Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Serious violence, HC 1016
Tuesday 30 April 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 30 April 2019.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Rehman Chishti; Tim Loughton; Douglas Ross; John Woodcock.
Questions 391–455
Witnesses
I: Mark Burns-Williamson OBE, Chair and Serious Violence Lead, Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire; Vicky Foxcroft MP, Youth Violence Commission; and David Lloyd, Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire.
II: Dame Louise Casey DBE, CB, former Director General of the Troubled Families Programme and former Victims’ Commissioner; and Anne Longfield OBE, Children’s Commissioner for England.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire (SVC0041)
– Children’s Commissioner for England (SVC0054)
Witnesses: Mark Burns-Williamson, Vicky Foxcroft, and David Lloyd.
Q391 Chair: May I welcome our panel to this evidence session of the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into serious violence? May I begin by asking each of our panellists to introduce yourselves and refer to the work you have been doing on serious violence?
Mark Burns-Williamson: Morning, everybody. I am Mark Burns-Williamson, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire. I lead on the portfolio for serious violence for police and crime commissioners and chair a working group within the association, looking at how we can work together to try to reduce knife and violent crime. I have attended a number of the roundtable meetings recently within the Home Office and am also a member of the serious violence taskforce that the Home Secretary chairs. Did you want me to go on and say more at this point?
Chair: No, we will come back to that in the questions.
Vicky Foxcroft: I am Vicky Foxcroft. I am the MP for Lewisham, Deptford, but I also chair the cross-party Youth Violence Commission, which has been looking, along with academics and others, into the root causes of youth violence.
David Lloyd: I am David Lloyd. I am the PCC of Hertfordshire. I was the immediate past chair of the working group and the serious violence portfolio of which Mark spoke, and I recently attended the Prime Minister’s serious violence taskforce.
Q392 Chair: Thank you very much. Can I ask for your reflections at the beginning? There have been reports overnight of another stabbing in north London and potentially a double murder inquiry in south London, and there is a real sense of looking at these increasing numbers of stabbings and homicides right across the country as an escalating problem that neither the police, the Home Office, the Government more widely nor any of the prevention services have a grip on. Do you think that is a fair assessment?
Mark Burns-Williamson: I think it is really difficult. The Government produced the violent crime strategy over a year ago now, and when you read that document it makes a lot of sense. The concern is that we have had recent announcements of additional funding—the so-called surge moneys for policing around operational work—and an element of that £100 million or so, around what are termed violence reduction units, has not yet been allocated, so in a sense we are playing catch-up with what is happening out in our communities and on our streets. Although we are all committed to early intervention and prevention, the cuts we have seen to policing and other public services—youth services in particular—are all adding to this problem. The role of social media, for example: how is that impacting, in terms of enabling, potentially, some of these crimes to take place?
As an example, I have commissioned some work with the University of Huddersfield and the youth offending teams in West Yorkshire to look at that, and it will be reporting in the next two or three months. Schools, policing and local authorities are under real pressure to respond to these incidents that appear to be occurring, pretty much, on a daily and weekly basis. While police will always respond and try to put things in place, this is a longer-term issue that will require a much more joined-up approach and sustained investment into public services.
Q393 Chair: Do you think we are on top of it at the moment?
Mark Burns-Williamson: Not totally on top of it, no. I will reference the “Serious violence in focus” document that we published recently setting out some of the work that police and crime commissioners are undertaking with police and lots of other agencies, but there is a requirement for a much more sustained, all-system approach to this that I think, at the moment, is not really in place or where it needs to be.
Vicky Foxcroft: When all that young people are seeing in the media—bear in mind that most of our people are not involved in youth violence of any sort and are fantastic—is negative images of them and negative images of young people, that adds to the kind of fear that young people have. If we are absolutely honest, our young people are terrified right now. Sometimes that may well be leading to some of them carrying knives, which we know will make them far less safe.
One of the things we found in our surveys—we did the first survey of young people’s experience of violence in school, at home and in their local community, but also of how they felt in terms of the police—when we asked them how many of them would go to the police if they had a problem or an issue, 46% said they would not go to the police, so we clearly have an issue with lack of trust as well among young people and the police. That is the one area where they should be going and seeking that kind of safety at times.
David Lloyd: Clearly, the Government and the whole of the UK recognise that serious violence is a problem. Your commentary underlines that.
The first of my asks, in many ways, would be a better understanding of what that problem is and what we mean by the language that we use. When I have said before that in Hertfordshire there has been an increase of 44% over two years in knife crime, everyone assumes that means there are 1,600 people in one year being stabbed. It does not. It means that bladed articles are being taken off people, and the carrying of that bladed article is an offence. I think we need to better understand that, and in some ways, the media representation is not helpful around it, because many of the issues are brought together, and some of the issues of knife crime especially are ones where we are on top of it, but actually, we are doing something about it.
We also need better recognition of where the problem is, because I do not think it is fair to say that knife crime—sorry, serious violence—is exactly the same throughout the whole country. Certainly, there are hotspots of serious violence, and there is quite a lot of travelling criminality around serious violence. We also need to recognise that. There are different approaches needed in different places. There are different threats and risks. This is not something that has the same impact, for example, in Hertfordshire as it does in north London, although the two may very well be linked.
Q394 Rehman Chishti: Mr Lloyd, with regards to your point about the possession of bladed articles and how one deals with that, we have heard evidence in this Committee before that says that previously you had individuals using bladed articles to attack individuals in their thighs or buttocks as a deterrent linked to the selling and supply of drugs.
However, in recent years, we are now seeing that they are going directly for key organs and, therefore, you have a high fatality rate. That has been confirmed by senior officers who I have spoken to, but also by medical experts who have given evidence. One of them is Mike Beckett, who is the medical registrar at West Middlesex University Hospital. They are saying, “Look, it’s part of this wider strategy.” In the taskforce that you were on, was there any discussion about banning the supply of pointed articles—that is, long pointed knives—looking at how they were being used before as a deterrent in the buttocks and thighs, which is wrong, and now in key organs, which is leading to high fatalities? Is there discussion on that and, if there isn’t, why not?
David Lloyd: In many ways, I would put the question the other way round. One of the real issues that we have at the moment is around, as you rightly highlight, the use of drugs. Frankly, the middle classes who, in Hertfordshire, are really concerned about their Fairtrade coffee and what the supply line of that is do not seem to have the same concern around the cocaine that they take.
Actually, the outcome of taking cocaine is not victimless. As you rightly point out, those organised crime groups are using violence to enforce an unlawful market. They are not particularly interested in supplying drugs; they are interested in making money unlawfully. In some ways, we need to turn it around, rather than saying, “Well, it’s all right if they use this type of weapon or”—
Q395 Rehman Chishti: I think you’ve got me wrong, Mr Lloyd. Let me come back. Of course I get the point about drugs, cocaine and whatever it is. It is completely wrong and abhorrent, and we have to deal with that. My question to you is specifically on that. We have had evidence about the way knives are being used—ordinary kitchen knives, being carried, in possession, to inflict critical injury, which then leads to some people losing their lives.
Your taskforce is one aspect. The taskforce would have looked at everything; not just one or two aspects. Before you give me a comment on whether it is the right thing or not, has there been any discussion with regard to certain bladed articles, like the ordinary knives that are being used to carry out these crimes, in line with the report that I have read, and the point made by certain medical experts that ordinary knives should have their blades amended to stop that critical, fatal injury?
David Lloyd: I do not know whether or not there has been that discussion, so I cannot answer that question.
Q396 Rehman Chishti: May I then say this to you: when you next go to that taskforce, could you remind them of what has been said by experts such as Sarah Hainsworth, who is a professor at Aston University, and Mike Beckett as part of the same report, supported by Reverend Nathan Ward in my constituency, who was successful in getting £30,000 of Government funding, saying that certain things need to be looked at? You can look at all the different sectors, but the basics are that these are some of the things that people are saying we need to look at. Could you take that away?
Linked to that are the knife crime prevention orders. The Government have come out with this to say, “Hey, this is part of our strategy.” From your experience, sitting on that taskforce, is this really a constructive way forward? Sir Denis O’Connor told us that the strategy is more concerned with narrative and less with action. Is having this title basically to say, “We’re doing something,” rather than doing something that actually needs to be done? How effective is it, and what is the overall assessment of the taskforce in making that difference?
David Lloyd: As I am not longer an active member, but Mark is, with your permission—
Rehman Chishti: In that case, Mr Burns-Williamson, could you answer that, please?
Mark Burns-Williamson: Going back to your first point about whether there has been discussion around the bladed articles, unfortunately not enough in my view. I am aware of some supermarkets that have taken decisions to curtail or not sell certain items, or to do it in a way that is responsible, but much more needs to be done. Certainly when I attend the next taskforce I will raise that.
In terms of the prevention orders, it is just one tool, basically, that is obviously aimed at trying to deal with some of the perpetrators of knife crime. On its own, it is just one aspect.
Q397 Rehman Chishti: The reason I asked that question is because I used to prosecute cases and defend cases before doing this job. We have previously had ASBOs. Were they really effective, or was it an action to be seen to be doing something. It is the same thing here. I ask experts, “Will it really make a difference?” I know it’s part of a wider strategy, but is it a case of simply having a catchy title and the real issue that needs to be dealt with therefore not being dealt with? In your view, as somebody who looks at it and works with different agencies, will it make a difference, and if so, what? From a score of 10, the highest, to 1, the lowest, where do you think it is?
Mark Burns-Williamson: Only time will tell, because they have only recently been introduced. I have not seen much evidence of their being put into action or used. At this moment in time, it is very difficult to give an assessment of how effective they will be. I think there is an element of having to announce something or being seen to address the issue. What really matters is what happens on the ground and if the police and other agencies can effectively utilise the legislation.
Q398 Rehman Chishti: I am running out of time, but I have two more questions. First, Ms Foxcroft, do you want to add anything?
Vicky Foxcroft: Yes. I have concerns over knife crime protection orders for exactly the reasons that you outlined. In terms of bladed articles, it will be a long time before you can manage to get them all round-edged, but I think we should move towards that, particularly for the reasons that you outlined in terms of the stabbing stuff. Also, arguably, I think we should legislate to make sure that we have all knives in stores locked away in the back. I know there are some problems with DIY stores, but I think there could be a way of managing to achieve that. I was disappointed that we did not do that in the Offensive Weapons Bill.
Q399 Rehman Chishti: Can I ask a separate question, Mr Burns-Williamson? You touched on local authorities earlier and different organisations playing their role. One question that comes up, which we raised with a panel that gave evidence a couple of weeks ago, regards young, vulnerable individuals being moved from one local authority to another. I get individuals in my constituency in Gillingham and Rainham placed by Bromley and other London authorities, with the host of challenges that they bring, which then ties in to antisocial behaviour and some crime. I am talking about some, not all.
I recently had a young man, 17, who lost his life to a knife stabbing. I am not linking it to anything. I am just saying that a problem that occurred was moved from one local authority to the other. It is wrong. Every local authority should take responsibility and deal with their issues. It happens whether it is London to Kent or Manchester to outskirting areas. Is there a concerted approach to make sure that that does not happen, or that it happens only in very rare circumstances, with the consent of the local authority?
David Lloyd indicated assent.
Rehman Chishti: I see Mr Lloyd agreeing with me; he is nodding approval. Is that the right thing to do?
David Lloyd: Certainly that would be very helpful, were we to have that power to convene, and also a power to share data. Hertfordshire and a number of north London authorities are moving people out. People who have a wide range of needs are being moved into Three Rivers, into Broxbourne, into those district areas, either into private rented housing or into housing association housing. We are not hearing beforehand, either as a police force or as a county council in social care, that those people are arriving. That means we cannot put the appropriate safeguarding around them before they arrive. We really do need to have far better data sharing. There should be a duty to co-operate on that, and I think it should be placed on all local authorities, police and health. Health and local authorities are particularly difficult to get that data sharing across.
Q400 Rehman Chishti: Can I ask a question on that specifically? Sometimes you ask one Department and it gets passed to another Department and then another Department. There is a Government taskforce looking at this. Is it the responsibility of the Government taskforce, as a part of its wider strategy, to say that that must happen? Is it the appropriate body to do that?
David Lloyd: It would be very helpful if we had those broad convening powers as PCCs. Many PCCs—probably every PCC in the country—would be happy to take those convening powers so that we could ensure that we get the right data, the right information and the right support, so that we can do something about it.
Rehman Chishti: I have no further questions. A big thank you to all the PCCs across the country. I have a brilliant one, Matthew Scott, in Kent. I know you all do a great job.
Q401 Tim Loughton: Can I first ask the two police commissioners how big an issue is knife crime and gangs for you at the moment? How do you deal with it strategically, in terms of dealings with the police, and, as two experienced police commissioners, how would you say that has changed over your last couple of terms since you first became PCCs?
Mark Burns-Williamson: It clearly is a big problem. I represent an area that has a big, large metropolitan force, but I think all PCCs are concerned about the rises in violence and knife crime in their areas. I think all of us have looked at our own local strategies with our chief constables, working in partnership with community safety partnerships, and we have strategies in place.
Where one of the big problems has arisen is just the sheer number of partners that we need to bring to the table in order to address this. In terms of the educational system, we have seen a fragmentation of how schools operate now, whether it’s free schools or academies; the role of local education authorities is clearly not what it used to be. School exclusions, pupil referral units—all these things are playing into some of the issues that we are having to address and deal with.
All PCCs are absolutely looking at local initiatives to raise awareness, going into schools and working with community groups to try and prevent knife crime from happening, but I think there’s a big cultural shift that has taken place in the last two or three years.
Q402 Tim Loughton: What is that cultural shift? Are you saying that there is a problem in bringing all the various agencies—and this is a complicated problem that’s a sort of jigsaw of solutions. Is there a problem with bringing all the relevant agencies and bodies to the table? In terms of the police taking the lead on this—and we’re talking about strategies or whatever—what does that actually mean in practice, in terms of how the police in West Yorkshire are now using more of their resources? They’ve got more officers deployed and are being more proactive, or more active or whatever. How has that actually changed?
Mark Burns-Williamson: We have established, or invested in, major crime teams. One of the big issues in recent times has been the fact that neighbourhood policing has had to be diminished because of the funding pressures that we have been under. Ultimately, it is only by having those locally embedded police officers, PCSOs, working in multi-agency teams with schools as well that we can really start to get on top of this.
We have looked at various initiatives. I use Proceeds of Crime funding, for example, to give out grants to community groups and different organisations that directly address knife crime and serious violence, but that is not a substitute for the longer-term investment that in my view is required, not just in policing but across the board. We do have good partnerships, and we obviously co-operate and work with health services, local authorities and probation, but actually I think there needs to be a beefing up, if you like, of the statutory duty for this partnership—so, a reinvigoration of the community safety partnership arena.
Q403 Tim Loughton: Mr Lloyd, if you would like to comment as well, has your strategy in Hertfordshire been set up completely in isolation from what Mr Burns-Williamson may be doing in West Yorkshire? Is there a coherent working together among the PCCs or constabularies around the country? How has it worked in Hertfordshire, where you have different challenges, but not necessarily lesser ones?
David Lloyd: Let’s first of all answer the part about how much of a problem it is and then move into the working together. In terms of how much of a problem it is, the numbers are not huge, if we are honest. If you look at how many people are stopped per day for a knife crime, it is about four people; there are about 1.2 million people in Hertfordshire.
If you look at how much serious violent crime involving knives or bladed objects took place from April 2018 to January 2019, it is 276 offences, so probably one offence a day. That goes through the whole gamut: from personal robbery to actual bodily harm, to grievous bodily harm, to threat to kill. Again, across 1.2 million people, the numbers are not huge, but there is a disproportionate effect from the threats and the fear of that violence, and that is something we need to recognise.
It does mean that young people are more likely to carry knives because they feel that they have a threat if they do not carry. You have got to put it into context, but that does not mean to say that we do not take it really seriously. We do take it seriously, which is why we do work alongside each other within the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. One of the things about police and crime commissioners is that we all work in a very affiliative way.
Clearly, the other thing about police and crime commissioners is that you set up what policing and crime reduction should look like locally and how you intend to do that. In Hertfordshire, I hope that I was ahead of the curve. We have got a gangs and schools unit where I am putting police officers back into schools; I think we have got five plus a sergeant across those 10 areas. I have pledged that we will have 10 plus a sergeant, with one police officer per district or borough in the schools there. We have also put considerable funding into St Giles Trust, which is doing great work within the schools.
Tim Loughton: We have had them as a witness.
David Lloyd: You have heard from them. They really are tackling that gang violence and those at risk of harm. An interesting subtext to that is that in a number of cases the schools they went into in Broxbourne or Waltham Cross are right on the border with Enfield. Many of those who they are working with are resident in Enfield, but are coming into Hertfordshire for schooling.
Q404 Tim Loughton: That is helpful. Can I ask you both—Vicky might like to comment, as well—about one of the comments in the Government’s violence strategy about charging rates having fallen? We have had the whole dialogue around changes in stop and search, too.
To what extent do you attribute what appears to be—whether it is happening in Hertfordshire, West Yorkshire, south London or wherever—a spike in violence involving young people and crime to a perception that it is being less stringently policed and the prospects of getting caught, charged and punished are less? That might be linked to your comment about PCSOs and police on the ground. To what extent do you attribute it to that, or are there other factors, such as an increase in drug distribution, the whole county lines phenomenon and the demand causing a spike in violence? It is quite a big question.
David Lloyd: There has been some work done within the Home Office, hasn’t there, that shows that in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was the use of heroin, and there was a similar increase in serious violence around the back of it. Actually, the serious violence is very closely linked to the drug market, rather than anything else, but I do not think it is helpful that people feel that if they carry a bladed object, they are unlikely to be stopped and searched. That is why I am very supportive of us using section 60 powers and various other powers to be able to stop people and search them.
I think the pendulum has perhaps swung too far in one direction. It was wrong in many ways that people were being targeted without good reason, it would appear. I think we have now got that right and it is clear why we target people. If people are targeted and they are from a BAME background, I am very happy for that to happen if we are seeing people from BAME backgrounds disproportionately being killed through knife crime. We need to ensure that they are safer and safer on the streets, and that is what it is about. We need to push back, and it is very useful that we are seeing more section 60 usage so that people are being stopped and searched and they are aware, because that then says, “No, you will not be able to carry a knife.”
Mark Burns-Williamson: I think it is obvious that the fact that we have fewer police officers throughout England and Wales clearly means that there will be fewer interventions. That is self-evident, in terms of actual day-to-day policing.
Q405 Tim Loughton: It doesn’t necessarily mean that there are going to be fewer charges.
Mark Burns-Williamson: In terms of the charges, most of us now chair local criminal justice boards. We work closely with the CPS courts and probation services and there is no doubt, because of some of the changes in the criminal justice system, that that has contributed to some of the drop off in charges as well.
When you look at the number of stop-and-search incidents that have been carried out, they have reduced quite dramatically in recent times. The best use of stop-and-search was adopted by pretty much every police force that now has body-worn cameras. I think there is a much more intelligence-led approach to targeting where these types of offences may be.
Another issue is that we have lost a lot of experienced police officers out of policing. We are recruiting and have a very young in-service workforce that takes a while to get fully experienced and confident in making stop-and-search activity in some of those areas.
Q406 Tim Loughton: Do you think they engage better with young people, because they are young themselves, rather than some of the old lags?
Mark Burns-Williamson: Potentially, yes. One of the big things is the cuts to youth services. It comes back to the point that I think Vicky made around the confidence of young people in engaging or contacting the police. Often, outreach youth workers, where they used to be, were in a better position to engage on those types of areas.
Q407 Tim Loughton: I think we are going to come on to that as a separate subject. Vicky, do you want to comment on that? You commented that 46% of young people said they did not trust the police enough.
About three years ago, the all-party parliamentary group for children reported on the relationship between police and young people. It found similar sorts of results and made a number of recommendations, some of which the Home Office has taken up since. Why is there this lack of trust, and what has to happen for that trust to be reinstated? Perhaps you will comment on whether it is because you are less likely to be caught, on the face of it, or because of other factors that mean this crime has spiked as it did in the 90s.
Vicky Foxcroft: I think a lot of young people don’t know the police now—they don’t see the community police around. One of our recommendations to try to tackle this was around making sure that we have police officers in every school. That builds not only trust, because the police officer is not always policing in the school—they might be playing football or whatever—but relationships, so that they see the police officer as a human being that they can have a dialogue with and find other ways of resolving situations and issues.
All the schools that had a police officer reported a good relationship with the police officer, and children were far more likely to go to them with a problem. We even heard stories from children who were about to steal money from a card machine, but a police officer nudged them beforehand. They said, “They could have just arrested us straight afterwards, but instead they gave us the advice pre-that situation”.
Managing to find stuff that builds that relationship back up with the police arguably helps the police to do their job as well. Young people have so much expertise and intelligence on the ground, and it is not always seen as grassing; it is more seen as trying to protect their friends. That is quite important, but they need to feel that trust in the officer, so that they will not just end up having their friends bothered, but find a way of diverting. We have talked about that kind of early intervention and prevention stuff a lot.
Q408 Chair: How important do you think that issue is? We took evidence from some of the chief constables. The sense we had from the Met was that there was a big drop in the number of police officers based in schools, but it was now starting to increase the number again. The West Midlands said it had no police officers in school and no prospect of being able to have any, given its resources.
What is the situation in terms of police officers and schools in your PCC areas? Vicky, what is your sense of how important this is? Given that, in the end, there will have to be priorities on which interventions can make a difference and where the funding goes, where would you put it in your list of priorities? I’ll start with Vicky and then we can ask about the PCC coverage.
Vicky Foxcroft: That question is a bit of the all-round problem because we are spending more money on youth violence, year on year. If we want to talk about early intervention and prevention, we can’t just have that one bit of it that ends at resolving it.
Just on the point about police officers in schools, we also need that early intervention working with a mum when she is pregnant, early childhood centres, youth work, proper support and resources in terms of schools, and those police officers building the relationship.
I wouldn’t choose to pit one of those against the other; I would almost use a pendulum effect. We are going to have to take the hit for a bit of time to go and invest more in the early intervention and prevention and then, in future, we will save the money in terms of the policing system, the judicial system and the costs there. So I would not pit one against the other.
If we go on to stop-and-search, where it is handled well and young people do not feel threatened and targeted, they don’t particularly have a problem with it, if it is done in a polite, non-aggressive fashion. Body-worn cameras, which we have now got in Lewisham, make a really big difference. Arguably, the police prefer doing stop-and-search with body-worn cameras because it feels like they protect them.
In the long run, it is about managing to encourage some of our young people, who might not think they would go into doing jobs in the police in future, and ensuring that our police force is more representative of communities. Having those police officers and trusted adults and role models and those relationships in future can have a really big, long-term effect. I would not choose one or the other. We need to do all of them and will save more money in the long run.
Mark Burns-Williamson: We have about 40 dedicated schools officers in West Yorkshire, and we have done some mapping around where incidents of knife crime or serious violence have occurred. We link that into some of the deprivation factors as well. As we are now starting to rebuild some of our neighbourhood policing teams, we are ensuring that every school has at least a contact within the local neighbourhood policing team, and often that will be a PCSO.
I agree with a lot that Vicky has just said. If we are to rebuild trust among young people, having those police contacts and presences within school help to normalise and help people see them as human beings and not just somebody in a uniform that is there to enforce the law, as it were. We think it is a really important part of policing, in terms of having those concrete links with local teams.
There are some schools that are better placed to provide some funding or match funding for some of these roles. Others are not in a position to do that, so it is a bit of a postcode lottery around some of the resources that might be available for some of the schools, as well.
David Lloyd: As I think I have already said, I have ensured that we have police officers going back into our schools. I think it is really important. When they weren’t specifically based there, I kept on saying that we should have patrol plans that involve schools. We cannot be at a point where the only time we see a police officer is if something has gone wrong. If you see a police car outside school premises, people shouldn’t assume that there is anything wrong; they should assume there is something right when they are there. It has been really important.
It is sometimes difficult to engage with the education sector. I should think we all find that in our elected roles. As they have become more and more autonomous, that means perhaps that they don’t engage in quite the same way across the public sector as perhaps they did 30 or 40 years ago.
This morning, Three Counties Radio was leading on schools in Harpenden and St Albans, with the heads writing letters about concerns of drug dealing within the school. Clearly, there is an appetite to start reaching out and working across other organisations, and that is very welcome. I think that all PCCs are starting to write to their regional schools commissioners to try to involve them as well, but there has been a disconnect within that local community, which we need to repair.
Q409 Chair: Just a short, follow-up response. The reason why I am pushing a bit on this is that, clearly, more substantial action is needed to deal with the very serious, escalating violence that we have seen. However, we are still trying to work out how to prioritise things—what things would have the biggest impact.
If it turned out that having a dedicated police officer in every school would make a massive impact: working with the kids, dealing with safeguarding and safety issues, building those relationships, doing crime prevention work—if that was a big thing to turn things around, maybe we should be making a big fuss about it and saying, “For heaven’s sake, we’ve got to find the resources between us to make sure that we have police officers in schools.”
What I am not sure about is whether, if we were going to make a big fuss about having one thing or a couple of things, you would base police officers in schools or you would say that we should have youth support immediately after school, for instance. At the moment, there is a massive difference between trying to get dedicated officers in schools and trying to have a few more PCSOs having links to schools. I am trying to work out how much this is one of the issues we should be shouting and screaming about, or how much this is a matter of, “It’s one of many things; this bit will help, but actually other things will make a bigger difference.”
Vicky Foxcroft: We know that 50% of the prison population were excluded at school. If we were to shout and scream about something, tackling the rise in exclusions should be something that we prioritise. There isn’t just one answer for how we tackle that, but when we know that we are sending kids to PRUs that are four times more expensive than secondary schools, when they are arguably more expensive than private schools at times, we could almost say, right, in terms of funding, do we want to revisit and repackage where we go and put that funding?
Do we provide the support required for those kids at that time, to keep them in mainstream education, and be that mental health support—have police officers in schools building those relationships and getting those links? Arguably, it could save the police money, having those links in with young people, because of the intelligence that they have gone and got there. I do not think it is just one thing, but exclusions are one of the massive issues.
Mark Burns-Williamson: I would agree with that. We know that the Timpson review is overdue in terms of reporting. I know that Anne Longfield is due to come into the next session: the reports she has done recently have been very helpful in terms of highlighting some of the real issues here. Absolutely, having a dedicated officer does make a big difference, particularly where there is the intelligence to suggest that there are more incidents of violence and knife crime. Would it be great if we had a link to every school? Absolutely. Actually, though, it goes beyond policing.
Q410 Chair: So is it fair to say that the school-police link is crucial, and what is happening to young people is crucial, but it is more than simply whether there is an officer in schools?
David Lloyd: I would certainly agree with that. I was just thinking about Stephen’s predecessor, Alun Michael, who is doing such a lot of work around adverse childhood experiences. It is a whole-system approach that is required. The police are great at certain bits of it, around arresting and doing those things, but we don’t actually want to be at the point of arresting and investigating a murder or a serious violent incident; we need to be there further up. That is where getting organisations like St Giles Trust involved, and getting proper youth support in place at the right place and time, is far more likely to work. The problem is that it is not a swift solution. You cannot just do that overnight, and that is the real frustration.
Q411 Douglas Ross: Can I look again at this figure of 46% for the number of young people who do not feel comfortable going to the police, but from the other side? You mentioned, Vicky, how you address this, but how aware do you think the police are of this problem prior to these results being announced? I assume no police officers are just sitting there wondering why young people aren’t coming up to them. They are having interactions; they are working hard with young people. How do you view the problem from the police officers’ side, rather than from the side of encouraging young people to be more involved with the police?
Vicky Foxcroft: I have not experienced any police officers who have been surprised by these figures. Many would say they are unable to do enough of that kind of engagement, but where they are, they would say that, within their cohort of young people, that changes very much and can lead to very emotive and fantastic stories of the work they have gone and done with those young people. But it is about having that time and resource to be able to do that versus everything else they have got in their work portfolio.
Mark Burns-Williamson: I would agree with that. It goes back to the neighbourhood policing role. It’s actually having that time to engage and spend the time doing those neighbourhood policing roles, with engagement as a key part of that, and building up the trust, confidence and the relationships that are so important if we are to improve the confidence levels. This goes back to the wider issues we were just getting on to there around the educational side of things. Looking at the inclusivity agenda of schools is key to this. In my view, Ofsted needs to be looking at a wider inclusion agenda within mainstream education that supports schools. Certainly, when I have spoken to a number of teachers and police officers recently, both groups say that the pressure is on them to go and do much more than just beyond what their jobs are around safeguarding. Looking at mental health issues is overwhelming them at times, as is being pulled off to deal with other things.
Q412 Douglas Ross: Can I ask both the commissioners and maybe Vicky: do you think, however, that there is a risk if we say that the answer to this is largely—I know the Chair tried to get this; it is not the sole solution—more police officers in schools? Then the majority of other police officers think, “Our work is done by these officers in the schools and it is their responsibility; therefore, we can focus on other things.” However, a number of people affected by these crimes are disengaged with the education system as well.
David Lloyd: I think you are quite right. That is why I keep talking about the whole-system approach. All of this is around what sort of community we want to live in and how we have a society that supports people properly and which broadly has a family structure that does not encourage violence. That is the end. We can profit from far more than just putting more and more police officers into places. You are quite right as well that there is a danger that if you have too much specialisation and you just have a team of schools officers, all of a sudden, it is not part of the patrol plan at all because another colleague does that. There is a danger, and I think it is one we can probably cope and can work with, but it is a point well made.
Q413 Douglas Ross: There have been some announcements about having a public health reaction to respond accordingly to serious violence. What is your view on that, and have you looked at what we are doing in Scotland? That is something the Scottish Government have taken forward and it is often lauded, quite rightly. Do you see that as being the answer, an answer or part of the answer?
David Lloyd: I think it is certainly part of the answer. Clearly, Scotland is different and, indeed, many of the structures are set up differently, so it is easier to have a more unified approach. We have more separate parts of the public sector within England and, to a lesser extent, within Wales as well. That makes it slightly more difficult, so the approach is an interesting one. We need to be certain that we do not try to give the same answer to different problems. I have heard chief constables who know more about the issue than I do say that the gang problem in Glasgow is a very different one to the violence problem in London, West Yorkshire and—to a lesser extent—Hertfordshire. We cannot say, ”It worked there, so it is bound to work here,” but it is a good starting point.
Vicky Foxcroft: It was one of our big recommendations from the Youth Violence Commission report. We referred to Scotland, but the World Health Organisation said that violence needed to be treated like a disease. It is a disease that spreads and it needs to be inoculated. One of the things that worries me at the moment is that we have a lot of people talking about having a public health approach but they do not really understand it—nor, indeed, do we understand what we are supposed to be doing as part of it. It is very much about following the evidence.
One of the things that concerns me is the amount of evidence and data gathering in terms of information identifying what we know we need to do. There are a couple of areas where we do know stuff; exclusions is one. We should be doing stuff on that. The Timpson review was due to report before Christmas and we are still waiting on that. The medical journal BMJ Open published research that said that the time period between 3pm and 6pm was an unsafe time for a large amount of children. That does not mean that it is the case everywhere—which is why different solutions to problems in different areas need to be looked at—but should we not be doing something about that, be it youth workers or keeping our kids in schools, whatever that must be? The public health approach is about data gathering, trying to work together among all the different agencies. It cannot just be the police in isolation from schools, or social work, or looked-after children, or the local authority. Everybody needs to be working together. If we were to really work to the key aims the money should follow the issue, rather than each department being its own silo with their own budget. That funding should go round making sure that we keep those young people safe.
Adverse childhood experiences was mentioned, and there is growing evidence around that. We should also be using that evidence around what we do in different areas. As a Member of Parliament, I am concerned that even at Westminster we do not seem to have that cross-departmental working. We are advocating something that we do not necessarily even achieve ourselves here. It is all well and good for everybody to use the words, but they need to understand the public health approach.
I will highlight one anecdote. Members of the Youth Parliament voted for knife crime to be their top campaign issue. They have been doing loads of stuff on this, and have been advocating the public health approach as part of it. Anybody could get them in at any point. They genuinely understand what the public health approach means.
Mark Burns-Williamson: Just to support that, during the recent roundtable meetings that I attended, I was struck by the fact that we need to be talking much more to the communities and young people affected by this. While we have been to Glasgow and looked at the great work that has gone on there and the other models, it is not just a “lift and shift” model that can be put into any other place with everything exactly the same. The Government are consulting at the moment on the public health approach, and that is part of the answer, but we need to be deciding what we think will work best locally with our partners. We need stronger support around statutory duties for police and crime commissioners and others from Government to actually bring those agencies together, so that we can start to make a tangible difference in tackling knife and violent crime.
Q414 Douglas Ross: Finally, Mr Burns-Williamson, you mentioned in your opening remarks the issue of social media. You were alluding to some of the problems relating to that. Could you expand on some of those comments?
Mark Burns-Williamson: I was elected to this role in 2012. Prior to that I was chair of the police authority. I think one of the massive changes in society for all of us, and within crime as well, is digital technology/social media. I think we need to carry out much more research and other work to understand how that is potentially enabling or facilitating some of the trends that we are seeing.
Q415 Douglas Ross: So is your issue that things seem almost respectable because they are seen on social media or that it’s used to organise some criminal activity? What do you think is the key problem?
Mark Burns-Williamson: This is what we really need to find out from the young people themselves. Regarding the research that I have commissioned, our youth offending teams are working with the cohort of young people affected, and obviously getting the university at Huddersfield involved to provide some real academic rigour. I hope this can prove to be a really valuable piece of work, to provide better understanding of some of the enablers and potential causes of why we are seeing increases in knife crime.
Q416 Douglas Ross: Just to link on from that, I think everyone mentioned how the publicity that knife crime is getting is a bad thing. However, do you not also see it as a necessary evil, because if we do not have the publicity, sometimes you do not get the reaction from Government until it is on the news and in the newspapers? And for many of these families, they have gone through an extremely traumatic event—sometimes the death of a sibling or a child, or a brother or sister, et cetera—and they do not want that incident to go unnoticed. They want people to know the pain they are going through to ensure that it does not happen to another family. I was interested to hear all the negativity about the media, but sometimes I think we actually need that coverage to show that the issue is being taken seriously.
David Lloyd: We are not for one moment trying to say that there should not be that coverage, and I certainly would not want to try to control the media. I think we just sometimes have to be aware of the perverse outcomes. So while those of an older generation might recognise that if carrying a knife is more likely to mean that you will be injured or seriously injured by a knife than if you do not carry a knife, with younger people it seems the other way round. They are less concerned about being arrested and about the impact of carrying a knife than they are about being injured by someone else carrying a knife, and the more that young people feel that there are knives out there, the more that they use that as a justification for carrying knives themselves.
For example, the wonderful sculpture of the Knife Angel, which many people will have seen going around the country, is—I was going to say that it is a “two-edged sword”, and I perhaps do not need to use that image. That is because for some it says, “Gosh, those many knives were given up in an amnesty and therefore there must be a lot of knives out there, so I need to carry a knife.” So we have to be really careful about what we put into the media about the issue.
The message that I want to leave young people with is this: if you carry a knife, the likelihood is that you are going to be injured by a knife. And I do not think that that message is out there.
Vicky Foxcroft: The other thing is that we talk about role models and young people wanting and needing role models, and all the evidence supports that, but we never have those positive media stories of young people doing fantastic stuff. That is one of the things that young people have said to us: “Why are there never reports of the great things that we have done at different times?”
The other thing is that sometimes it is seen that we will just raise stuff when something has happened, but when something big and significant has not happened, we will all be quiet. As politicians, we probably are incredibly guilty of that.
That leads me on to getting a point across that I wanted to make. I was reading a 2009 Home Affairs Committee report before I came here, which advocated taking a public health approach. One of the other parts of a public health approach is that it is long term—a 10, 15 or 20-year strategy, arguably. If we had done that in 2009, we would be 10 years on with a public health approach and strategy, and if we were still doing it into 2029, we might start to get somewhere towards dramatically reducing youth violence.
Q417 John Woodcock: Can I just ask a brief question, following up on social media and role models? We had what I thought was quite compelling evidence from young people from Project Future, and one of the things that they really wanted us to take away was that this focus that we as politicians and the media have on drill music is a red herring. Vicky, I saw that the commission had a whole session on music and social media. Did you come to a similar view, or are you or the commission concerned about the effect of drill music?
Vicky Foxcroft: No, we went and said that we didn’t see drill music as an issue, and actually in some ways it’s a bit of a cop-out. There has always been different music forms at different times, and of course there are some negative things within that, particularly in terms of films and so forth, but that always has been the case.
What we did say, in terms of social media, is that it can be an escalating factor when incidents occur—and the police, I think, will verify this as well—and it’s about how you de-escalate that. It’s about how you manage to get those online interrupters at certain times. Arguably, if we were creative with different approaches, we might have whole teams of youngsters actually being those online interrupters, in terms of stuff to be able to stop that escalation that we know does take place.
Q418 John Woodcock: That’s helpful, thank you. Can I ask about school exclusions a little more, on the basis of what you said? There is really striking research from the St Giles Trust, looking at children involved in so-called county lines: every one of them was involved in a pupil referral unit. Vicky, you were clear that actually you want to see more children in mainstream school. Clearly, there is an issue here. I just wondered to what extent you and other panel members have come to a view—or whether more is needed—on whether the whole PRU model is fatally flawed, or whether there is a potential to reform the PRU model so that it offers greater levels of protection.
Vicky Foxcroft: I did a speech in Parliament where I said I thought that we should re-invest all the money from PRUs into mainstream education.
John Woodcock: You just scrap them, basically.
Vicky Foxcroft: Yes, and I got a lot of PRUs contacting me, interestingly. I actually thought, “Do you know what? Fair point. Let’s go and have a meeting and a discussion,” and we sat round and we had a really good discussion about where those lessons learned could be learned. There are some good PRUs; there is some good alternative provision. It is not saying that you entirely scrap it, but ideally you want to get those kids back into mainstream education, because we know what the trajectory is.
I’ve been to see PRUs that look like prison camps. I’ve also been to PRUs that look like really healthy schools. It is about learning from those good PRUs and alternative provision and replicating that, but ideally what we want is to try and keep most of our kids in mainstream education. The point that was made to me, and quite rightly, is that all those kids are off-rolled, and off-rolling is a huge issue for police, in terms of identifying and finding out where our young people are. Arguably, we have lost some for weeks at times, particularly linked in with the county lines stuff.
David Lloyd: Some of those pupil referral units in Hertfordshire are doing brilliant jobs, but I think what makes them stand out is that they’ve got to not just have a goal, but to deliver on getting those very vulnerable young people back into mainstream education.
Q419 John Woodcock: That is supposed to be their purpose, and some just end up really as dumping grounds.
David Lloyd: Exactly. When they become a form of borstal or whatever, that doesn’t work.
Q420 John Woodcock: Thank you. David Lloyd, you clearly implied that if there were a way of tackling the demand within the drugs market and the changing nature of the drugs market to this so-called county lines approach, that would be a, or the, primary factor in reducing violent crime. Mark Burns-Williamson, Vicky, do you attest to that? Is it the primary driver of what we are seeing, do you think?
Mark Burns-Williamson: I think it is a big driver, yes, because the gangs and the perpetrators that are behind targeting vulnerable young people in this case are often involved in the drugs trade. I do not think that any of us are under any illusions; it is probably the biggest driver of a lot of the crimes that are then committed.
Q421 John Woodcock: Clearly it is by no means a simple thing to simply cut that out, but do you agree with that, or do you think it is more complex? Do you think that if you could cut drug demand, you would cut violent crime?
Vicky Foxcroft: Definitely. If you cut drug demand, you would cut violent crime, but it is not the only issue within it. It is one of the large, major issues, but more and more young kids are stabbing each other for a variety of different reasons.
David Lloyd: I think I was quite careful to say, but I say again, that organised crime groups do not really care that it is drugs that they are dealing in. I think we need to think of that other side. If there was some way that there could be no demand for drugs, organised crime groups would still be there and they would still be trying to enforce their organised criminality, probably using violence. Where that is and how is open to conjecture, but it is just the way that organised crime groups work.
Q422 John Woodcock: But if they were focused on an outlet that did not have such a lucrative role for vulnerable young people to act as mules, then you could—
David Lloyd: Exactly. It is being better understood now, but frankly the same vulnerable individuals who are subject to child sexual exploitation are also being groomed to do this. It is two heads of the same problem.
Q423 John Woodcock: Thank you. A final question, if I may, Chair, to the two police commissioners. Whenever we have someone central here, or a Government Minister, they always mention the National County Lines Coordination Centre and laud what I think was the £2.9 million. Is that making a difference on the ground? Is it changing things, as far as you can see?
Mark Burns-Williamson: We certainly have much better working relationships with the National Crime Agency, and obviously the work is co-ordinated through there. It is still quite early days with it, but early conversations are quite positive. Again, some of this comes back to investment in regional organised crime units, to make that difference as well, because you have to have that co-ordination with the National Crime Agency.
Q424 John Woodcock: Which would be a separate thing. When you talk about investment in regional crime units, that needs to come through a separate track, and something which is happening, or not happening, needs to happen.
Mark Burns-Williamson: It is unclear at the moment which funding is being allocated to what part of policing. I know that the National Crime Agency has been making representations on that, but certainly as police and crime commissioners we want to see better co-ordination at the local and regional level with the national level. If the national co-ordination centre can help to improve that, and early signs look promising, that is a good thing.
David Lloyd: In Cumbria, I don’t know, but I would imagine that country lines are coming out of Merseyside, Manchester and presumably London as well. The co-ordination of that clearly has to be on a national basis. Cumbria will not be able itself as a constabulary to deal with that. It is promising what is happening through that national co-ordination. We are seeing more and more that much of the response to international and national problems needs to be done on an international and national basis. That is probably another whole Select Committee inquiry.
Q425 Chair: Thank you. I will ask you just one final question, and may I ask you for perhaps a one-sentence answer to it, because unfortunately we have run over our time? What is your verdict on the Government’s current serious violence strategy? Is it that it is a good strategy but it will take time to have an impact, or that there is good content to the strategy but it does not have enough oomph and resources behind it, or that actually something about the strategy needs to change if we are to properly address this?
Mark Burns-Williamson: I think the content is good, but much more tangible support and action is required to make it happen.
Vicky Foxcroft: There are lots of good words, but not enough action or resourcing for it.
David Lloyd: It is always dangerous—this is a trifurcation, not a bifurcation; you have given us three options, and none of them might be the ones we want. The content is good, and time will tell. The frustration is that we do not have a lot of time.
Chair: Thank you all for your evidence this morning. I ask our second panel to come and join us.
Witnesses: Dame Louise Casey and Anne Longfield.
Q426 Chair: Thank you for your patience. Can I ask you to introduce yourselves and the work you have been doing in this area over the years? Could you also kick off by answering the last question that I put to the previous panel? What is your overall assessment of the Government’s serious violence strategy? Is it good in content but does not have enough oomph? Does the content or the balance of it need to change?
Anne Longfield: I have been focusing on this area for the last year in some detail. In particular, we had a report out a couple of months ago on gangs. Issues around exclusion and the like are the ones that I hope to talk about during this session.
The Government’s serious violence strategy is the beginnings of a strategy. It exists, and it is a starting point. It is not an implementation plan and it does not have the mechanisms in place within the strategy at its core to be able to deliver. Therefore, it does not deliver the mechanisms needed to make a difference for kids on the ground. That, I believe, needs a much stronger lead from the PM, a lead from every Department involved and a follow-through with funding to make it happen.
Dame Louise Casey: Relating to being here, in about 2003 I became the anti-social behaviour tsar for the Home Office under the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Over a two-decade period, I have worked in and around these areas, working under the coalition and Cameron Governments on the Troubled Families Programme, so I have been looking at these issues for a while.
I think the Government’s strategy is woefully inadequate. It is not a match for what we are dealing with. Over a long period of time, the structures and systems around the whole of crime have been dismantled or left to go, and that has been a real problem. You see, therefore, from 2014 onwards a rise in some of the most heinous and most extraordinarily awful crimes in our society, and that is where we have ended up now.
I feel that at some point—maybe the Home Affairs Committee’s report will be part of this—somebody somewhere has to say, “We need to draw a line in the sand and work out how we go forward across the whole of society and the whole of Government.” What they are doing at the moment is not a match for the people out there who are trying to do bad. That is where you have to be in the world of crime. You have to be better than the people committing or organising the crime, and we are not.
Q427 Chair: What are the top couple of things that you would do and the Government is currently not doing, if we are really to make a difference to this awful problem?
Anne Longfield: I have talked about this getting the same level of priority and resources as CSE had five years ago. There are many of the same significant aspects. The scale of what we are taking about and the characteristics of the children involved are not recognised. It is often seen as a lifestyle choice for children to be involved in this. As Louise says, it is not matching the level of risk for children. It needs to be treated as a national emergency.
When I sat at the summit a couple of weeks ago, I said that I thought the Prime Minister needed to have a phone call every week with the people who had been charged to deliver this. I have written to at least four different Ministers and Secretaries of State asking them to do a whole range of things, such as instruct the safeguarding boards to gather information on the scale of risk and ensure that there are plans in place to deliver it and monitor it. The NHS needs to deliver the mental health support to prevent children falling into this place, especially targeting under-fives and under-11s, and public health needs to play its part, too.
So on every level the Government need to put the money in, ensure the leadership is there, and hold people accountable for delivering what they need to deliver on a departmental basis. In each of those departmental areas, there needs to be a follow-down to local delivery. I think the mechanisms are there to enable that to happen. The safeguarding boards have new responsibilities on contextual safeguarding. The research I carried out recently with just 25 of them in the areas of highest violence led me to believe that they did not know how many children were at risk, or that many felt it was their job to prevent them from coming into danger or to protect them.
With schools you have had a lengthy debate about children who are marginalised in schools. There is a role there clearly for schools to do more. What we need to see is a visible change where you have agencies working flat out, especially in the areas of highest violence, with new money to enable them to deliver the kinds of things we saw in Glasgow. It needs to be timed, it needs to be swift. I would like to see schools staying open this summer in those areas. I would like to see youth workers working in schools and those areas over the next few months. At the moment, my fear is that these children are not being protected and are in tragic circumstances because no one thinks it is their job to protect them, and that cannot be right.
Q428 Chair: If the safeguarding boards were to be the focus in each local area, what would they need, additional to what they do now, either in terms of scope and the way they operate or in terms of resources?
Anne Longfield: They are in a transition period. They have moved to a situation where, from this summer onwards, they are responsible for contextual safeguarding. That means they need to look at population-scale risk. They need to be able to ensure that agencies work together and they need to monitor what is happening. That is now the responsibility of those boards. So the mechanisms are actually coming into place to enable that to happen. There is not the level of information on how many children are at risk. They take it—if they take it from anywhere—from those involved in statutory agencies. Out of the 100,000 children that we believe are at risk, only 6,500 are known to statutory agencies. So it is a non-starter.
One thing that I have been doing is gathering evidence on vulnerability. This summer, in July, I will be able to issue all of those safeguarding boards with a breakdown of how many vulnerable children there are in their areas. That is something that covers off step one. Then they need to ensure that the strategy is in place and then monitor what is delivered. Those are the ones that I think need a direct feed up to the Cabinet Office to report to the PM on what is happening week by week, month by month, until we get to the point where people can feel that risk is under control.
Q429 Chair: On your calculation of the numbers of vulnerable children in each area, how do you define “vulnerable” for those purposes?
Anne Longfield: I am now into the third year of statistics on that. It is those that have vulnerabilities within the home: children who live with parents who have high levels of mental health problems, or they have domestic abuse or addiction to drugs and alcohol. They may have their own issues. We know that a lot of children who end up in prison, for instance, have communication issues, and we know those can be identified early. They may have mental health issues themselves, or there may be other contextual issues that they experience.
There is a whole range of categories that make them vulnerable and put them at a disadvantage. Those can be tracked from birth onwards. There are various key moments of reachable and teachable moments where you can intervene, but you need to start from birth. It needs to be seen as a long-term risk that the Government overall need to de-escalate over the period of their lives.
Dame Louise Casey: The starting point is that we have a lack of leadership at the centre. To be honest, I do wonder what it would take to restore a sense of fortnightly meetings, a sort of street crime initiative, where the Prime Minister herself would chair those meetings. They would be serviced by independent civil servants who would put the evidence in place that made sure that people round the table—all Secretaries of State and Ministers—with responsibility for anything in this arena, whether it is dealing with kids out of the Department for Education and young people, the Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or the Department of Health and Social Care, were brought together and you would push forward.
I feel quite cynical about, “Have a summit; appoint a tsar; issue guidance.” That is where we are and that, again, is not really grabbing the seriousness of what we are dealing with. Part of the problem is that everybody is not seeing the interconnectedness of the different strategies. You have a serious violence strategy; you have a trafficking strategy; you have a child sexual exploitation strategy. They are all strategies; they are all words. I could probably name many, many more. The issue is that they are not seeing the interconnected nature of them.
In the same way, there is a small amount of money that is now going towards families out of the Troubled Families budget that is targeting, quite rightly as a good thing to do, £10 million or something like that, to go towards helping people who are identifying risk in families where there could be people who carry knives and have been arrested for knives. Over here, you have somebody else in the Home Office saying, “We are going to do some early intervention, so we will have this.” At some point, somebody will announce something, saying, “I know what we will do. We will have some youth workers.”
It is not a coherent, overall Government strategy that essentially pushes forward into the communities, with an implementation behind it that is felt. That is the key problem for me. Yes—I declare my hand—I worked for 20 years in and around those sorts of approaches, so I am subjective about it. But last time I checked, I think that is what the country would expect with the sorts of things that you started with at 10 o’clock, talking about what happened overnight.
The approach that is taken basically says what Theresa May said when she became Home Secretary. She went to one of the key policing conferences and said, “We’re removing all targets. It’s down to you. Go cut crime!” At that point, I watched that and thought, “Oh, they’ll regret that.” Because essentially you have to have a sense of structures and systems where you can’t just devolve it, as we are now seeing with county lines. Don’t argue about the publicity; people are being killed out there. Don’t argue about the publicity; people are being threatened with a knife, when previously they might just be threatened when they are having their mobile nicked. Those sorts of things you cannot deny.
It is probably about where we are in politics. In the early days—2010—there was more of a determination in these sorts of issues, but there was the mistake of removing a sense of the structures. I could list and list the cuts. I could sit here and talk about cuts until the cows come home. I could talk about the children’s fund; I could talk about children’s centres; I could talk about family intervention; I could talk about the hollowing out of the national police in terms of neighbourhood policing.
The answer to the question, “Is there any presence on the streets?” is “Not as much as there used to be.” It is very hard to isolate any one of those factors and say, “That is the reason.” We have dismantled, or allowed the dismantling, of essentially all the structures and all the fabric that knit some of these things together.
Obviously, local government is an extraordinary key player in that and they are now reduced to doing what they call core services, which is essentially protecting the elderly, protecting the young and collecting our bins. You cannot look at the issue of serious violence without knowing it is within a context that is much wider, and you cannot ignore that.
Anne Longfield: There are 11 different interventions around serious violence at the moment across Government, but they are largely departmental, fragmented and small scale. Because of that, they just get dispersed and do not have the traction they could. I think there is an element around the child protection element of it. We have built a child protection system over the last 40 years, but while different agencies do not believe it is their job to deliver it and there is no glue left around the agencies that actually could be delivering it, you are talking about serious failure.
Q430 Tim Loughton: You mentioned safeguarding boards just now. They are obviously changing at the moment. Part of the problem in the past was the failure of certain elements to come to the table and fully integrate with others. In their new form, schools are not even a statutory component of them, which is a very significant part of the problem we are looking at. Are safeguarding boards up to the mission which you propose to give them?
Anne Longfield: I do not think they are at the moment. When I wrote to 25 of them in March and asked them how many children they knew were at risk in the area, half did not reply and half, even in areas of very high violence, told me there were fewer than 10. Some even questioned whether it was their core business to even know. At the moment, the jury is beyond out.
Potentially, they could be. Clearly, we have health and wellbeing boards and joint needs assessment. There needs to be some mechanism locally to be able to ensure that this strategy is a working day-in, day-out mission that directs people, ensures and holds them to account and co-ordinates stuff.
I believe they are the best bet at the moment and they are moving into a different territory. I do not think it has been clear to them that that is the expectation. One of the things I have asked the Secretary of State to do is to write to them to do that. They need to get to a completely different level of acknowledgement about what their role is, and they need to command with the other agencies in the area—they need to be at that table.
I often get someone saying: “Well, no one tells the police”. Well, tell them. You are there as a leader of that partnership with the authority to be able to command people to that table. Over the future few weeks, I am going to three or four areas to hold the kind of meeting that the chairs need to be holding in those areas to get people to the table, to ask them the questions that need to be asked and to see what they can come up with, partly to show it can be done.
That is the kind of leadership we need locally. They too need to be held to account. There is a chair in each of those boards. Often, it is a paid position. Often, they are people who only work a few days a month, but that is a different thing. With this level of responsibility, they need to have a direct line to report back—we cannot afford to let that mechanism slip.
Q431 Tim Loughton: I have been a strong supporter of safeguarding boards, but their status is pretty low. The difficulty in getting experienced, strong characters leading those safeguarding boards is a problem. They have effectively been downgraded since the change in legislation. What makes you think that they will be in a position to do such a challenging task as you are understandably going to impose on them, and what is it going to take to get them fit for purpose to do that?
Anne Longfield: It will take quite a lot. There have been statutory changes and the role has been strengthened in terms of the people who are required to be there. Also, it now looks at contextual safeguarding, rather than safeguarding in the home. We know it is more relevant now and that it has been strengthened.
I completely understand your point. It was often seen as a local authority mechanism in the past, which people let lie and thought: “Well, someone else is doing that”. There is now a much clearer expectation that other agencies have to be part of this. Everything we have talked about this morning shows a clear understanding that it is not going to be one agency that is going to deliver the products on this, it is going to have to be people working together.
All these different agencies have gone into their core business; they have all had limited funds; they have all gone to do their absolute statutory minimum around what they need to do. As a result, the people who might have stepped up in the past and seen a child in danger and been able to offer them the support they need, or help or whatever, are just not there. Everyone is in self-reliant mode. We need to reignite that joint working. We need to put the funding in there to be able to pay for those extra people.
Q432 Tim Loughton: This all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking.
Anne Longfield: Not really, how can it be wishful thinking? They exist, they are statutory requirements, it is quite within the gift of the DfE and the Secretary of State to make clear the expectations.
Q433 Tim Loughton: It is, but I am playing devil’s advocate here, because it didn’t work on CSE. All the evidence, for example the work done by the University of Bedfordshire, shows the number of safeguarding boards that did not have a proper, coherent strategy for dealing with CSE, which is why—
Anne Longfield: Well, hopefully you can learn from that.
Q434 Tim Loughton: But that is my question: what do you have to do to change safeguarding boards, in order for them to be able to deal with a huge challenge? In the case of CSE, I would argue that it was the initiatives not of the safeguarding board, but of the police, which have been most culpable for the explosion in CSE being swept under the carpet for all those years, and which are then at the vanguard in actually getting CSE recognised and acknowledged, and the police doing something about it. That is entirely separate from what the safeguarding boards were doing in their own areas. Who is going to take the lead here, if not the safeguarding boards?
Anne Longfield: I agree with you on the police taking the lead. Actually, we have police forces ringing us all the time asking us to help them work out how many kids are at risk. Now, I don’t think that it is the job of the police solely to do this, nor do I think that you can get the kind of change needed for those kids who are at risk by the police doing it alone—by taking away resources that were there.
We need to be able to require local agencies to work together to protect children, because they all have a role to play. There is a lot of responsibility for schools. There are clear responsibilities for the NHS. There are clear responsibilities around public health. But they are not being held to account for what they need to do for this group of most vulnerable children.
I do not need to tell you that we are talking about not just 10,000 or 20,000 children here, but, we believe, 100,000 children who are at immediate risk. You will have seen the DfE figures on children in need who are not getting discernible support: 1.1 million. That is 10% of children.
There are all sorts of layers of intervention needed. Some immediate interventions are needed to disengage children from those gangs and get them to a safer place, but others are needed to prevent that happening for the most vulnerable. Some interventions really need to start from those children who are being born this week, to ensure that they have better life chances in the long run.
Q435 Tim Loughton: I actually wanted to ask about youth services, but I will get to that in a minute, with the Chair’s discretion. Dame Louise, you just mentioned the Troubled Families Programme. Of course, you had a big responsibility there. What would it take to change the Troubled Families Programme, to be able to engage much more with the problem around gangs and serious violence? That has not really been a feature of the Troubled Families Programme. Yet, on the sort of indicators that the Commissioner has flagged up, those who are most vulnerable match the profile of many of those within the Troubled Families Programme. I assume and hope that the Troubled Families Programme will have its funding renewed, but it needs to be adapted, doesn’t it?
Dame Louise Casey: That is a really good question. Can I just jump into the conversation you were having around structures, because it is too hard to sit on one’s hands? There is a role for community safety partnerships in areas where we have very high levels of problems.
When you are sat in the centre trying to work out what to do, my advice to people is always to set targets. The first thing to say, which I missed from my opening remarks, is that there is no measurable target on serious violence. That is one thing, Chair, which you could potentially put out there. We need a goal or a target, and everybody in the high areas needs to own that and set their own versions of it.
I think that this kind of laissez-faire, hands-off approach, in which people make up their own minds what they do, just has to stop, because the problem is too great. Mr Loughton, that flows into the conversation you were having around what structures are needed locally to manage this process, which is about implementation.
Q436 Tim Loughton: But how do you set a national target on something that is as diverse—as we have heard from police commissioners—as serious violence, knife crime and gangs, where its manifestation is very different and more significant in parts of London than in parts of West Yorkshire or Hertfordshire?
Dame Louise Casey: Call me old-fashioned, but I think the starting point could be the Home Office indices from 1946, which show on their own indicator that we have the highest number of homicides since 1946 and that the number of robberies is up. All of those things are really straightforward. You just say, “I want to see them coming down,” and then you work out how.
There is a different situation happening in certain areas of the country. The county lines thing that people talk about is real; it is not “so-called”, but is actually happening. You can therefore see that there is a different situation in relation to crime happening right now. I agree with what the Hertfordshire police crime commissioner said. Lynne Owens, who runs the National Crime Agency, is here. We are up against people who are organised in their criminality. The people who are committing the crime are not those who are taking the drugs; they are organising people to make money, and they swap in and out of all forms of crime to do that. That is why modern slavery and child exploitation cannot be left out of this conversation.
What I find disappointing is that there are ways that we could work out how to set measurable targets, then you could backfill how you go about doing that. I would start with the areas that have high levels of problems. There was a classic moment the week before last, when a chief superintendent said he had done some research and worked out that if you looked at where crime associated with serious violence is happening now, hey presto—if you looked last year, it was happening then. It was a kind of “No shit, Sherlock” moment. I listened to it on the radio, thinking, “Dear God, is this where we’ve got to?” Is this the analysis that we are leaning on? Where has all the analysis gone? It used to exist in the Home Office, but they have cut all of that stuff. They have cut many of the things that gave the intelligence that you could then use to work out what you might do.
The answer to your question, though, is that Troubled Families is like the last game in town, trying to prevent these problems from escalating and getting any worse. What is really interesting is that it is happening quite often in an isolated set of circumstances. In children’s services, they then run Troubled Families. I would put the whole of Troubled Families on this: I would like to knock on the door of anybody in this country who is wandering round and picked up with a knife. I would want to know what is happening in that family; I would want to get in there.
We can predict the wards and even the super output areas where we know that is going to be happening. There is no area-based approach to dealing with this that is driven by central Government. It is all local, and it was interesting that a Labour police crime commissioner who appeared before us, Mark, did not call for that. Why aren’t the police crime commissioners asking the Home Office for more help? People are just putting up with way too much. Then you would do a Troubled Families programme, or whatever the hell they want to call it, in each of these areas. You would roll up your sleeves and get in there.
For me, it is less about, “Is it the safeguarding board?” I think Anne is on the money in that area, and people should march in that direction. However, there have to be resources behind it so that somebody is then picking up that case and going to see them, but there are not the resources to do that because this Government cut them.
Q437 Tim Loughton: All very interesting. Some of us would like to see a pre-Troubled Families programme, because the origins of all this go back to—
Anne Longfield: That is where you would set some of your measurements.
Dame Louise Casey: Actually, Yvette Cooper set up family intervention projects—if we are all scoring on the doors.
Q438 Tim Loughton: It goes back to conception, adverse childhood experiences, attachment and all that sort of thing, so you would not have families becoming troubled families because you have actually dealt with the origins of it, rather than just trying to manage the symptoms and get them back on the rails.
However, the purpose of my question was youth services. Obviously there has been a lot of debate around the cuts in youth services, which some of us tried to battle in the way things were happening some years ago. However, youth services have still been set up as some sort of rosy era. In fact, youth services are probably the only public agency unreformed since they were effectively set up after the Albemarle report back in 1961. We had too many youth services that were there for the convenience of people running them, usually from nine to five on Monday to Friday in their local authorities. If we are to restore effective, engaged and with proper intervention youth services, what would they look like? Just trying to reconstruct what was there was not cutting the mustard 10 or 20 years ago, frankly.
Anne Longfield: Something that I have argued for for a couple of decades.
Tim Loughton: Almost as long as me.
Anne Longfield: Exactly. When we talk to local authorities about what they do about vulnerable children, they all say that they put family support for the youngest as their top priority.
What would you do? There is and has been lots of jargon about youth work. There has been lots of jargon about youth services. Fundamentally, you are talking about individuals who can build relationships with kids and target those relationships. They can be positive role models. They can disrupt. They can divert. They can offer good things. There are alternatives to the kind of relationships we have seen some of the most vulnerable kids turning towards in gangs. They want to belong, they want to feel protected and they want to have things to do, but there have not been youth workers there in the numbers or with the kind of skill set needed to be able to divert them to a better place.
You will be familiar with the figures on the reduction. There have been 60% cuts to youth services according to the IFS work that we commissioned last year. That means that there are many areas now without any statutory youth services. I think there is a recognition in the public health approach in Glasgow and elsewhere that youth workers are a vital part of that solution. They will be able to work in schools and the community. I would like to see them populating schools after school and during school holidays. I would like to see them in the estates where at the moment no one dares go.
There are interesting things about reform. I have always argued for reform and the modernisation of youth services. I would like to see an approach like the one that the National Youth Agency is looking at in some detail, which is about a “Youth First”, like Teach First. It could look at a whole new approach and training for youth workers. Without going into great detail about how that might be possible, I think you could do that quite quickly.
Q439 Tim Loughton: With respect, Commissioner, you are talking about what makes for a good youth worker, and you are talking almost exclusively about statutory youth worker services.
Anne Longfield: No, I’m not.
Q440 Tim Loughton: Well, most of that is about statutory youth worker services. Some of the best interventions on knife crime that I have seen and that I saw when I did my time in Birmingham working with some of the gangs were entirely outside of statutory youth services.
Anne Longfield: I agree completely.
Tim Loughton: They were some of the voluntary services made up of kids who had been involved with knife crime in the first place.
Anne Longfield: You have had St Giles Trust in here, who are fantastic.
Q441 Tim Loughton: We have had St Giles doing some great work on that. The other issue is around getting into schools. We absolutely need to have—I did the NYA commission on youth workers within schools—empathetic, engaged youth workers working within schools. Some of the biggest problems are those schools that will not let voluntary or charitable organisations or whatever across the threshold to talk to the kids about knife crime. They say, “We haven’t got a problem here”, because of the reputational damage. It is many of the schools that are in denial that are most vulnerable to the sort of knife crime that is now happening. It is not statutory youth services that are getting over the doorstep, but the voluntary groups made up of people who have been there and can relate to those kids.
Anne Longfield: When I talk about youth workers, I do not really segment them into statutory or otherwise. It is about good inspirational people who have enough life skills and empathy to be able to inspire young people, to listen to them and to work with them to have alternatives. I have seen some great ones going into schools. I think the schools that will not let them over the doorstep are a wider symptom of schools that want to protect their reputation before they want to support children. Again, the DfE can give clear messages to schools about their part within this.
One thing that I have seen and that I want to log here is that the age range of kids getting involved used to be 10 to 12 and is now dropping down to seven to 10. There is increasing evidence that some of the habits or culture around that are becoming normalised in the playground. The whole thing about kids being debt-bonded and threatened and the like is becoming, I am told by the police in certain areas, just part of the way that kids are interacting in the playground. In anyone’s imagination, that is every school’s responsibility. I think primary schools are an area. I do not know whether we are going to have time to talk about exclusions—certainly we have got lots on that—but that is an area we need to look at. That for me is where youth work, if you like, can start working with the seven or eight-year-olds. You have got OnSide Youth Zones that are doing that with very young kids. It should not be about segmenting around children’s lives in a way that is not helpful for them; it should be about good people. I think we need more of them.
I think it is an interesting idea to lead through the staffing to be able to get new-style reform within the system, but safe places to go within the community obviously have to be a real basic.
Q442 John Woodcock: Tell me, Commissioner and Dame Louise, about how you would fix the school exclusions problem. Would you focus on reforming PRUs? Would you scrap the whole system? The PRUs were a feature of the new Labour Government years, so it might be useful to start with Dame Louise. Has there been a change in the way that they have operated—they were successful in the past and are now failing? What is going wrong?
Dame Louise Casey: At the risk of being boring, it is very hard to just isolate PRUs, yes or no, when you are looking at the wider context of some of the things that have just been discussed. If you look at the areas where you have high levels of problems—they can be domestic violence, antisocial behaviour, serious violence—you will see a pattern where actually kids are not growing up in safe and okay environments. They move into situations that become more tricky. We have very, very good people who are brilliant at grooming and they are nasty, so they are very clever at what they do and they start as young as they can and they pull people out of those homes. Then those kids attend school and they struggle in school. We used to have more teaching assistants than we have now.
What I am trying to say is that the fabric around all that is frayed, so it is really hard to single in. Your real challenge, as a Committee, is what are the two or three or 10 things that you think would put this back and get this right again. I will come to the question on PRUs in a second, but it is quite hard for you to work out which one it is.
If I could, I would go back to a time where we had children’s centres, where we had Sure Start, where we had an approach to early intervention and actually the type of things that I was involved in around antisocial behaviour—yes, ASBOs did work. Essentially, we were dealing with the need when it was up here, but we had a system behind us that was about preventing. Every time enforcement was used, support was put in place. There were mantras such as, “Support and enforcement: the twin-track approach.” All that has gone.
Then you put PRUs into the middle of it, and you realise that we have people out there who are really clever at going to children’s homes, going to foster homes, going to the parks where these kids are and where they congregate. Of course they go to PRUs and of course they groom and recruit outside PRUs.
The answer is that we have to go back to, in fact it was an early 1998 report published by the social exclusion unit, which I looked up before I came today, which looked at exclusions and how to handle exclusions. It is much wider than just saying yes or no to excluding and yes or no to PRUs. We have to be cleverer than just saying, “Let’s get rid of PRUs, because actually we don’t think that they’re working.”
I have to say that I think that once a kid ends up there, you are pretty stuffed, actually, about what it is you are doing with that young person and their family. You are pretty much at the end of the road. I want to know what is happening at the age of 11 when a kid arrives in school and starts to struggle that means you end up having to exclude them. If you concentrated at that point, you should have a lot less need for exclusion.
Just to remind the Committee—it is not your Department—but the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government cut local government funding by 50% or 60%, so all of the glue around those communities is not there anymore. That is why these things come out, whether it is PRUs or whether it is county lines and what is happening to the British Transport Police. There is nothing for those people to turn to.
Q443 John Woodcock: Just to be clear, as you have mentioned county lines—I will come to you, Commissioner—I have just one line on that. The reason I said “so-called” is not that I believe there is a question about whether there is a problem; it is that some people object to the term. I would not want you to think that I did not think it a problem. Barrow, my constituency, is being hit very badly by it. Commissioner.
Anne Longfield: There has been a big increase in exclusions—in primary exclusions, as well. Actually, 30 primary school children a week are now excluded during term time. That is a classroom a week. Given that things are seriously not going well if you are being excluded at any point, to be able to exclude children before the age of 11 has to be a very drastic thing to happen. Thirty children a week being excluded is unquestionably wrong.
We also know that 88% of the exclusions take place in 10% of schools, so it is not all schools. There has been a lot of debate and discussion—some on the comment pages—around whether the schools are to blame. Actually, most schools stretch every sinew to help support children, but clearly one in 10 is less tolerant. That is important because schools offer that protective factor we are talking about.
All this is about agencies doing their job to offer the protection that children need. Any child who falls outside that is at greater risk. It does not mean that it is causally there, but it really shows that they are at greater risk of all sorts of vulnerabilities.
Q444 John Woodcock: You mentioned that you need to target something to change it. It feels like we are going back to the halcyon days. Do you think that school exclusions should be brought into part of an incentive system? Sorry, I am not expressing myself well. Isn’t there a real problem within the incentive structure within the schools system at the moment?
Anne Longfield: Yes—the incentives aren’t around keeping them in school.
John Woodcock: In fact, quite the opposite.
Anne Longfield: Yes. Ofsted measures on exam results, which is an incentive for some schools that wish to take that incentive to not have those children who are not going to deliver on that. In fact, you hear stories about some children being asked to stay at home during Ofsted days because they don’t want them to cause problems.
You asked about pupil referral units, alternative provision and the like: there are good examples. The best I know are the ones trying to keep children in schools and looking at how they can work with schools as support hubs for the children who are at risk of exclusion, to keep them within the school. That is the way they can be offered the greatest protection to keep them mainstream.
What we also know from our analysis is that 60% of children who go into AP do not return to school within three years—once they are out, they are out. And we know, again, jumping ahead to those children who are in young offender institutions: the majority have not been in school since at least 14 and some have not consistently been in school.
There is another thing about the mechanisms and the workings of PRUs: 74% persistent absence rates and some are working on twilight timetables. So all the things that keep kids safe—structures, relationships and stuff to fill their time with purpose, hopefully giving something to build on in life as well—often are not there within too many APs and PRUs. Vicky Foxcroft said they look like prisons. I have to say, you can get a lot by walking through a door, and there are some even good ones that smell like prisons. That can’t be part of any aspirational system we all want.
I would like to say to PRUs and others involved in delivering that specialist support—and I am being generous now—that it costs £33,000 a year to send a child there. Use that to offer additional support around the school to keep that child in school and to offer the kind of additional support around speech and language, communication, mental health, all of those things, and, indeed, family support: all the things that that child is going to need to succeed. Of course you can’t do that to the detriment of all children’s safety or education in the school, but the majority of schools do do that. So we should be demanding that of the 10% of schools that don’t change their ways.
Q445 John Woodcock: Understood, thank you. We are running short of time, but I wanted to pan out and ask you both a systemic question. Both of you were intimately involved in the new Labour Government years and what you clearly both see as a relatively more successful approach there. Is there anything strategic, top-level, in terms of the approach back then, that you would not reapply now? Is it simply a case of reconstructing that far more interventionist approach? Alternatively, if you had the capacity to rebuild, what would you do differently, if anything?
Dame Louise Casey: I’ll answer that question. This is about universal and targeted; that is my thing. Just on the last question, there is a thread of evidence around kids’ lives that you can follow through, so you can see what is happening to them in their families. They are more likely to be in poor areas and from poor backgrounds. And as you follow them through their school life, you can see the danger points, in terms of their ending up in difficulty.
We know that most kids in PRUs are in there for violence, so let us not assume that this is a straightforward thing—they have learned that somewhere, from somebody, by the time they get to a PRU. And as Anne rightly points out relentlessly and quite rightly to all of us, we know that they will be entry level into custody.
Interestingly, we know that kids in custody are in there for very significant offences. So, if you look at the first-time entrants, they are committing much tougher crime and much harder crime, and they are much more prolific. Obviously, we have talked a lot today about children, but we ought to think about that cohort as well.
What used to happen and what we were better at was trying to look at how you get to kids and their families throughout that thread, and it does not really matter whether that is about serious violence or about long-term unemployment. So, you can look at it from social mobility, social justice, social exclusion, or you can look at it from crime, but there is not any thinking in the centre of Government, I think, right now.
My view is that I would bring back something like a renewed social exclusion unit that was evidence-based, to stock-take where we are 20 years after the first one; it is a long time since then, and most people do not even know that it existed.
Q446 John Woodcock: I know that you have to answer the question, but the Prime Minister would say, “But we had a summit two weeks ago”.
Dame Louise Casey: Oh, for God’s sake! I have worked for four Prime Ministers—when in doubt, have a bloody summit! When you do not really know what you are doing, have a summit, and possibly employ somebody to be “a Government of all the talents” person, who is going to be a tsar. I do not wish to be overly humorous about this, but it is a get-out-of-jail card.
Anne Longfield: You could be the next one!
Dame Louise Casey: Some good can come out of those things, but there has to be more than a bloody summit. You have to have a strategy and it has to be implemented. Also, for the victims’ families who go along to those summits, and remember that I have been the Victims’ Commissioner, they take them incredibly seriously. So, if you do nothing once you have had a summit, you are disrespecting the victims and their families who arrive at those things. Big hopes arise when people have those summits, and if they are not fulfilled, we are letting down the people who have been let down by everybody else.
The answer to your question is that if I had my time over again, I would do targeted, targeted, targeted. It is always great to be able to have a universal offer and that universal offer is everywhere. However, I think that if I had my time over and if I had to make a choice, I would do targeted, targeted, targeted.
Between us—the people in the room—we could probably work out which local authorities, which wards and which super output areas we are talking about, which we should be smothering with toughness and kindness. And I think that if I had my time over again, I would be much more targeted.
Anne Longfield: I think that if we were to look at what you would do differently—
Dame Louise Casey: Nice—better put.
Anne Longfield: I was trying to use those words carefully. I would say that there should be fewer tramlines of intervention; better recognition that people have joined-up lives and need joined-up responses; more of a focus on outcomes, rather than on immediate responses; and more of a life-course approach, which actually started very early and intervened early, and actually helped the 2 million kids who we know are growing up in vulnerability.
That probably means being more demanding, which I think was what Louise was saying about toughness, but with investment. There has been a strong reminder over recent years that money does not grow on trees. With investment comes responsibility.
I believe that what there is now a clear case for, but also the potential for, is a proper vulnerability reduction strategy for the 2 million children most at risk. There are some areas of it that just did not get reformed, as Tim Loughton says. Services was one of those. Every one of these investments in this army of people and these services need to be in no doubt that they are here to improve outcomes for kids and that they need to do so in a very co-ordinated and focused way.
Q447 Douglas Ross: We heard earlier this morning, and the Committee has received other evidence to confirm it, that there is a breakdown in trust between young people and the police. What, from your respective positions, do you assess as being the response from the Met and other police forces around the country to that issue?
Anne Longfield: I would say yes and no; I don’t think it is as simple as that. It is important to remember, given we are often talking about children and their parents asking for protection, that they are looking to the police for a response.
I often talk to parents who find that their children are in great danger because of gangs, often at risk of their lives—the parents go straight to the police and ask for help. Now, often they are quite surprised and then despairing that the mechanisms aren’t there to help and protect those kids, but they are probably likely to get the most immediate response from the police. If they go to a social services department, they won’t get that.
There is someone there, something there, that children do want to see. They do want to have the protection of the police; there are plenty of kids who want to see the police in their area, and we need children to feel safe. Now, clearly, if that is being done in a very aggressive way, then relationships are going to sour, but let’s not forget that children want to be protected by the police.
Q448 Douglas Ross: Just before I move on, do you think police forces are reacting to this in the correct way? We heard earlier on from Vicky Foxcroft that 46%, I think, of young people in that study did not feel able to go to the police, so therefore there is a problem. Do you think that police forces are responding to that problem adequately?
Anne Longfield: No, I do not—I don’t think they have got near to that. However, although I know everything around CSE and the like has not been perfect, the police did lead in many areas on that development, and I think there is the potential to do that. There is a huge distance for them to travel, but as I say, they are the ones coming to me and asking me to help work out how many kids are at risk in their area. For them, there is an immediacy; often, that is not translating, but it is not completely bleak.
Dame Louise Casey: What we know about human nature is that you’re more likely to reach out to somebody if you know them already. One of the things that is apparent is that the hollowing out of neighbourhood policing—which I have seen in my own borough, let alone anywhere else in the country—means that there just are not the neighbourhood policing teams that there were.
The number of police community support officers, the people who are not actually police officers but are part of the police family—they’ve gone. Essentially, there are not those relationships that you have day to day, where there isn’t a conflict; they’re just known to be walking through the streets or to be at various events in the same way that the youth service was, flawed as it was historically. My bugbear was that nobody ever seemed to open on a Friday night or a Saturday night, for example, but at least there were people in the community who people could turn to.
The police are one part of it; the wider police family is another, and the police officers who were in schools on a regular basis. The relationships were there already, as it were, and then you were more likely to turn to them when you knew them, so that your first interaction with a police officer isn’t a negative experience of a stop-and-search, or that your family is having their door kicked in. Your trust in that is going to be much lower than for, say, somebody who has played a football match with you or something like that.
Again, you know, broken record: you can’t look at these issues without knowing the resource implications. We are reaping the negative consequences of some of the choices that the 2010 Government and onwards made, and the fact that there is no glue in communities is one of those consequences. To put that on the police, to say, “It’s your fault that kids can’t reach out to you”—I agree with the Commissioner to some degree. Of course, as an institution, we know that we have a long way to go; Baroness Lawrence yet again reminded us of that, quite rightly, on Stephen Lawrence Day. However, in terms of something like serious violence and all the predecessors of it, you cannot ignore the question of “Do these kids ever come across a police officer in a positive environment?” It’s unlikely, so of course they are not going to reach out.
Anne Longfield: Just on that lack of glue, in really practical terms, BBC Children in Need told me the other day, completely off the record—
Dame Louise Casey: Switch the camera off!
Anne Longfield: Its worry is that there are no youth organisations of that level left to apply for the money. I have a youth theatre that wants to go into schools to run arts programmes for resilience and prevention of crime, but it has nowhere to go to ask for money or partnership other than the PCCs. So yes, of course, there are underlying issues that have not gone away and must be taken seriously, but at the moment, there are few other places where people can get a conversation going.
Q449 Douglas Ross: I was not going to mention this, but it has been said three or four times. I am going to check the transcript to see how many times you have both said the word “glue”. Is that a new buzzword that has been adopted recently?
Anne Longfield: No, we’re just dull old people.
Douglas Ross: It would be very interesting to know and I would ask you to look at the transcript.
Anne Longfield: Do you reckon we have said it more times in the last hour?
Douglas Ross: I would say 15 times, roughly.
Dame Louise Casey: Both of us?
Douglas Ross: A combined 15 times.
Dame Louise Casey: Well, we’re just trendy!
Douglas Ross: Well, maybe. Why do you think that is? Is it a new buzzword? It is quite interesting.
Anne Longfield: Essentially, we are talking about something similar, which is communities that do not have either the people or the services to the extent that they might have done in the past. Who can look out for kids, provide places to be, provide diversion and all of those things? I call it “glue” because those things stick, in a way, in those areas, and are the things that are there to actually help communities grow, deliver and be safe places. That is what I mean when I call it “glue”; it is the thing that binds communities. In a lot of the areas of serious violence, there is a lack of that at the moment and, if you are going to rebuild some of that, that would be the place you would look to start.
Q450 Douglas Ross: By “glue”, are you both referring to the same thing?
Dame Louise Casey: I think so, yes.
Anne Longfield: I don’t think we have analysed our use of the word that much.
Dame Louise Casey: We did not actually manage to co-ordinate our appearances today until we arrived. Maybe “glue” is the way to try to describe this. I think it’s something that oils the wheels of communities.
John Woodcock: You don’t want to glue the wheels.
Dame Louise Casey: I was somewhere the other week where they literally did not have the £20 for the lighting and tea to open up that night. That was an old people’s centre. I am looking at areas now that I have been involved with for every single Government strategy in my 35 years of working in public service, and I cannot express just how there is barely anything left.
To respond to Mr Woodcock’s question, in the decade of new Labour, under their Government—I was not one of them; I served them—and I would say the same under some of the early David Cameron stuff, the public sector almost got used to being funded. I remember Hazel Blears saying, “What’s the problem with these people, Louise? Why can’t they just put two pullovers down and get a football and play on the green? No, they have to have astro-turf under this, that and the other and the grant from the Big Lottery.”
I get that those things are complicated, and they get very political because the left says one thing and the right says another. Somewhere in there, over the last decade, this Government made some very bad decisions about resourcing for local government. Some of that might have meant more reform, but we made some mistakes.
One of the mistakes was that we have taken away the glue that people know exists within the community—that you might know the people who might be able to help you and have some sense of who is next door. Over and over, that particularly and disproportionately affects people who are poor. Poor people suffer more from crime than anybody else.
Anne Longfield: It is wrong for us to say that money is not being spent on children’s services because it is, but the majority of that money is now being spent on high need, which actually means that there is less and less money to spend on all the things that we are talking about.
Half of all the money for children’s services now gets spent on the 70,000-odd children in care, and three-quarters of it is now spent on those who are in statutory need. That means that very little is left for anything else. Of course, when you look at whether that money has all been recovered by the Treasury the answer is no. The state that we are now in is of an escalation of high cost and high need.
I get told about adolescents who come into statutory services at 14, cost £1 million by 18 and do not go out in a very good place. That is something that everyone would want to change, which is why we need to reset the dial.
Q451 Douglas Ross: My final point is on the issue mentioned by the PCC for West Yorkshire—his concerns about social media and its impact. I am still a bit confused as to what his issue is, and he is going away to do further investigation, but what is your take on the impact of social media and how it affects, promotes and influences youth crime and serious violence?
Anne Longfield: I have talked about social media a lot over recent years. It is not the cause of most problems, but it accelerates and amplifies. If you want to get your messages quickly, there is a way to do it; if you want to glorify something, there is a way to do it. Clearly, that has its role in the whole of the scene around serious violence and the children within it.
Q452 Douglas Ross: Is it not used at all to tackle the problems?
Anne Longfield: I was about to say—however, just as anyone can use social media as a negative force, it can be used as a positive force. I have challenged the social media companies to be much more aware, to take down content and to play their part in promoting positive messages. It is part of life—it is not something that kids usually think is happening over here—and, just as with anything else, it means that things are amplified and accelerated.
More broadly, we tend to think about social media and aggressive young men being part of that, but the kids I see in gangs and on the edges of serious violence are actually quite meek. They are visibly vulnerable and—a statistic that is not widely known—nearly half of them are girls. Social media feeds a certain view of what being part of serious violence is.
Dame Louise Casey: I agree with Anne. I was not entirely sure what Mark was saying, actually. Social media is here, and here to stay. It probably needs more regulation and more organisation, and again we are not a match for it.
What is really interesting is the use of social media for messaging; in places like Bristol, you can get your drugs really easily just be texting somebody. The instant nature of communications is quite shocking. Drug dealers and cartels are more of a match for this. The thing that the woman who runs the National Crime Agency said to you that made me think, “Wow!”, is that there are more organised crime groups in the UK than there are people working for the National Crime Agency. So we are not a match for some of the clever, intelligent way that these very nasty people go about doing their business.
May I just add one thing—a positive note of hope about your earlier question? The shame is that we know that some things work, and that they work over a period of time. Family intervention was set up under the Labour Administration, re-done differently under the Cameron Administration and, post me, moved on again to work with 400,000 families after I had gone.
The evidence—now undisputed—shows that using that whole-family approach, which gets to everything in the household, reduces crime by 25% among adults and 15% among juveniles. There is reason for hope, as long as you are able to target areas across from youth or child arrival right the way up to keeping the child—as a man, largely—out of prison. There are ways that we can do it, but it needs leadership. It needs national leadership to make that happen.
Anne Longfield: And that relentless determination. For every gang leader or gang member who is targeting the most vulnerable—they can see them, can find them and will not stop until they come back with them—we should have that same relentless nature and determination.
Actually, with the tech, we need to be a step ahead. Yesterday, I was told about how social media maps are being used—you can see for a place on a map of your locality what kind of drugs are on offer, and where to get them. Just as everyone is looking for a new way of delivering on that business model, we need to be looking at a way to protect children.
Q453 Chair: I have a follow-up question about social exclusions. I picked up some issues about academy chains that are off-rolling rather than excluding, so children are being pushed into home schooling with parents who are struggling to do home schooling.
Also, on internal exclusion—they are painting isolation rooms black and isolating people with no content. Children with autism or other special needs are completely incapable of coping in that kind of environment and end up being pushed out through off-rolling. Have you done much work on that? Perhaps you would be able to send us some written information about that. Do you see it as a significant part of the exclusion problem?
Anne Longfield: Yes. We have a couple of pieces of work coming up, which we will report on very shortly. We did some analysis on the number of schools that were off-rolling in 11 sample areas earlier in the year. We found that one in 10 schools was doing that—so 90% of schools were not. We said that we will conduct the survey nationwide, probably at the beginning of the autumn, and we will publish the list. We did not publish the list this time because it was just 11 areas, but we will publish the list of schools by name.
We are worried about over-strict behaviour policies that use that kind of aggressive isolation as a way of isolating children in the school. Again, we know that drives lots of parents, especially with children with special educational needs, to want to home school, which is not their first choice and often they are not prepared for.
Q454 Chair: Are you doing further work on the scale of that?
Anne Longfield: Yes, and we will publish that very shortly. I can send you a note on what is coming.
Q455 Chair: That would be really helpful. You have both given us lots of examples of the kinds of interventions that could make a difference. Going back to the question about how you would drive this at national and local level, what sort of structures would you put in place to make sure you deliver results? You talked about targets and the Prime Minister or a Minister making a phone call every fortnight to chase progress. You talked about safeguarding boards. Do you have any final reflections on what action the Government should take and what structures they should put in place to drive progress and make sure that all the interventions, whether resources or individual polices, get delivered and make an impact?
Anne Longfield: I would say that the Government need to take control of the priority that this has, and make it a national emergency. They need to target the areas of greatest violence, but have a view beyond that. They need to provide the resources that people need to be able to run it, and then decide which local infrastructure they will demand to deliver—I suggest safeguarding boards, but there may be others.
The Departments need to be under no illusion that they will have to drive this through with their own mechanisms. That means targeted work through mental health developments and speech and language early on. That means targeted work on exclusions—we talked at length about that, and you know there is a review.
Locally, with investment, the population needs to understand the risk and they need have a cohesive strategy on how to deliver, and deliver in a matter of weeks rather than months and years. If you went to an area you were investing in as a high-priority with all those things in place, you would be very disappointed if people could not see how many kids there were or who they were, if people were not keeping schools open in the evenings, were not opening leisure centres in the summer and did not have some kind of programme to de-escalate and divert children through youth workers and others. Of course, that is along with other agencies doing what they need to do anyway.
Dame Louise Casey: I think I would have a renewed overall crime strategy that recognised the public health approach and that this is not a natural disease—there are people behind it.
The difference between the public health approach that people talk about and the one we are dealing with is that we have nasty predatory criminal people behind it, who want the disease to spread. Therefore, we need a slightly different approach to saying, “It is nobody’s fault, but we are going to do it.” There has to be prevention as well as cure. I think we are lacking that at the moment. There isn’t a strong preventative strategy that comes out of all this and there isn’t a cure strategy, so there’s no simplicity to it.
I definitely think we have hit a moment in the United Kingdom when the levels of crime in the key areas of robbery, homicide, knives—it’s just too much. And the Government should be supported by all political parties; they should come together to create a sense of a new strategy that actually links all this together.
There is no point in looking at serious violence if you are only looking at drugs. There is no point looking at drugs unless you are looking at what is happening with modern slavery. There is no point looking at modern slavery unless you know what is happening with schools and exclusions. These are all interrelated issues, and there needs to be somebody to step back and sort that out across the whole. And then, of course, I don’t want a phone call from the Prime Minister; I want timed meetings with support behind her, or whoever it is in the future, to make sure that they have the evidence needed to basically ask the right questions and drive this forward. I think we have hit a point where that is necessary.
Is there the relentlessness that you need to push forward on these really difficult big public policy areas? That probably does need an individual or a team—a tsar or something like that—who would relentlessly push forward. It would be their 24-hour job, seven days a week. They would sit next to the Prime Minister and say, “Last time I heard, nothing had changed.”
That is quite a tough approach to dealing with people across Government; it’s the sort of thing that Jeremy Heywood would understand and would set up for the Prime Minister. I am sure Mark Sedwill could do the same. But we need a renewed approach to this. In a way, we need to not worry about why it has all gone to hell in a handbasket; we need to learn from that and now put it right.
Anne Longfield: I think it is doable. That’s the thing: it is doable.
Dame Louise Casey: It is definitely doable.
Anne Longfield: And there could be visible change quite swiftly, although clearly it needs to be for the long term. While we don’t reduce levels of vulnerability for children, we just feed this on an ongoing basis.
Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence today.