Violent Crime Reduction Bill

My hon. Friend makes an important point. There is little published evidence to tell us why knife carrying and knife use has grown. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be familiar with the Home Office report that was published in January. It made several important points about knife carrying and knife use. It said that the group most likely to carry knives comprised those young people who have been excluded from schools. Those, including the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), who belong to a party that calls for children to be excluded from schools at every opportunity, need to recognise, if they wish to tackle the causes of crime, the links between excluded young people and knife carrying. We must deal with that. Fear and peer group influence are reasons that young people give for carrying knives. However, I want to stress one of the points in the conclusions of the Home Office research, which states:"““Although the problem of young people carrying knives and other weapons appears, by common consent, to be growing, few dedicated public awareness or educational programmes have been developed or delivered. Similarly few dedicated programmes working with young people at risk of carrying and using knives have been developed. As a consequence, there are relatively few examples of good practice. Those that there are have not been widely disseminated or shared.””" I stress to my right hon. Friend the Minister that the challenge for the Government is not to change the Bill—I do not believe that the measure should contain a different bit of law—but to develop a strategy for tackling the causes of knife crime and ensuring that schools link with outside agencies to identify the gangs where it predominates. If we are to be effective, the Government should also ensure that there are proper strategies and punitive measures for dealing with the ring leaders and that proper educational approaches exist for tackling young people who carry knives. The Government are trying to do that with gun crime at one end of the spectrum and antisocial behaviour at the other. A systematic, root-and-branch approach to young people and knife carrying needs to be developed. I met a group of students from my constituency this afternoon who happened to be in Westminster on an educational programme. I—and, I suspect, their teachers—was surprised not by their saying that there was not a problem in their school but by the fact that they regarded carrying knives as a significant issue for young people in our society. We need to build an awful lot around the Bill if we are to change a serious and developing culture in our country.