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Knife crime speech

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
I congratulate my hon. Friend Chris Grayling on the way in which he introduced this motion from the Front Bench in a very thoughtful speech. I also thought that the Home Secretary's first foray from the Dispatch Box in his new role was very thoughtful. He is clearly concerned and interested, and he listens to arguments. I look forward to his period as Home Secretary, although I hope it is not as long as perhaps he hopes it will be.

I also congratulate the Select Committee on Home Affairs, whose report I read with interest. I should say how much I agreed when Keith Vaz said, at the end of his contribution, words to the effect that the House should try to unite on some of these difficult issues and put its best constructive views.

I have spoken about crime and knife crime for what seems like many hours in this Chamber over the past few years. I have spoken in Committee for what seems like many days or many weeks on the same subject; I well remember the Violent Crime Reduction Bill being discussed, day after day, in Committee in 2005, and knife crime featured heavily in our debates. I managed to obtain figures showing that at that time some 60,000 children in our country admitted to carrying a knife, for either defensive or offensive purposes—a truly horrifying statistic.

I have also spoken in this Chamber about the very real fear that I have seen on the faces of witnesses in court who are forced to relive a moment of terror when a knife was waved at them; it is a truly horrifying experience. All through these years I have wondered what we can do to reduce this awful crime, which puts so much fear into so many people and which blights so many of our inner-city areas. I was, therefore, pleased to see that the motion talks about tackling the problem and about solutions.

May I be forgiven for putting forward some of my own solutions to the House for a few minutes? They apply not only to knife crime, but to crime in general and to young people in particular—mostly it is young men who carry knives. I shall start with a statistic and ask whether we are getting value for money.

Let us assume that we put a young man away in Feltham remand centre for carrying a knife. The average cost of a place in a young offenders institution is £32,800 a year—a lot of money.

David Davies (Monmouth, Conservative)
Would my hon. Friend not acknowledge that the net cost to the taxpayer is considerably less than that, because that young man would probably be on benefits anyway?

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
My hon. Friend makes his own point. Given net and gross costs, maybe so, but I simply remark on the fact that while that young man is in the young offenders institution, it costs the taxpayer £32,800 a year to look after him.

David Davies (Monmouth, Conservative)
Perhaps I did not get the point across. It is obviously not costing the taxpayer that much, because the taxpayer is not paying for him to receive benefits while he is in prison.

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
Yes, and of course my hon. Friend may say that while the young man is in custody, he is not committing crimes outside. I much look forward to hearing his speech on that point. I merely point out that Government figures show that £32,800 is the average cost. Yet we know that when the young man comes out, he will offend. There is a 70 to 80 per cent. chance of his reoffending four or five times officially, and perhaps 25 to 30 times in fact, in one year. My first question, therefore, is whether we are getting value for money from our young offender custodial estate, and my answer is no.

Let us go back to the time before that young man was put into the custodial estate. Who is he? Where is he from? What is the problem? I have come to the conclusion that there is a great link between crime and school exclusion, and between school exclusion and literacy. An important inspection report in 2004 told us that 83 per cent. of boys under 18 in custody had been excluded from school, and 50 per cent. had been excluded permanently. Why? It was because they had behaved badly. In my judgment—I believe that others share this view—there is a link with literacy. A young man may fall behind in class and begin to behave badly. He cannot keep up, and his behaviour gets worse. He begins to truant, perhaps partly because of the fear of being called stupid or because of embarrassment. He is behind, he is out of school and he has huge literacy problems.

Let us step forward a bit. I have done a trawl around a number of young offenders institutions in the past 12 months, and person after person who runs these places tells me that 80 per cent. of their youngsters aged 15 have the literacy and numeracy levels of an eight-year-old. That is not good news. Although it is not a rule right across the board, there is a link between that and the youngster who gets on badly at school and cannot keep up. He starts to behave badly, has very low literacy and numeracy levels, plays truant, gets excluded, gets permanently excluded, goes out and joins a gang, and does not want to go back to school because he is frightened and embarrassed. It starts off with literacy, which is a big problem.
When I look at our young offenders institutions, I ask, "Well, what are doing about it there? What is actually going on?" Are the youngsters in those institutions getting 20 hours a week of education? No, they are not. Government figures show that at Feltham, they get seven hours' education a week. At Rochester, they get three and a half hours, and at Reading five hours. It is just not enough.

Martin Salter (Reading West, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman mentioned Reading and touched on a particular cause of mine, which is the causal link between illiteracy and reoffending. Does he agree that our current reoffending rates are nothing short of a national disgrace? Some 70 per cent. of youngsters on a first-time custodial sentence in young offenders institutions will reoffend within two years. It is utterly ridiculous for the first period of internment to be short and without training.

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
The consensual atmosphere of this debate comes through again, and the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. What would I want to happen to that young man who entered a young offenders institution aged 15 or 16? First, I would make a thorough assessment of his literacy and numeracy abilities. An individual plan would be drawn up for him. If, as is probable, he had been statemented earlier in his life, the statement would form part of his papers on admission and would be acted on. I would also ensure, if possible, that he had proper literacy and numeracy education for 25 hours a week, and I would make that compulsory for under-16s in custody.

I am very depressed by Government statistics that tell me that in fact our young man would be locked up for 16 or 17 hours a day out of 24. What kind of a world is this? That means that he is out of his cell for seven hours a day, maximum. How much sport would he play in that time? Never mind pumping weights in the gym for a couple of hours—as has been pointed out, that just makes them stronger and fitter and able to run away faster. Where the devil do team sports come into the picture? I am old-fashioned—I cannot help it—and I believe in team sports. They create self-discipline and teach people to win or lose and to take a knock. I have seen young men playing rugby at Feltham and it has been like a breath of fresh air to see how it improves their characters. Team sport is very good for them, as is pursuing the Duke of Edinburgh awards, but hardly any of that happens in our young offenders institutions. Team sport is a terrific thing to do for a young person and their self-esteem and confidence.

Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points. In north-east Lincolnshire, some excellent work is being done with young men, in getting them to play football, and with young women, getting them into street dancing. This is being done before they offend. Does he agree that such work should be extended across the country so that we can get people to work co-operatively and make use of their energies before they are ever arrested?

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative) The hon. Lady makes a good point and I support what she says. Now I come to a revolutionary idea. I do not think that it is mine—I would be very surprised if it were—and I must have heard it somewhere. In any event, I have written about it and published work on it. I think that sending a young person into custody for anything less than eight months is a total waste of time. I have spoken to many judges about this, and my view is that there is no point in putting a young man into a young offenders institution for anything less than 12 months. If he is in there for only five, six or seven weeks, he lies low, joins a gang, does not do much, comes out and goes straight back where he came from. If the offence is not serious enough to merit 12 months in custody, it should be dealt with in the community. Only in a period of nine to 12 months can we really do some good and turn that young person around.

Paul Holmes (Chesterfield, Liberal Democrat)
I am pleasantly surprised to say that I agree with every word that the hon. Gentleman says, given our previous exchanges in a debate on drugs and alcohol when we did not agree on everything. Does he agree that if we adopted the policy that short sentences should be served in the community, it would relieve some of the pressure on prisons and we could have more training and education in them? In the last Parliament, the Education and Skills Committee's report on prison education found that all the good intentions in adult and young offender institutions were being destroyed because there were not enough prison officers to take people from cells to training areas, and there were so few hours available it was meaningless.

Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
Another way of saying that is that if young offenders institutions are going to do real good—there is no point in having one if they are not going to do good—they should do good not just for three or four weeks but all the way through a proper-length sentence.

What about the last three months of the sentence? First, where is the emphasis on resettlement? We should have resettlement wings in all our young offenders institutions into which people who are about to leave them should move. The emphasis should be on preparing them and the outside for when they come out. These wings should get the family, the housing and the job ready and should deal with resettlement. There is just not enough emphasis on resettlement.

I commend the intensive fostering programme, which takes place in Hampshire, I think. Families take young offenders on remand as an alternative to custody. I would not mind seeing that extended to young offenders who leave custody. If they leave the custody estate and go back into exactly the same circumstances they were in—where the home and the scene are miserable, where there is no job and where there is no education—they have had it. It is as simple as that. There is not a cat in hell's chance that they will stay straight. Where is the huge emphasis that we must have on proper resettlement so that people go back into education, get themselves into a job and, possibly, get themselves away from the communities in which they have lived so far?

Finally, where are the mentors? Gosh, we should have more mentors in life. I would love to see those in their last three months in a custodial estate for young people being given a permanent mentor who came to see them once a week, tried to help them get a job, filled out their CV and went to interviews with them. We have to make our young offenders institutions places that give a real chance to young people to reform themselves and in every respect to come out better than when they went in. We want them to come out with many more chances than when they went in—chances in education, jobs and hope. Only if we focus on those areas, in my judgment, will we ultimately reduce the incidence of crime among young people and, in particular, the incidence of knife crime.