By Bruce Houlder CB KC
Starting a new charity is not for the faint-hearted. For me it has been a life changing experience. Fighting Knife Crime London (FKCL )launched on 1st June 2021, to much press fanfare, and in part due to help from Joshua and Danny Shaw who I had got to know during my time as public affairs spokesman for the Bar. On the same day I was invited to No 10 Downing Street to speak about what I planned. There were many others who encouraged me, and after about 2 years of intensive preparatory work and fund-raising, my one-stop shop for information to help young people and those who care for them, was up and running. One of the most stimulating aspects of doing this was meeting, and continuing to meet through talks and webinars, so many inspirational people. Most of these new friendships are among people who have spent years of their lives working directly to change the lives of young people and had so much to teach me. The multifaceted nature of the website that resulted is www.fightingknifecrime.london. Our social media presence, the tools available for self-help and new pathways to professionals and young people alike are best seen by visiting the site itself. Please do so.
As a criminal barrister, I had spent 52 years trying my best to deal with failure , for that surprisingly is the work that the criminal justice system is engaged upon. It is of course necessary work. But I had been working for too long at the wrong end, and, naively perhaps, I thought there was something I could do to change that. 34 years of my time as lawyer was spent as a Recorder, and 20 years as a facilitator for Judicial College courses (formerly JSB). I had seen how sentencing guidelines, and now codes, were being politically driven to a point where longer prison sentences were seen increasingly as a solution, rather than the more imaginative early intervention and diversionary approaches which we are coming rather too late to appreciate. Too little was being done too to make the communities which provide most work for our justice system better places in which to live and grow up.
Judges too saw their discretion in sentencing increasingly removed. Some politicians still fail to see political capital in prison reform, despite that the HMI Prisons Report for 2023 showed only one prison achieving ‘Good’ across all four healthy prison tests, but finding that 71% of prisons were ‘Not Sufficiently Good’ or ‘Poor’ for Purposeful Activity, and 42% of prisons were ‘Not Sufficiently Good’ or ‘Poor’ for Rehabilitation and Release Planning .
So young people who carry knives, or those who might be thinking about it became my main concern. There are some pretty general views about why these young people might think of such a thing. There are some pretty terrible personal stories and home lives, involving drug and alcohol abuse and violence. Young people are assailed in a way that my post-war generation never were, by competing and often negative value sets, where gender, racial identity, and overwhelming pressures imposed by social media and their peers simply overwhelm them. Then there is the dilution of informed debate into what often seems to be a completely unaccommodating and intentionally hurtful online messages, about who is in and who is out and who to fear and who to trust. Social deprivation is a word that covers so much, but still lies at the centre of why things are getting worse. Add to that the changes that take place within the brains of young people during these formative teenage years, and we have a problem.
Dangerous, and angry messages are promoted by social media, hate is disseminated sometimes at the school gate or by simple Chinese whispers. It leaches into the lives of children through bullying and worse. Sometimes even by something that should be as life enhancing a music can become a messenger of death. For those unlucky enough never to have had the home life or any of the advantages which most of us have at least to some small extent, the feeling must be that the good things of this life have let them behind and will never be achieved; that life offers little or nothing for them, and that life itself is cheap. The voices of authority are no longer on their side, and often provide no example for them, nor any evidence they understand them. Even low level poorly monitored non-custodial sentences and orders restricting activities and freedoms hold not the slightest fear for many young people. Nor can they see how this helps anyone, least of all improve their lives.
Strong communities are a good part of the answer, but that does not absolve central and local government from their duty to support these efforts and not to act simply as the givers and takers away of tax payer’s largesse. The machinery of government can be put to better purposes than that. Although I have written and spoken about that, there is not the space here to expand. Suffice it to say, a short tour of the research section of our website here https://www.fightingknifecrime.london/resources will show you that the answers have been provided, and that we have a high level of consensus in recommendations made for change, but seem to lack the serious determination from government to see that the changes happen that the best informed have identified as necessary. None of these recommendations look towards the criminal justice system as the solution.
Some of the newer police and YOT alternative solutions do not now even involve the courts. It is instructive to see that those who are learning to understand this most are the police forces that have been encouraged by more thoughtful senior officers, who have heeded the experience of their community based officers, and see the benefit of the wide range of diversionary opportunities. Many of these opportunities in London are listed in the borough directory of FKCL’s website and our other resources.
In November 2023, the College of Policing Report into ‘Imprisonment and other custodial sanctions’ declared their ‘…findings are in line with a 2019 Ministry of Justice study https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/814177/impact-short-custodial-sentences.pdf. This found that ‘custodial sentences of under 12 months with supervision on release are associated with higher levels of reoffending than sentences served in the community via court orders (community orders and suspended sentence orders.’
The present Lord Chancellor, Alex Chalk KC appears to see the advantage of a more imaginative approach to sentencing, and it is to be hoped that his approach will be followed up by his successor in the emphasis given to community rather that increasing penal solutions. Part of Labour’s new proposals include the creation of bodies modelled on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) would publicly hold ministers to account for progress against key Labour goals under plans being looked at by some close to Sir Keir Starmer KC. This kind of thing is something I have been advocating for some time. Now we don’t know how far this might go yet, but it seems to me that this kind of thinking is key to reducing the issues around youth disengagement and youth criminality and violence.
I am no soft touch here and acts of serious violence and threats of violence must be met with custody in most cases. But, we must heed the growing body of evidence that solutions can be even more successful where low-level offending is taken out of the court system altogether whenever the benefit to society and the offender outweighs the now petty well-established disadvantages of a court solution.
But, as I see it at least, failure runs deeper than that. Too little is done to act on research that shows that 80% of young people carry knives for their own protection. Recent research from the Youth Endowment Fund showed that 47% of children reported that violence and the fear of violence impacted their day-to-day lives and 20% of children said they’d skipped school due to feeling unsafe, and those were the ones most likely to be exposed to greater dangers. Worse still, 62% of children thought that drugs were a major factor, and half thought gangs were amongst the two highest drivers of fear and violence. Sentencing policy had not provided an answer. Something has gone badly wrong. We have as a society got things completely upside down.
As criminal practitioners we are often held back from closer engagement with the root causes of crime, by the relentless life we live as criminal practitioners, trying to keep the system on its feet after the depredations of successive secretaries of state, and the increasing demands made upon our time fulfilling tasks to make the lives of others less burdensome. The almost visceral feeling I had after years of practice in the criminal justice system, is that so many of our young people were being, and had already been abandoned by a society that saw criminal justice as the central agency in social reform. Too little was being done to support our young people during the most difficult period of their lives. None of this was surprising as several studies showed that 75% of our youth services had been removed in the 10 years between 2011 and 2019 with the loss of 8000 youth workers over the same period. It was scarcely surprising to find that in the year ending March 2022 more people had died at the point of a knife since records began in 1946; and now again we see deaths of teenagers in 2023 higher than in 2022.
So FKCL is on a journey, both to influence and inform, and to provide an ever-expanding list of pathways to help young people. I owe a debt to those who many who inspired this work. We should recognise that others too from my former profession, are heavily engaged to make this change work. For example, Honour Judge Sarah Munro KC, a Judge at The Central Criminal Court, and now Sheriff Bronek Masojada, are hosting roundtable discussions with Joe Lyons, the dynamic CEO of the West Ham Foundation, which already does so much work in the community. I joined one of these sessions recently where we focussed on tackling the growing rates of youth violence and anti-social behaviour. These events bring together a sector-diverse group of organisations and leaders, providing a platform to explore solutions, share knowledge, to identify root causes, and hopefully reduce the numbers of young people involved in gang crime. Work too by the criminal barrister Stephen Akinsanya too is accelerating this change through the use of every modern means of influence, some of which we feature on FKCL’s website (see Stephen’s work here https://www.lifeoffocus.co.uk/about). This kind of material is increasingly being used by educationalists to change the future for our young people.
My only interest is to be part of this, to help to draw together the organisations doing most and working most innovatively in ever greater collaboration. For this reason, on May 14th this year we are hosting a major London conference at the Congress Centre in Gt Russell St, titled “Being Greater than Ourselves”. You can sign up here –https://www.fightingknifecrime.london/conference. Please come along, and learn what you might do to be part of the change that is already on the way. Our profession has a big part to play in this.
Bruce Houlder CB KC