand. The market is getting more sophisticated, with dual markets and things like that.

In terms of disruption, which we have just started talking about, Mr Rodhouse, what can we do more to disrupt, certainly at the border? Surely there comes a time when stepping up disruption starts to have an impact on the ability of crime gangs to satisfy the market. Does that mean a huge stepping-up before we see an impact, or are they always going to be one step ahead of us?

Steve Rodhouse: I would never admit defeat and say they will always be one step ahead of us. There is a realisation that law enforcement cannot choke off supply to a point where there is no supply. The reality is that most interventions to seize drugs and reduce the ability of organised crime groups to work are based on intelligence. They are based on information, whether from source producing countries, transit countries or the crime groups that we tackle within the UK.

We do need to keep pace with technology. A lot of our ability to operate in that sphere is based on understanding communications. The communications industry is changing, and we need investment to keep pace with that. That is absolutely critical. It is relatively uncommon to achieve significant disruption by stumbling across a significant importation of drugs. More often than not, it is a consequence of good intelligence sharing, relationship-building with countries abroad, and a wide range of law enforcement agencies working closely together.

That has to be the way forward, combined with—as I have rather passionately said—tackling the funding and the illicit finance.

Q271       Tim Loughton: Our figures suggest that the level of seizures has reduced quite substantially over the last decade. The chances of getting away with it appear to be greater than they were previously and, surely, the deterrent factor is just not working.

Steve Rodhouse: The deterrent factor is there at the moment, but clearly, it would be that much less if we were not focusing on doing what we are doing. Production is increasing hugely. You can argue anything on statistics, but the National Crime Agency’s annual report last year talked about the amount of overseas and at-the-border interventions. They are growing. I have looked at the profile for Border Force and policing over the last decade and, of course, it has declined in totality. Over the last four to five years, the number of disruptions and seizures of cocaine has been static. The quantity of drugs seized is on an upward trajectory.

I come back to the point. We can do all of that, and we must continue to have that dampening effect, but crucially, there has to be something that impacts on the demand in the UK. We must tackle this from both angles.

Q272       Tim Loughton: What is the long-term game plan of the NCA?

Steve Rodhouse: It comes to a number of points. We deploy 145 international liaison officers across the world. They are absolutely crucial both as individuals and in the jobs they do. I am not going to talk in this public forum too much about the specifics of what they do, but they provide significant intelligence and engagement with overseas countries. We must continue to do that.

Our strategy is about tackling the highest-harm organised crime groups that are importing into the UK and importing from within the UK.

A third strand of our strategy is around tackling the county lines threat, which comes down to street level. It is about the county lines co-ordination centre. It is about mobilising the law enforcement response because county lines is quite a complex area that involves commodities moving across force and national boundaries. It is also around tackling the finance, predominantly through the new National Economic Crime Centre.

Q273       Tim Loughton: Finally, on your first point about international co-operation on this, I have metScotland Yard officers, as it was then, in Tehran working with Iranian police. There has been a huge loss of life of Iranian law enforcement officers through organised and heavily armed drugs gangs there. Do you feel that you have enough resource to be trying to disrupt at source, working in co-operation, or are there various other things that could happen or that need to happen to make that job easier?

Steve Rodhouse: I would never sit here and turn down the offer of resources. I must be clear. The international network is important, but it is not the only strand of our strategy. The challenge of course is that as an agency, we are focused right across the spectrum of organised crime threats. As a community and as a nation, we are recognising more international organised crime threats. Our network of international liaison officers is not just dealing with drugs in Afghanistan and Colombia; they are dealing with online child sexual abuse right across the world. We are spreading ourselves.

Of course, there is an argument around investment for the NCA as a whole, I would—as you would expect—argue. There is certainly an argument for investment around the technology that empowers and mobilises our work to be more effective.

Chair: Thank you to our panel for evidence today. We appreciate your time this morning and we would like to move on to the second panel. Thank you very much.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Cressida Dick CBE QPM and Chief Constable Dave Thompson QPM, West Midlands Police.

Chair: Commissioner, Chief Constable, thank you very much for joining us this morning. Apologies for the delay in beginning this session. We’ll begin straight away with Tim Loughton.

Q274       Tim Loughton: Chief Constable, Commissioner, do you think the levels of knifings, particularly of young people, which we have seen in very high profile recently are the worst they have been in your policing career and experience?

Dave Thompson: I will start from the West Midlands perspective. We have seen some very high-profile cases that have resulted in homicides at the top end, but we do also see less high-profile attempted murders at the lower end. Overall, in terms of youth/age, yes, it is the worst. The numbers of homicide issues have not varied hugely over a period of time, but if we look at the broad mass of injuries in that space, yes, they are.

Cressida Dick: Stabbings of young people specifically have been the number one priority for me since I was Commissioner. We will no doubt talk about some of the things we have been doing. The last couple of years undoubtedly have had the highest and most worrying levels in my service. Right now, we have seen a 15% reduction in knife injury victims under 25, and that is a result of the huge efforts we have been making recently.

Q275       Tim Loughton: Since when? Over what period?

Cressida Dick: The rolling year.

Q276       Tim Loughton: Year on year?

Cressida Dick: If you look at this year compared to the last year, we are down 15%, and have been consistently for a little while. I am cautiously optimistic about that. Our homicide numbers are always so horrible, but they fluctuate a lot. I hesitate to say very much about that, except to say that in terms of homicides of young people, again, we are down this year and overall we are down.

If you take a view over the last three or four years, we are absolutely at a terribly high level. I believe—and I can see other indicators I can tell you about, if you like—that the Met has begun, with partners, but particularly with enforcement, to stabilise and reduce that level. It is deeply worrying. It is a horrible set of offences.

Definitely, more younger people are involved, and more knives are involved in the serious violence on the streets. Just yesterday afternoon, we had a 15-year-old stabbed not long after school. They are horrible crimes.

Q277       Tim Loughton: Yet the public perception would be not to recognise a 15% reduction. Most people would say, “Gosh, it is terrible, isn’t it?” Is that because it has become a thing in terms of public profile, in the same way as perhaps 10 years ago nobody thought we had a problem with child sexual exploitation, and then post Jimmy Savile it became the big thing—it was just that it was not properly considered before?

You have just made the point there, Commissioner, about after school. Has there been a change in the profile of the sort of violence we are seeing in terms of kids, some of whom are involved in gangs and crime of some form, and some of whom—perhaps those cases that have the most high profile—are just innocent bystanders who have done their Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme, are upstanding citizens and just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Do you think we are seeing more completely random victims among young people, rather than those who associate with people who might be more prone to violence?

Secondly, are we seeing more out of London now? This has always been a very London-centric thing, but certainly the figures suggest that the risk in this type of violent crime has been far greater out of London. Can you comment on both of those phenomena?

Cressida Dick: You asked whether this is a thing that is getting attention. It is true—the Committee will be aware of this—that if you go back 10, 15 or 20 years and look at, for example, robbery levels, they were very high in recorded crime, higher than now. But if you look at stabbings of young people, this is a new, tragic and worrying phenomenon. It has been my number one priority and remains so.

There is a very dispersed profile of people who become involved in knife crime in all its forms—robbery, carrying a knife, that kind of thing—and indeed a reasonably but much less dispersed profile of people who get involved in very serious stabbings. When you come to look in London at victimisation, there is a very large overlap between many of our victims and our offenders for stabbing and serious violence, including amongst teenagers. Of course, any young person dying is tragic, but on occasion we have had, even in the last couple of years, some young people who have been killed who have shown no sign whatsoever of ever having been involved in crime.

I cannot, probably without going away and having a good look at that, say whether that is hugely different from 15 or 20 years ago and whether we are getting more of it. I know that it is deeply worrying for people and we are clearly seeing more young people carrying knives, some of them thinking it will make them safer. People are deeply concerned about their children going on the streets.

We see it as a very big issue for London and indeed one which, as you say, is by no means restricted to London. In fact, in most of the violent crime figures that I am talking about have either gone up more steeply in the rest of the country or have remained going up in a way that in London in the last few months they have not. They appear to have stabilised. It is absolutely—not least, but not only, because of county lines—a problem well beyond London.

Dave Thompson: I will describe the problem at three levels and then say where the common features are.

We do see a proportion of the stabbings around younger people who are on the periphery of urban street gangs, involved in street-level drug-dealing or on the edges of county lines.

Then we also have—and there is an overlap with this—some of those young people in other groups involved in what I call the projection force around acquisitive crime, particularly robbery. There is a particular challenge in the West Midlands about vehicle-based robberies. The commodity value of cars is the route to launder money. We see some young people exploited in the same ways we see on county lines to steal vehicles. We see some use in terms of robberies.

Then the third group—and this is the broader issue—involves a proliferation of weapon carrying. The fist-fight becomes a knife-fight. A number of cases we have seen are straightforward conflicts between young people that result in a knife being produced.

There are many factors that drive that. This is unquestionably concentrated in more deprived communities, and in some cases, young people have no footprint with policing, but there can be a footprint with offenders and the contact across those areas.

There are some social media trends playing into that, particularly respect and losing face, as well as things like drill music and other influencing factors.

Therefore, I tend to see it as three elements. They are connected. There is a connecting factor about the handprint of organised criminality touching it. There is definitely a footprint in terms of deprived communities.

Q278       Tim Loughton: Ten years ago I took part in a documentary working with the gangs in Newtown, Birmingham, in your patch. That was very largely based on the postcode gangs, the most inane reason, apparently, for wanting to do harm to somebody else, based on whether they lived in B9, B19 or whatever it may be. I got to know some of those people to the extent of recording some rap music with them, which went down very well on television. Has that changed in 10 years? Now is it much more drugs and serious-organised-crime based, or is it still various people who have partly dropped out of society and have found some sort of belonging in these gangs? Has that completely changed in the last 10 years?

Dave Thompson: No, in the West Midlands it has not. We see that use of postcode ganging in other cities in the West Midlands as well. As you will know from your experience, for these people it is often about identity and belonging. There is sometimes some connectivity with the drugs market, but it is the very low-picking end. These are not people who are making huge returns. They are often people who are quite excluded in terms of the community, without strong links into the relationship and community factors that would hook them more broadly into society. That identification around postcodes plays out very much.

It plays out also with young people, who will identify parts of the city they feel comfortable travelling to or not and will determine whether they feel they should carry a weapon going to those areas.

Q279       Tim Loughton: Finally, Commissioner, going back to your after-school point, many of us are concerned about links with excluded kids and those who have fallen out of the education system. There seems to be a certain hard core of schools that look to exclude more than others do. What evidence is there to suggest that there is a direct link with those kids who are getting excluded, and then getting sucked into gang violence? In many cases, that reflects back on the original school, because they tend to hang around with their old mates. Excluding somebody from the school does not necessarily mean excluding the problems they have been causing with their former schoolmates.

Cressida Dick: Very quickly on the postcode issue, we do not see that quite so strongly now, but we absolutely see gang territories, where people feel safe travelling or not. They move into the higher levels of gangs, sadly sometimes at really quite young ages. Quite often they will move from one gang to another. That is one of our challenges. People think of them very much like the gangs in Kingston, Jamaica, or in some of the big American cities. They are not. They are very fluid and dispersed, and they come and go, but the connections are often made around school friendships. One person will be recruited, bullied, exploited and seduced into the activity, and then they will bring another, perhaps from their friendship group or their peer group. They will likely be local people. Also, sometimes groups from schools identify strongly with their area against another area in a way that children have been doing for hundreds of years.

Let us stress that the vast majority of children in London are not involved in crime in any way, but those who become excluded by definition already have a number of very obvious risk factors about them and a reduced number of what we call protective factors, usually. They are already vulnerable in some respects, and some of them are likely already to be tangled up with or involved in criminality.

We are very focused on our schools and working with our schools. It is a matter of policy for the individual school. We have the current national review going on and lots of interest in this subject. We absolutely see that a higher proportion, much higher than we would like, of our young people who have been excluded and are in alternative provision or pupil referral units have escalated or become involved in more serious criminality. That is why we are putting officers into our pupil referral units, and that is why we have already 280 officers in schools. We want to increase that, because for them to see a police officer as a reliable and trustworthy adult and as part of the fabric of those institutions to some extent may be very helpful.

There is most certainly a strong correlation, but it does not mean that the fact of being excluded makes a young person do x or y. It makes them by definition vulnerable when they are already a vulnerable person. Of course, if somebody can be kept in meaningful activity, whether it is work, education, sport or whatever, for long periods of the day, they are less likely to get involved in other things. They will be tired out. They will not be available for exploitation.

Exclusion is a big issue for us, undoubtedly, and we look forward to seeing what the review says.

Q280       Chair: You talk about 280 officers in schools. Are they based full-time working in schools, or are they just neighbourhood police officers who have a link to the schools?

Cressida Dick: No; our neighbourhood officers have a responsibility around schools as well, of course, as do all police officers, but these are full-time schools officers. They include those 40-odd who work with our volunteer Police Cadets. Again, that is a full-time role in the school and with the Cadets.

Q281       Chair: How does that compare to the last time there was a peak in the number of teenage deaths from knife crime in the 2007-08 period? There was a big focus on putting officers into schools at that point. How does it compare to then?

Cressida Dick: I am afraid I do not know. I could try to find out. I remember last time when you asked about neighbourhood policing numbers and the Committee was looking at some broader issues, all police services struggled with the questions because we have redefined the roles quite a lot. Who does what and how it works has changed so much that it is quite difficult to compare meaningfully. But I will certainly try to do that for you.

Q282       Chair: What is the scale of the increase over the last couple of years to that 280?

Cressida Dick: Our target is over 500, and I am anticipating we will get there, I hope, by midsummer to certainly the early autumn.

Q283       Chair: What was the starting point, say, a couple of years ago?

Cressida Dick: Again, I would have to look. I am not sure. We have gone up, but not hugely, because as you know, overall we have been struggling to deal with all the demands we have had, and we have been reducing our numbers until very recently.

Q284       Chair: Is it accurate to say that there has been a big reduction in the number of police officers based in schools, and now you are increasing it again?

Cressida Dick: Certainly nationally, hugely.

Dave Thompson: We have been quite clear that in the West Midlands there are none any more. There are no school-based officers in the West Midlands any more. We have had a debate around police resourcing in the West Midlands where the police has had the second-highest reduction in budget, a 24% reduction, and has the lowest ability in the country to raise council tax, so the increases are slower in.

We are a high spender on neighbouring policing as a percentage of the budget. Our neighbourhood teams are expected to have relationships with schools, but we do not have dedicated schools-based officers. We are targeting some of the work we do through Early Help schemes with local authorities. We are looking at an approach to embed some staff against Early Help. We are definitely intensifying the work we are doing on pupil referral units, but we could not establish that resource and we are not going to be in a position to even contemplate that at the moment. Across the country, that model that used to exist probably 10 years ago is pretty absent, and it is not something that at the moment I could do.

However, we do of course try to step up the involvement in schools. We are running a programme, Mentors Against Violence in Schools. It is a public-health based approach, evaluated in Scotland. We see schools as being a big part of the solution. We have 42 schools in that space and will take in 120 more. We are doing a lot of structured, evidence-based activity with schools, but we are not going to be able to have a police officer permanently based in a school.

Q285       Chair: If you compare what we were able to do 10 years ago, in terms of responding and having police officers in schools, if resources were not a constraint, do you think having school-based officers or officers who work across a couple of schools is a valuable part of the fight against knife crime?

Dave Thompson: Our view in the West Midlands is that the much-vaunted public-health based approach is often mentioned and rarely understood. I am a huge supporter of that. If we look at that, it asks you to think—at an individual, relationship, community and society level—about what risk factors and protective factors you can play in. The challenge we face at the moment—and the media is defining knife crime in its own terms—is about under-25s. They really concern me. Knives have been used in homicides since policing began; this particular group is the issue. Our strategy has to be to increase protective factors around young people. I feel there are many factors now affecting them, particularly in the most deprived communities. That can be part of the answer.

There are challenges around police capacity to do what they are here to do in their core role, and whether others can provide that role in a broader protective response. I would not want to narrow it to policing. My view is finding the best protective approach we can take. Policing is definitely part of that answer, but whether it is solely a response to schools I am not sure. That would be where I would take the first opportunity to put more capacity in.

Q286       Chair: If you had more money, schools officers would not be your priority? Let us suppose you had more money just for knife crime. I appreciate that there is a wider issue about policing. We have argued previously that there should be more resources for policing. But what if you had some specific money to target the teenage knife crime problem?

Dave Thompson: My observation would be that young people at the moment feel under-protected. If we solely resort to stop and search, they will feel over-enforced against. In the approach we have been taking in the West Midlands, we are doing stop and search. We are now going through a stop-and-talk strategy with young people and a stop-and-think strategy with partners.

Schools officers could form part of that response, but we will still do some of that with our neighbourhood teams anyway. I would look at a range of strategies—which we do currently in schools—and more of it to make young people feel more protected. Visibility around school closing times and safe routes for young people to travel in areas are all strategies I would employ. That is the outcome I would be seeking to achieve.

Q287       Stuart C. McDonald: Commissioner, you described this upsurge in knife crime as “new”, which I think everyone would say is fair. It is a new issue to deal with. That said, it has been on the radar, it is fair to say, for the best part of two years now. Some of the evidence we have heard in previous sessions has suggested that the response at first was left to a local operational level, rather than a national strategic level. Is that fair? In your discussions with Ministers in recent weeks, would you say you are now satisfied that we have the right structures in place at a national and cross-government level to tackle this problem?

Cressida Dick: I came in in April 2017. Our figures in most of those categories, including knife injury under 25, have been going up since 2014 and more steeply since 2016. You will remember, for example, moped-enabled crime, which was at that point roaring away and is now down by 50%. You will remember that huge concern around acid attacks, a horrible crime, which is down 35%. We are down in some other categories and we have stabilised.

Of course, I made it my number one priority for my people and wanted some of them to stop doing the work they had been doing, despite the fact that we were stretched, and start doing violent crime on the streets work. Secondly, everybody made it their number one priority, and if you came to visit the Met you would know that it is the Met’s number one priority, whomever you spoke to. I started speaking to Ministers about this, and by the late autumn of that year, the Home Office had started to do the work and analysis that led to the serious violence strategy in due course.

There was interest from national Government undoubtedly and, of course, for us, we are a big old place, so there was a huge amount of interest from the Mayor and from our 32 local authorities. We were doing a whole load of work to step up our enforcement, our suppression, if you like, and I can talk about that alongside these other step-ups. Subsequently there has been a massive amount of tension, not least from the media and some really tragic cases, and undoubtedly everybody in the country is more focused on this.

In recent weeks we have seen the terrible murder of Jodie Chesney, and other cases of serious stabbing and homicide have come so much to the fore that there is a question: what can be done? My colleague, Sarah Thornton, was here before; I would echo what she said. The analysis is good, as does the strategy, with a bit of refining perhaps as to exactly what success looks like. Dave and I agree that we need to be looking at young people. We need to be looking at violent crime on the streets. If you are not careful, you go all over the place with it and dilute it. But the strategy from my point of view is fine, and the Home Secretary has clearly shown considerable leadership around it. However, we are not yet seeing real cross-Government action being delivered in a meaningful way on the ground and in our communities.

Q288       Stuart C. McDonald: Do you have an idea of what needs to change to make that happen? Is it just because we have only now set up structures like that? I understand there is a cross-departmental ministerial team now looking at this. Is it just because it is too early, or is there something you would want to see changed?

Cressida Dick: I have worked as a professional police officer on and off for 35 years. I have worked alongside Government on a number of issues for a long time—20 years. I appreciate it is always, despite all sorts of different mechanisms, hard to get different Departments co-ordinated.

For me this is about priority. It is about priority at the local level, for us at the London-wide level, and then at the Government level. It needs to be more clearly a higher priority for parts of our public sector, stretched though they are, and probably parts of the Home Office, stretched though it is, not least with the issues around our relationship with the European Union. It needs to be a higher priority, and then there needs to be more co-ordination and delivery of the things that we know will work. Potentially, further resourcing of those would be something else I would like to see.

Dave Thompson: I have three reflections. I agree with the point the Commissioner makes around the level of analysis done, and that there is a good start in terms of strategy. There is something more that needs to be done on strategy; there is a capacity issue; and then there is a connectivity issue.

At a strategy level, this is still quite a crime-based strategy. If you look at the document, it alludes to a public health based strategy, but it is not yet a public-health based strategy. If you look at Public Health England, the Secretary of State’s instruction on what PHE should look at, there is no mention of violence. If you look at the PHE outcomes document, the only mention of violence is the Violence Prevention Alliance in the West Midlands, because we have a very fortunate regional director in that area. We do not quite have the focus as a public health plus Government strategy.

Also what is missing in strategy is a place-based focus. We pretty much know which areas we are talking about. They are quite deprived. We used to take a Government-based approach to regeneration that was very much cross-party and would look at areas that were struggling on lots of outcomes. We mapped all our violent offenders in 2014 and our victims, and they all mapped back. We did not know what the offence was; we looked at where they all lived, and they all lived in the areas with the poorest public health outcomes and the highest deprivation. There is a strong correlation with place that we need to think about that I think would be useful.

Clearly, when you look at those areas, I raise an issue of capacity because we had seen resources in some of those highly deprived areas reduce considerably and at a faster rate than in other parts of the country, so we have to think about that.

Finally, there is connectivity on the ground. Strategy and connectivity at Whitehall is important, but the public services now are more complex than they were. Schools are a great example. They are a much more complex environment. It is much harder for us to navigate in policing. There are free schools, academies, local authority schools and a huge issue with home schooling in that space as well.

The conversation we would have with the Home Office is that we would like to see officials deployed more on the ground in a way we have seen happen on other issues to ensure that Government is challenging itself on whether this connects at place level, because the players are much more complex than they were. It is a good start, and it is important that we are looking at it, but if we are really serious, we need a strong endeavour.

I have been around policing a long while. I saw the TGAP programme; I was involved in the Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme; and here we are again. What happens is we do not drive forward a sustained, consistent approach, or recognise that if we take our foot off this problem—that problem is the resilience of young people—we get back here really quickly, with a vengeance.

Q289       Stuart C. McDonald: Turning to the question of resources, how far does £100 million take us, and what do we need to see from the comprehensive spending review to get a handle on all this?

Cressida Dick: Well, £100 million is obviously very welcome. It has not been distributed yet, but our understanding is that it is to be in-year. Recruiting new people takes a while, and getting them skilled takes even longer; being able to keep them if you do not have a budget is difficult. Nevertheless, the seven forces that are most affected by this, very clearly most affected by this, have all suggested, very loosely, through the National Police Chiefs Council, how we would make use of that money. Frankly, in terms of the reduction in policing scale and capacity and budgets over the last few years, it is, as you well know, a reasonably small amount. Secondly, what we have been talking about is not just policing resources. It is about other resources as well.

Dave is our National Police Chiefs Council leader on finance, and we will be seeking to make an evidence-based case in the comprehensive spending review about the sheer stretch that our people are feeling, the services we are able to provide, and at what level what more could be done with more money. I have been consistent. All the extra money I have had latterly, unless it has been ring-fenced for something else, has gone straight into tackling violent crime on the streets of London.

Dave Thompson: From my perspective, I agree with all the points the Commissioner has made. I will talk about the areas where I think we need to use it in the short term. I will use the current position in the West Midlands. We are at a period where our demand is probably 30% lower than it would be in the summer, and our violence rates will go up in the summer. If you look at the three murders we have had in Birmingham, they happened in a very hot 10-day period when the street population grew huge, so I brace myself for summer, because summer is very demanding on violence.

If you look at West Midlands police, it deploys to about 25% of the calls it receives. We have to grade and assess what we can go to. Getting to that 25% is a challenge. We have switched on to section 60 knife crime work to deliver suppression—but as you have probably seen, we have also had some issues to deal with in connection with attacks on mosques—and at this time of year, we would normally expect to run with about 1,500 outstanding calls for service. Bear in mind that we are going at 25%, and these are cases we really need to go to. That number is now at 2,100. It will take me weeks to claw back, and I am already in discussion about beginning to take staff off preventive work on this area to clear calls to service.

There is a capacity problem. We will use that money to lift capacity, but that can only be in the short term, frankly, by asking staff largely to work days off or overtime. I have some teams where days off would be a pleasant change. It would buy me some short-term ability.

The longer-term issue is that we will also add to some work around partners. We will do some long-term work in that space as well, extending some of the work we are doing on violence prevention with a public health approach. The most important outcome for CSR is to be clear about what Government wants from policing. What are the outcomes we are trying to achieve? What are the objectives? Then we need to resource against those. At the moment, the mission is very wide. The level of priority is extensive and the capacity to make that a local need is very stretched. We will have to focus on the key priorities, and I would have thought this issue around youth violence is one.

Q290       Stuart C. McDonald: Thank you very much. My final question is about the serious violence taskforce. What is your broad assessment of the work of that taskforce? What have its key achievements been, and is there any truth in what we have heard? Sarah Thornton suggests it is somewhat London-centric. Is there any truth in that?

Cressida Dick: I go to the serious violence meetings, and I am a member of that group. I think it is right to say it was set up at a time when a huge amount of focus was on London. The Mayor of London is also an important part of that group, and a lot of what we are doing in London across the board—enforcement suppression, early intervention and prevention, the work with health and education, our work to mobilise communities—are all things that at one level lots of people know something about, but at another level we are doing a lot of, and people are interested to come and see. London being a big part of that, as a big part of the problem and a big part of our sum knowledge and understanding of what works, is right.

My colleague, Duncan Ball, who leads for the National Police Chiefs Council on county lines, knife crime and gangs, I think, is a member and, of course, brings the national perspective, from a policing point of view. What has dawned on many people—not totally; some people probably knew it already—in the last six or nine months is that this issue has gone far beyond London.

Dave just described his capacity challenges. They are different from mine. I look through a lens of the next few months of “it’s summer”. We have all our ceremonials, all our big events, all our public order normal stuff, Pride and goodness knows what. We may—we do not know—have further protests on one matter or another; sometimes we do. Over the next couple of years, it is clear that people want to continue to have big visits and big meetings in London, and we have the terrorist threat, so we are extremely stretched, too.

We need to think about that across the board, and it is a different context for everyone, a different stretch for everyone, but many of the themes are the same, and many of the solutions to this challenge are the same, albeit that there will be a local context. If that group was to become more obviously and strongly focused beyond London, then of course I would be very comfortable with that. Having said that, there are a lot of highly effective national operators there from the third sector and from other Government Departments, who I think have benefited hugely from coming together and learning about different people’s experience, and are doing stuff on the ground as a result.

Dave Thompson: I am not quite feeling it on the ground as a taskforce. The police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands has now started to attend that meeting as part of the APCC’s delegation, and I think would probably say it has had a London bias for all the reasons the Commissioner has said.

I am not so sure about growing and growing the focus nationally and expanding that table. I take the view that Government probably need to embed a little bit more on the ground in localities. It is very hard to aggregate these things. If I compare, our ability to mobilise partnership in the West Midlands would be different from that in other parts of the country. It is important to understand local context, and that is why as chiefs we are keen to see more evidence of officials, with some mandate to shape this, embedded locally.

We rarely ask for officials to come out and visit us in the provinces. We are happy for them generally to stay in London, but in view of the level of challenge here and the co-ordination issues, rather than keep adding to that national taskforce, I would like to see it replicated locally.

Q291       Chair: When did the taskforce last meet?

Cressida Dick: Weeks ago. I think there is a meeting this afternoon. I would have to check we are talking about the same thing.

Q292       Chair: The serious violence taskforce.

Cressida Dick: Yes.

Q293       Chair: Is it chaired by the Home Secretary or Victoria Atkins?

Cressida Dick: The Home Secretary.

Q294       Chair: Do other Government Ministers attend it?

Cressida Dick: Quite regularly, yes.

Q295       Chair: How often, roughly, does it meet?

Cressida Dick: I am not sure I am the person to ask. Genuinely, Chair, I am not trying to be difficult. It has met several times in the last several months. Probably every six weeks, something like that.

Q296       Chair: Does it monitor data? Does it track numbers of stabbings in different areas? Does it monitor hotspots and things like that?

Cressida Dick: There has certainly been data presented at every meeting, from a different source often, but there is data presented, yes.

Q297       Chair: Does it have outputs? Does it have, “This is what we are going to achieve by two or three months’ time”—things like that?

Cressida Dick: Yes.

Q298       Chair: Are those monitored in terms of outcomes?

Cressida Dick: Yes. It is a meeting, with minutes.

Q299       Chair: From the outside, it does not feel like it is doing a huge amount. It is therefore quite useful to understand whether it is just having nice chats, or whether it is tasking, in terms of who is going to do what over the next two months or three months.

Cressida Dick: I understand you will be seeing the Home Secretary later on, and you will want to ask him. My sense of it, and I think I have said it before, is that from a Government point of view, we would like to see much more happening on the ground. It is a start, and it is absolutely action-focused, undoubtedly.

It has also been useful for officials and Ministers to hear, particularly from the third sector, about some of the challenges and what is going on, and that has allowed them, when they have made announcements about where they are going to put new money and where they are going to put their effort, to be better informed. We can see some quite clear things.

There have also been occasions when the NPCC has presented on a particular challenge, and then as a consequence, money has been made available for a particular project or something like that, so yes, there are actions coming from it.

Q300       Chair: Have you come out of any of those meetings thinking, “Okay, I have a new task that I did not have before I went in”?

Cressida Dick: Yes.

Q301       Chair: Have other Government Departments come out of those meetings— not the Home Office; the Education Department or other Departments—with a new task that they did not have before they went in?

Cressida Dick: I think you would have to ask them, but my sense is absolutely yes.

Q302       Chair: Do you think this is a good and functioning structure, this taskforce?

Cressida Dick: I think it is absolutely functioning. As I keep saying, we would all love to see everybody stepping up more—everybody.

Q303       Chair: In the end, it is a question about the scale of the challenge. What it looks like on the outside is that we have a massive problem, and we have teenagers and kids being stabbed after school. We have hospital admissions for this awful violence and crime, and we have lives being ruined and families being devastated. To be honest, it does not feel like the scale of the response is enough, or is remotely matching the scale of the challenge.

The reason I am trying to probe is it would seem that the taskforce should be the thing that is driving the scale of action we need. If we are not seeing the scale of action, is that because it is taking a long time? Is it because although the taskforce is great, the problem is further down the track, or do we need a massive electric shock into that taskforce to get it to do far more?

Cressida Dick: First, you do not need to tell me how big a problem it is. This is a huge problem, and it is something I am absolutely passionate about and have worked incredibly hard on for the last couple of years. More to the point, my people, as Dave has described, are working incredibly hard and having daily huge successes in suppressing and enforcing, but that, of course, of itself is not going to solve this issue.

I echo what Sarah said. We obviously need a national step up, definitely. If the taskforce is part of that, that is great. If there is some other structure that goes above and beyond that, involving more senior Cabinet Ministers more of the time, if they mimic what happened 15 years ago, fine. We all agree there needs to be more co-ordination, more step-up and more focus and priority.

People are constantly talking about what happened in Scotland or wherever. We have looked at that lots of times. It is a very different context. Lots of things they did there would just not apply in London, but as you know, my new Deputy Commissioner worked there for seven years and was at the heart of this. One of the things they did, to go to your point, was very clearly have all Government Departments, and therefore all local authorities and all local providers, having this as one of the top priorities, if not the top priority, for them. We would love to get to that position. We understand there are policy choices to be made, but we would love to get to that position.

Dave Thompson: I do not go to the taskforce, so I cannot comment directly on the taskforce. I think the proposition is that there is a need for some transformational response to this. The sense that policing by increasing the stop-search or enforcement activities is going to solve this is a million miles away from what this problem is. This is about the resilience of children. It is a broader issue and we need to look at the response to that. Many of these issues need to be led by the Department but there is an absolute role for the police that I come back to, to make our young people feel safer, because in many of these inner-city areas they do not feel safe enough.

The police are very good at identifying these young people involved in more serious crime, because we pull them out and identify them. We have a lot of data to help on that. Home Office Ministers are very passionate about this, but mobilising this across Government, and recognition of the scale of the challenge, is much broader than policing.

We talk about a public health based model. There are many factors here that health can impact on. At the moment, I do not see that is connected into this in a strong enough way. If the proposition is: “Would policing welcome a huge step up, and a stronger inter-governmental approach to this issue?”, then I would support that. Whether the taskforce is the right body to do that, I would not know, because I do not attend it.

Q304       Chair: Would it help if it was led by No. 10?

Dave Thompson: There is an issue when the Prime Minister becomes involved in things. We have seen in the past that the Cabinet Office can be very influential across Government and can deliver traction. It is a matter for Government how it best mobilises itself, but we do see things on occasion, do we not—the reach of Cabinet Office, the tracking across Government and the accountability across Government. It is very hard sometimes for Ministers to hold other Ministers to account on a delivery issue that might be seen as confined more directly to their Department.

Q305       Stephen Doughty: I want to take you back to the resourcing issue. You were very diplomatic, Commissioner, about the £100 million, but the reality is when you compare it, for example, against other parts of Government, there is £200 million per year less on youth services than there was three years previously. Some 600 youth centres closed between 2012 and 2016, and 139,000 youth service places have been lost across England. It pales in comparison, does it not, with the cuts in other related resources?

You mentioned other focuses of the Home Office. They have had £1 billion extra for Brexit preparations from the Treasury in the last three years. It is not enough, £100 million, is it?

Cressida Dick: I think I said that already. It is very welcome, but when you compare it with all the things we know we could do and all the savings and reductions in budgets across the various relevant sectors, not least policing, at a time of increased complexity, expectation and demand, £100 million absolutely is a relatively small amount of money.

Q306       Stephen Doughty: Given you touched on some of them, which of the other budgets, aside from the core policing budget, would you prioritise that need additional resources? Is it health, education, or youth services, or are there other particular areas you would like to see additional resources given to?

Dave Thompson: One of the things I have decided to work hard at in the West Midlands is to try to avoid discussing the reduction in budget with the public, who just want to see something done about this. Chief police officers—and this is the approach the Commissioner is taking—talk about what we need to get on with. It is not always helpful to look back at the baseline of austerity, because the answer is we may not need quite the same things now as we did then. If I look at the online world, it is very different. Is having kids playing ping-pong in youth centres quite the answer? I do not know. I think there are other professionals for that.

My personal view is that this is an issue about young people. It is about protective issues and reducing risk factors. Local authorities concern me on the funding. I am worried about the local authority funding formula, which should remove deprivation. Every time I look at violence, it is about deprivation. There is a lack of capacity on those services particularly. Children’s services are often running at a critical level, and the Early Help offer is getting stretched in those areas.

Health services will always have a demand-based challenge, but sometimes bending the resource around it, and particularly targeting some of the education skills and funding around inclusive growth and job opportunities, is important. Plenty of the money Government spends could be bent around this problem without it always necessarily being new money.

The challenge police colleagues feel is this: local authorities can often decommission a service. You can decommission youth, and nobody keeps phoning you up to say, “Can you come out at 11pm? I need a youth worker.” The police service can decommission very little, so what happens is that the demand piece is getting stretched and stretched because of lack of protective factors. I would talk about the role of local authorities. I would talk about how we bend money in those areas. There is a police capacity problem on this, unquestionably.

Q307       Stephen Doughty: Clearly it is needed across all aspects of the core policing resource. For example, we were talking about school liaison officers, but personally I think what we need is more core policing in the community, plus youth workers, attached youth workers, community workers, children’s services and so on. It needs more bodies on the ground, does it not? It needs more people out there, speaking to communities and individuals, engaging with young people on the street.

Dave Thompson: What I come back to is that we are not talking about the whole country here. We are not talking about the whole of the West Midlands or London. Half the population of the city of Birmingham is aged under 25. In the wards we are talking about, it is more than half the population under 25. We are talking about very clear areas of the country that have a particularly acute problem. That problem emanates with county lines in other areas and it is not isolated, but the concentration is here.

You treat a disease where it happens; you fight battles where they are happening. If you concentrate on these places and take a more transformational approach to how services are spread, stuff that is very hard to do on the ground now for policing, we can leverage more from what we have. But do I think there is a capacity problem in those areas? I look at my colleagues in Birmingham City Council; in dealing with a knife crime issue, we are talking about the deployment of maybe 20 youth outreach workers. One million people live in Birmingham, and half of them are under 25. There is a real capacity problem in services.

Q308       Stephen Doughty: I have seen exactly the same. Cardiff Council has tried to protect some limited services, despite the cuts they have had. South Wales police does excellent work on knife crime, but the reality is I have seen a young man dragged out of his car and stabbed to death in a garden round the corner from where I live. Just a few months ago, another young man from Cardiff was stabbed to death in Liverpool, probably related to a county lines situation. There are multiple stabbings going on. There was another one in Grange Gardens in Grangetown, in my patch, just the other week.

This is a problem that is definitely affecting Cardiff. It has massively increased in the six and a half years I have been a Member of Parliament and it is directly related, I think, to the cut-back in other services and the rise in the trends we have seen elsewhere in the country. But we do not get capital city funding, like London, Edinburgh and Belfast. We get less per capita than West Midlands. We need to look at all those cities outside those places. You are right, though: it has to be focused in different places.

Can I ask about two things to do with the nature of the crimes that are going on? Rightly, lot of attention is given to the homicide figures, but I have heard about a lot of incidents where individuals have been stabbed in the legs, the buttocks—other life-changing injuries. They tend to be treated as lesser offences if they are caught and prosecuted. What trends and tactics in terms of wounding have you seen, and is there a particular trend going on there that we need to be aware of?

Cressida Dick: On what you were talking about—Dave described some different categorisations—we certainly see occasions when somebody ends up in an argument that escalates, and one or perhaps both of them has a knife and somebody stabs somebody. That may be a minor injury, or it can be a death. It is such a dangerous thing to do. We see the occasional incident that is clearly intended to be a kind of punishment of some sort, because there has been a disagreement about a drug debt or something like that.

What we have undoubtedly seen in the last few years in London—but, as I say, now less—are these terrible events where you have a group of teenagers setting upon an individual, or more than one individual, and inflicting injuries with very large knives. These are not small flick-knives, though you can kill somebody with those; these are huge Rambo knives, hunting knives, and great big kitchen knives. This is repeated stabbing, again and again, sometimes associated with other violence as well—they stamp on them or something. My officers in 2016-17-18 felt the extra use of extraordinary force by groups on other young people to be a new phenomenon. Of course, it is all very dangerous, but it is even more dangerous, and just awful, in terms of life-changing injuries, as you said.

Q309       Stephen Doughty: Those circumstances are utterly horrific. I completely agree. It is extraordinary what the officers and the emergency services more generally have to deal with when they attend those situations. Do you think we are underestimating the scale of the problem? If you look at all the types of wounding—all the types of attacks going on that do not lead to a death—the problem is worse than it seems. This phenomenon of stabbing people in the backside and the legs and these punishment knifings—I have seen multiple examples of that in Cardiff in recent months. It does seem to be going on, and it never went on before, as far as I was aware.

Cressida Dick: Undoubtedly a huge proportion of our victims are reluctant to tell the police, unfortunately, and an even higher proportion will not talk to the police about what happened, but we have increasingly good ways, through health, of knowing about when somebody has received treatment for what appears to be a knife injury, and that is, certainly in London, getting better and better, as I know it has been in Cardiff. I am sure you are right: there is under-reporting of this sort of indiscriminate violence of one sort or another, sometimes including a knife; they just get it stitched up at the GP and we will not hear about it.

Chief Constable Thompson: In terms of the injury position, when I answered the question earlier and said that the homicides are the tip of the figure, we would also accept that over the 10 years we were talking about, trauma care has significantly improved. Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, the military hospital, is pretty good at trauma care, so we would say that if we look back 10 years, we would probably see more homicides in some of the groups of attempt murders that we are seeing. I think that it is remarkable what we are seeing people survive with, which is all credit to and part of the NHS’s important contribution in this space.

As to most of the knives we are seeing, I would say they are the small pen-knife type injuries, and we see more kitchen weapons, but we are, as the Commissioner said, pulling off some pretty nasty knives, and some of those have been used in murders. There is some more work to be done. We are doing a lot of work with Trading Standards. There is more work to be done around online sales and those areas. We are seeing a slightly different weapon being used and, again, that ties into some of the status issues about the type of weapon that can be carried, sometimes. I certainly think that just looking at homicides can be too restrictive, if you look further down at, as I say, the growth in attempt murders.

You have to balance that with some crime recording changes during that period. For example, the threats to kill category is much higher. I am not so sure that that is a real rise, but I look at the murders/attempt murder category, which we would say is pretty stable and the attempt murder category has gone up quite significantly.

Q310       Stephen Doughty: That is hugely helpful. One last question: in terms of the types of tactics being used to encourage young people into gangs or drug-dealing operations, or to undertake actions, punishment, knifings, whatever it might be, I have seen a lot of crossover with the grooming tactics that were used by extremists and others trying to groom young people for other purposes. What lessons are being learned in comparison? I have seen some of the young people who were targeted by extremist groups, for example, being groomed and recruited in exactly the same way, but for drug-related violence and dealing. Is there a comparison that has been done?

Chief Constable Thompson: These are largely factors about resilience and vulnerability. I think that the ability to control and task people has gone up. We are seeing it in our organised vehicle crime. We are seeing tasking of vulnerable individuals to steal particular cars using social media messaging. They are able to keep them under control more frequently. They are generally more vulnerable. They can be enticed in because of, to a large degree, poverty, frankly. We have seen examples where some people, particularly in organised vehicle crime, are doing this for family food bills; it is just poverty.

The ability to organise and manage is very different now, with technology. You can groom people in. You can create association. You can create the warmth of belonging, and then you can be sat up in a flat in Lincolnshire dealing drugs, and well and truly under control. We have prosecuted on modern slavery offences for this, but it is the same sort of issue, isn’t it? You exploit somebody’s need for belonging. You exploit somebody’s lack of status. You exploit somebody’s vulnerability. I think that people are very adept at it, and technology enables you to task, co-ordinate and control them more frequently.

Q311       Stephen Doughty: Do you think that schools, youth services and others are tackling that in the same way that they alert young people to the danger of sexual exploitation or extremists through Prevent-type work?

Cressida Dick: I can say in London they really are beginning to, and there are a lot of good programmes and a lot of interventions that are being used, and a lot of guidance, advice and support to young people. There absolutely is. This is not a completely new phenomenon in any way. Exploiting children has gone on by criminals probably as long as history. When I was running Operation Trident in the early 2000s, we had drugs lines running to Aberdeen and Cardiff and children engaged.

What we now see, I think, is particularly the power of the new ways of communicating being seductive, controlling and so fast. Also, there are various markets and quite strong structures from, for example, some of the London gangs who are involved in county lines, who have been involved in extensive criminality across London, as well as outside. They are constantly learning; they are entrepreneurial; they are aggressive; and they can see a new market. They know where they want to take over, and they know how to target young people. They are teaching each other how to target young people in a way that would not have been straightforward for them 20 years ago.

Q312       Sir Christopher Chope: The former Home Secretary said, on 22 October 2015, “Stop and search reform has worked, it must continue, and—if you look at the evidence—it shows no link whatsoever with violent crime”. Do you agree with that?

Cressida Dick: I may have misheard something that you said, but if I could lay out my position on stop and search, I think that it is an important power. The professional and intelligence-led targeted use of stop and search is very important, and has been an extremely important part of our success in the last few months in suppressing violence in some areas.

We have been targeting the people we know to be the most violent, targeting habitual knife carriers, targeting the right places where we know violence is likely to take place, targeting street dealing and, where appropriate and where there is a power, using stop and search. What we have done at the same time is, as I have said, every percentage increase in enforcement effort—which is very largely supported by local people, by the way—will also have alongside it an extra percentage of effort in terms of engagement, information, communication and working with local people to explain why we are there, what we are doing and what we are trying to achieve, and ensuring that young people understand their rights.

The current Metropolitan Police officer using stop and search is, I would say, far more professional and far better briefed, working with intelligence, and, of course, has their body-worn video. We have a number of ways in which we scrutinise, and we ensure that the community is involved in scrutinising the work. Done that way, very professionally with good accountability and scrutiny, lots of good training for the officers and putting them in the right places at the right times, I think that it is absolutely unarguable that it has been in the last few months a very important tactic for us, and it has to be used. We have been using it a great deal more than we were three years ago.

Q313       Sir Christopher Chope: Do you think that there is any need to amend the powers under section 60?

Cressida Dick: The first thing to say about section 60 is that it is a very strong power anyway. When I arrived three years ago, I think that the Met had used it 20-something times in the year. We have now used it, given the rise in violence incidents that we had in 2017 and early 2018, nearly 300 times, again very professionally and in a measured way. It is a powerful power that must not be, in my view, in London in 2019, overused, and must be used appropriately according to the law, but where we know it will help, and for a short time period in a restricted area.

We have found no difficulty in using it. The law is clear, and we have applied the law. Regularly, on a weekend we will have maybe five running—it will vary a lot, of course—and my officers are quick to know when they need to ask for one. They have a very good understanding of what the law says, which is where serious violence may take place, and I have always applied that since I became Commissioner. I think that the law is quite strong. The best practice guidance, in my view, has been slightly unhelpful, but it has not inhibited us from using it well latterly.

The thing that can inhibit any police service, perhaps less the Met than others, is that there is no point in having a section 60 in place unless you have the resources to do the work. We would use it perhaps occasionally in football violence. We will use it where we know there has been an inter-gang attack and there is likely to be another one somewhere else and reverberations are going to happen. You have to put police people’s bodies to the problem; otherwise there is no point in putting in place a section 60.

From my point of view, that has been the success, to some extent, of our violent crime task force: really good leadership, really good co-ordination, 24/7 responding, being in the right places, overt and covert, doing all the right tactics, including using section 60 where required, but always with sufficient resource to be able to use section 60 properly.

Chief Constable Thompson: I think that it is an important power, but I go back to the analogy that I feel we are using it in Birmingham to safeguard and protect young people, not to over-enforce on them. I am not sure they might always take that view, and we need to be very careful as we navigate through this. Our aim is to protect young people. There will be some young people who absolutely do need enforcement and arresting, but the effect, particularly a few weeks ago, with section 60 in Birmingham was to send a bit of a shockwave to the system about more general weapon carrying.

I agree with the Commissioner. I think that we were right to be challenged at the time about some of the ways we were using this. I think that policing was a little loose. The scheme has driven guidance that is over and above what the legislation says, and that makes me uncomfortable, because I think the legislation is perfectly well there. If there is an amendment to the scheme, we will still, exactly as the Commissioner describes, have very controlled operations. We have a commander on the ground. We use body-worn video. We take our community Street Watch out. We have had schools supervising it. We are constantly keen to look at legitimacy. We have had no complaints. We are gathering quite a lot of information from young people.

We have to use it as part of a package of measures, because it can in circumstances generate more harm. I went out on one of the section 60 ops with our officers in Birmingham city centre. To underline the point the Commissioner makes, there were two young men who we needed to search after a knifepoint robbery in the area. That is a large bus interchange. It took eight of us to control 30 other people who were surrounding us and trying to film us. These are quite challenging operations to carry out, and they require a level of capacity and to be done well, because that can easily become more conflict-driven and be less legitimate of the police.

It is a really important power. I don’t like guidance that goes over and above what the legislation says. We have to make sure we manage it wisely and in a legitimate way, as we have both described, and I think that we should not underestimate the resource challenges to do these things well. We are much more professional on this. Some of the Servator work we have done on counter-terrorism, on behavioural insights, we have been using on these schemes. We are deploying officers not to just search everybody, but to look for behavioural issues. People always say, “Why would you walk under that knife arch to go into that place?” We are more interested in the people who do not go under the knife arch and turn away. There is a lot of sophisticated thinking being used, which Government did challenge us around, but maybe the guidance is a little bit too far now.

Q314       Sir Christopher Chope: Who has produced the guidance? Did ACPO have input into the guidance, or whether the guidance needed to be changed?

Chief Constable Thompson: The best use of stop and search scheme was designed by the Home Office. I think that there were views offered at the time. There are many things that are very good in that guidance that I think we would all stick to. For example, we publish section 60s widely; it is very clear where they are. The legislation talks about inspectors. It talks about very legal criteria. The guidance talks about assistant chief constable level authorisation, and it talks about different criteria. I would venture to say that that is an area that should be amended.

Q315       Sir Christopher Chope: Do you think that these are the sorts of issues that will be being discussed at next week’s knife crime summit?

Chief Constable Thompson: I think that we have discussed that issue already.

Cressida Dick: A lot.

Chief Constable Thompson: Yes, we have already discussed that issue with the Home Secretary.

Cressida Dick: The Home Office and the Home Secretary have been talking to colleagues about this for several months.

Q316       Sir Christopher Chope: What do you expect to come out of the knife crime summit? Are you going to be attending, either of you or both of you?

Cressida Dick: I don’t know. I am not sure.

Chief Constable Thompson: I don’t know about that.

Cressida Dick: No, we don’t know. We will if we are asked, of course, I am sure, if we can. I think that what you have heard from us so far would tend to indicate that certainly I, and I am slightly stealing Dave’s words for this, believe that the powers that we have are quite strong and the laws that we have are quite strong. As you know, there is a Bill going through Parliament, and we in the Met have suggested the policy work that has resulted in the knife crime prevention orders. That is important to us, but it is a small change in powers. We believe we have strong powers. We have said the challenges, I think.

Q317       Sir Christopher Chope: Why is it that the vast majority of the victims of knife crime are males, as indeed are the perpetrators? Why is there a particularly male dimension to this activity?

Chief Constable Thompson: I suppose there are a few issues. We would say men are over-represented in criminality generally around that. In issues of violence, we would also say there is a particular phase where men are more likely to engage in violence. Perhaps one’s physical abilities and sense generally change over time around it, but younger men have often settled disputes by violence. I don’t think that is a new feature.

The issue here, though, is what is driving weapon carriage. Sometimes this is criminality. You heard at the previous session about drugs. It is a competitive, street-level market around drugs. If you are involved in that end, the encouragement to gain territory is a pretty violent business, I would say, and I think that plays out. We see it in things like domestic violence as well; it is not a unique issue.

Q318       Sir Christopher Chope: One of the ways in which people can be prepared is by, for example, doing judo or taekwondo, being physically able, and being taught how to deal with a situation where you are threatened with a knife. Do you think that there is something to be said for increasing the encouragement of young people to be able to protect themselves, so that they do not have to take a knife out, by knowing how to deal with such an incident were it to arise?

Chief Constable Thompson: The best knife prevention technique is to run away as fast as you can. It genuinely is.

Sir Christopher Chope: But you need to be fit to do that.

Chief Constable Thompson: Yes. I think that people have to run away. I would probably not advocate a strategy of increasing the combat readiness in martial arts of young people in general, but what we do see, of course, with things like those types of groups is there is some attraction to those sports. I was out visiting one of the mosques that was damaged the other day, and opposite it, the mosque runs a martial arts club. It is hugely popular. It takes young men off the street. It channels them into competitive activity. We have seen boxing play a part. Those types of activities are very popular with young guys, and if that is a way of dealing with it and it builds confidence, I would probably not see it as a strategy to improve their street-based combat skills, but it does deliver something different.

Q319       Sir Christopher Chope: It is an alternative. If they say, “I am carrying a knife because I want to protect myself,” an alternative to that is to protect yourself by being fitter and more able to deal with that sort of attack, in the same way that a lot of young women are taught how to deal with men who get violent or threatening towards them.

Cressida Dick: I would absolutely echo Dave’s point that meaningful, purposeful activity is always good for all of us, and is likely to stop us getting into trouble, make us feel more confident potentially, and increase our skills in a variety of different ways. Sports and adrenaline-filled activities in which you can get out frustrations are very good as well for young people, probably, and maybe more particularly young boys. I am not sure about the science of that, but it appears to be the case. We have both been, as I am sure many of you have, to fantastic sports diversion programmes and activity programmes that are clearly keeping young people very safe.

Part of our strategy in London is to try to mobilise our partners and our public in every way to try to keep our young people safe, whether that is by giving them greater confidence and greater skills or, for example, making sure, as Dave said, that there is a safe corridor for them away from school, provided by schools officers, other police officers but also members of the public. This is a time when everybody is soul-searching and thinking hard about how we could be of service. I am not dismissing your point; it is one of a hundred things I would like to see people exploring more and doing more of. People want to help.

Q320       Stuart C. McDonald: I just wanted to follow up on the issue of knife crime prevention orders, which you mentioned, Commissioner, but if I could come to you first of all, Chief Constable, the whole tenor of your evidence has really been that enforcement is only ever going to take us so far, that we need a cross-Government response. You have spoken about public health and you have even spoken about the vulnerability of some young people who are involved in carrying knives and so on. Aren’t knife crime prevention orders almost going in the opposite direction to that? Isn’t there a danger that the risks of drawing 12, 13 and 14 year-olds into the criminal justice system outweighs the small increase in powers that the Commissioner referred to?

Chief Constable Thompson: I think that there is a role where they can operate. We have been doing some work looking at young people who are most likely to commit serious offending, to try to drive prevention. It is part of national analytic solution work that is going on nationally. We have been using data from a number of forces to look at what factors will predict offending. We want to do that to intervene. We do the work around the Turning Point programme in the West Midlands, which was one of the things that the Lammy report covered off, which is trying to look at diverting young people away from crime.

I do not think the Met is any different; we all start from the basis of trying to divert people, but let’s be honest, prevention is often looking at the flow into the problem. There is a problem with the stock sometimes. There are some pretty seriously violent people who are involved in some pretty serious violent behaviour, and who terrify other young people; we have to do something about that here and now. My view would be that prevention is great for groups who we can intervene with. There are some people who we are going to have to take a criminal justice sanction to.

Q321       Stuart C. McDonald: Twelve, 13 and 14 year-olds—is that too far?

Chief Constable Thompson: I regret to say that I think sometimes that is the case. A criminal justice intervention is just as good an intervention sometimes.

Q322       Stuart C. McDonald: But don’t we already have—

Chief Constable Thompson: I don’t set out with a strategy to criminalise lots of young people. It affects life chances. If you look at the stop-searches, for example, we took some policy decisions about what we do about cannabis, because if we are stopping and searching for weapons, we know we will find huge amounts of cannabis. My answer is not, “Let’s give everybody a cannabis warning”. It is disastrous for their life chances. What the Met has talked about and discussed on this is that it is a targeted piece on people who particularly, I think, pose risk. I think that we should be focused on it, but I will always start from a preventive approach.

Q323       Stuart C. McDonald: Commissioner, are the powers targeted enough, though? It is not just me that is questioning this. The Prison Reform Trust, the Standing Committee for Youth Justice and the Magistrates Association are all concerned about how broad these powers are. Is it worth it for the small increase in powers that you describe?

Cressida Dick: I think it is and I think it will be. I respect my officers who are working really closely with these young people who have come up with the initial idea for this. It is, I should double underline, prevention. I am completely with Dave. Sadly, we have a lot of offences against young people and by young people. Some of our young people feel that the police are not able to keep them safe enough and they also feel that it is not likely that anything very meaningful is going to happen to the lad who has attacked them in a robbery. Robberies are overwhelming numbers of youngsters on youngsters. They need to see that there is a fast, swift, effective system and that for those who are very violent and very dangerous there is a really meaningful break for everybody else and an opportunity for that person to get away.

That has nothing directly to do with knife crime prevention orders, which are a preventative order. We have been doing lots of briefings to colleagues of yours in both Houses and we would be happy to go on doing that because I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about this. The idea of this is that the two types of occasions on which somebody might become subject to such an order are entirely preventative, where we have good intelligence that has to satisfy a magistrate, of course, that a young person is more than once carrying a knife and routinely carrying a knife. This order does not take them into the criminal justice system, it imposes on them—which may be very helpful to them—some restrictions that they can then say to the gang or whoever else, “I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I can’t get involved in that”.

Q324       Stuart C. McDonald: Is that realistic, though? We were speaking earlier that some of these people are vulnerable kids. Just because the police have slapped on some sort of order does not mean that they are really going to feel empowered to go to the people who have groomed them or encouraged them to start carrying a knife and say, “Look, I have this order in place, I can’t do it anymore”.

Cressida Dick: I think it may do. I don’t suppose it will be a magic thing for all, but I think it may very well, actually. It involves a serious conversation among a number of people, not least the young person and their parents. It outlines the challenges that they are currently facing and puts in place, according to whatever the magistrate decides, some measures that will help them to be restricted in some of the activities that were putting them at risk of getting further embroiled. We have seen in different contexts similar types of orders work very effectively, including with very young people. It is designed to be preventative. It is designed to get people away from the criminal justice system and divert, not to fast track them into it, which I think is perhaps what you fear it may do. It is not designed to do that, and I don’t think it will.

Q325       Chair: I have a quick final question. Our previous evidence session was about interaction between serious violence and the drugs market. Do you think it would make any difference to the serious violence challenges that you face or to your ability to address them if either UK demand for drugs reduced or if UK supply of drugs reduced?

Chief Constable Thompson: Yes, I think both, but there are always transitional impacts when dramatic things happen. Many people are involved in this area because of the high returns in terms of criminality. What we do know about organised crime groups is they diversify incredibly well. I alluded earlier to the challenge that we have in the West Midlands about organised vehicle crime, which is exactly the result of some changes in regulatory framework in other areas and what is going on in the market that have made that become hugely exploited. We have to be very careful. Some of that is the same gangs who are involved in drugs. It is a great way of laundering money.

I was listening to the group talk before about the issues that might reduce demand. We are talking about treatment rooms now. The West Midlands police and crime commissioner is very keen to grasp those issues in partnership with health. We could do work that could reduce demand; that would be the first place I would start.

Certainly, on the inflow and purity of drugs into the country, for national agencies—the National Crime Agency, border agencies—an impact on supply would be useful, but impacting on supply alone will create its own problems. If it drives up the commodity price of drugs, that will hit acquisitive crime. You have to start off with this demand and harm-reduction approach to those who use being the predominant issue. Listening to the evidence before, I would agree that some of the resources diverted into that area in the past were not as strong. Certainly it is about trying to re-instigate that.

There are discussions in our region about drug treatment rooms. There is some interest in the health sector, but there is an interest if policing contributes quite a significant amount of the money to it, and I think that this is a health-based issue.

Cressida Dick: I think that we have to really stress just how much of this phenomenon that you are focusing on—serious violence affecting our young people—is connected to drugs in one way or another. That is far less in terms of the addiction and the acquisitive crime, and far more about the market and the availability. It is, in my view, at the root of it all; it really is. When we look back over the last five years or more that you have been doing this—more than I have—all the indicators have been going in the wrong direction, as far as I can see. It is a massive challenge for all of us at every level.

You have heard me say that we are looking at targeting places and street dealers entirely through the lens of the violence that is associated with that. We are looking at county lines, and you have debated that a lot. We are looking at the gangs and the OCGs, organised crime groups, nearly all of whom are engaged, if it involves young people and violence, in primarily drugs. It is a huge challenge for us. As to how you solve that, it needs to be tackled at every level.

I absolutely agree with Dave that large swings always cause trouble, and reducing demand is just as important as reducing supply. I also heard the witnesses before, including Steve Rodhouse—who obviously we have both worked very closely with—and I understand the challenges, I think, of reducing importation and availability in a demand-rich market, in which it appears that more people are getting interested in taking drugs right now. It is very, very challenging, and I think that people have slightly taken their eye off the ball in the last several years. I regret that on everybody’s behalf, and that is why we are really going full steam ahead.

Q326       Chair: You say that you think this is actually at the root of all of the increases; why do you say that?

Cressida Dick: The questioning started with the serious stabbings and the serious violence that is affecting young people, often perpetrated by young people, or nearly always, and young people on the receiving end of it. The vast majority of those young people are engaged in drug activity one way or another.

Q327       Chair: What is it specifically about changes in the drug market, then, that you think has driven the increase?

Cressida Dick: I am sure you covered this before, and others are more expert than me, but with purity strong, price staying the same, and demand up, it is a very lucrative market, and there are some very, very aggressive and entrepreneurial people out there who are using young people and vulnerable people in all sorts of ways to make maximum amounts of money.

Q328       Chair: It is the expansion of the market, you think, that has driven it?

Cressida Dick: I do think it is one of the factors, yes, absolutely, and the greater importation and availability that we have seen over the last years, despite more interdictions.

If I might just add one last thing, I would want to echo what Steve said about criminal finances. It is a very important way into dealing with this challenge, from an enforcement point of view. For us, we have a particular interest at the moment in money service bureaux, of which we have about 9,000 in London. They are not very well regulated. Huge amounts of cash are going through those institutions, and most of it is straight out of the country on crates. A huge amount of that cash, I am sorry to say, appears, now we have been doing some targeted testing in the last three or four months, to be illegal finance, and most of it comes from the drugs trade.

Q329       Chair: Do you need stronger regulation, or just stronger enforcement to do that?

Cressida Dick: I think both—stronger regulation and enforcement.

Chief Constable Thompson: Back to criminal finances, the context is often very different in different places. Assisted accommodation is becoming a real concern in the West Midlands, in terms of properties being purchased, converted and used to house vulnerable people. We have seen the evidence recently about the probation issues. Again, there is evidence in there that money is being laundered through those. We also see it with the criminal vehicle market now, quite extensive levels of opportunity. Cash sales for scrapped vehicles generate a market for stolen parts. There is a considerable opportunity, I think, to close off criminal finances. It feels to me there are a lot of gaps that well-intended deregulation has created.

Q330       Chair: Let’s suppose there was suddenly £100 million for something that was not policing, but that would make your job easier in terms of tackling this. What would your top priority be?

Chief Constable Thompson: I would start off on the point around increasing young people’s resilience, and go back to that model. Starting with them and their relationships and their community, I would look at the areas where we have the highest problems. I would look at the particular groups and schools, and I would invest more resourcing into improving the resilience of young people, their families, and their community, in terms of driving up social capital around those young people. That is the biggest challenge, I think. Far too many of our young people in the cities, despite well-intended support from their parents, are often in a much more complex environment than we grew up in with social media and other areas. They have many more challenges and that support and resilience for me is really important that it is targeted around those people.

Cressida Dick: I won’t repeat that. I would put that amount of money, if it could not go into policing, into really effective interventions that we know do work, particularly in terms of diversion. So not quite as far upstream as Dave has gone, if you like, but those young people who are already getting sucked in, to give them youth workers out on the street in the places that they are and diversion schemes in hospitals and in custody and in other places. I think that would have a massive impact.

Chair: Thank you very much, and thank you to you and your officers for the immense amount of work that we know you are doing to tackle serious violence and knife crime. It is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Cressida Dick: Thank you.

Chief Constable Thompson: Thank you.