Summer Adjournment

Part of Points of Order – in the House of Commons at 5:27 pm on 22 July 2008.

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Photo of Sarah Teather Sarah Teather Shadow Secretary of State (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) 5:27, 22 July 2008

Two and a half months ago, a man was stabbed to death at the end of my street. Michael Mann, who was in his early 40s, was killed by a single stab wound in front of his partner, Natasha, and their six-month-old baby, leaving a bewildered family to try to pick up the pieces. The trauma of that experience was exacerbated considerably by the complete incompetence of Natasha's housing association, PCHA, which refused to take her request for rehousing seriously, despite the fact that it was her neighbours from an adjacent flat who were arrested for the murder and then bailed. Sadly, that is an all too common experience.

Michael Mann's murder brought to a close a period of relative calm in Brent. We had begun to think that we had turned a corner after several years of high-profile gun and knife crime fatalities. The most famous and shocking was the killing of the child Toni-Ann Byfield in 2003. It is seared in my memory because she was murdered just days before the by-election in Brent, East, and the front pages of the newspapers that told the story of my victory also carried photographs of children carrying candles in a vigil outside the house in which she was killed.

Things had seemed a little better until May this year, when three people were killed in the space of just a week. The toll now stands at two fatal gun attacks and two fatal stabbings. The headlines have all been about young people and gangs, but the fatalities in Brent this year have been adults, mostly killed by other adults, with causes ranging from domestic violence to neighbour disputes. It is a complex picture and we need to be careful not to make too great a generalisation about the causes. There is no doubt that the fatalities of adults have masked many other incidents involving young people, which are often not reported to the police because of fear or because of a lack of belief in the police's ability to tackle the problem.

Policy Exchange's recent report, "Going Ballistic", said that only one in four young offenders thought that the police could protect them from crime. More shockingly, two thirds of those who thought that the police could not protect them had previously been threatened with a knife, so there is often a cycle. Perhaps the greatest challenge in tackling knife crime is tackling the fear that everybody else is carrying a knife. It is important to put on the record that a recent random search of 300 young people at a school in Brent found that none of those children was carrying a knife. The concern about knife crime, which is rightly expressed, often fuels that fear in young people and means that they think that they will be safe only if they all carry a knife. There is a desperate need to tackle that problem, perhaps with better and closer relationships on a ward level between community police and young people.

Research on gun crime in Brent has turned up a similarly complex picture. The council commissioned research that was published in 2005, and is going on to commission further work that looks at the causes of gun crime in Brent. The 2005 research contradicted many of the stereotypes. It found that gun crime was not just a problem of one ethnic group against another, and neither was it about drugs. It is not necessarily directly related to gangs. We have had gang problems in Brent, but the research shows that the incidence of gun crime is not always related to gang crime.

As Policy Exchange found, the distinction between victims and offenders is often blurred. The Brent study found that all those people who offended with guns have been victims of crime. Most had been victims of gun crime and half had had family or friends who were directly affected. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the research and the most common feature between offenders was a hyper-material culture and attachment to overt wealth. There is a bit of a moral parable about what happens when someone values things that they can see rather than things that are about them as an individual. When that is coupled with a fear of violence, it is easy to see how people can get into a cycle where life is cheap.

We have many ongoing projects in Brent that work through the umbrella project, Not Another Drop. I want to highlight one particular project, which targets young people who are thought to be at risk of or on the cusp of being involved in serious violence. It is called In-volve RAW and focuses on young people in the south Kilburn area of my constituency and in Harlesden and Stonebridge in neighbouring areas, as well as the Harrow road corridor that runs between those two areas. It focuses on raising self-esteem and trying to tackle the problem caused when people's sense of value is about overt wealth rather than themselves. The project tries to reverse negative self-images and, in particular, tries to help young people to deal with anger and a sense of hopelessness. It is an interesting project that I hope that the Government will look at carefully and consider replicating in other areas.

Finally, I want to mention the fact that that project, along with many other projects in Brent, suffers from a lack of consistent and stable funding. It is difficult for the council and other community organisations to plan the funding of good projects in Brent when initiatives and priorities constantly change. I have one plea for the Government: will they consider a more stable way of funding this difficult work with difficult communities, who need long-term work in order to build up trust?