Knife crime on rise as youth services cut

Knife crime in London has increased by almost 10% in the past year as local authorities cut youth services. Photograph: Katie Collins/PA

UK cities should brace themselves for a summer of gang and knife violence as the impact of cuts to youth services takes hold, experts are warning.

Youth violence is already increasing in London. Figures given to the Guardian reveal that serious youth violence increased by 4% year on year across the capital, with a 9.6% hike in knife crime.

There are fears that deep reductions in youth service budgets, particularly to programmes that divert inner-city youths away from gangs and knife crime, could have a devastating impact on crime levels.

Professor John Pitts, who advises several London local authorities on gangs and violent crime, warned that inner cities were likely to experience increased crime as the holidays begin.

"If you cut summer activities for young people as night follows day you will see an increase in crime," he said. "My anxiety is that those gang members who were in school will now be on the streets. Coupled with cuts to the services they use and fewer youth workers who can mediate, those streets will be a lot more dangerous and I would expect the level of crime and violence to rise."

Gang violence, including peer violence against girls and young women, is increasing, he said. "It is getting worse, it is becoming more embedded and more serious – this is not the time to be pulling the plug."

Eight teenagers have died in London already this year, including Negus McLean, 15, who was chased by seven youths on bicycles before being stabbed. Earlier this month Yemurai Kanyangarara, 16, died after being stabbed in the neck – two 15-years-old youths and a 14-year-old boy have since been arrested.

According to Scotland Yard the number of recorded knife-crime injuries in London went up from 941 to 1,070 in the three months between February and April this year compared with the previous three months; victims in the 13-24 age group injured during knife crime increased by more than 30% between 2008-09 and 2010-11.

Youth services, particularly those that prevent gang violence, have been savaged by local authorities because of government-imposed cuts. More than ?100m was removed from local authority services for young people up to March this year, according to the Confederation of Heads of Young People's Services, which surveyed 41 of their members. Budget cuts imposed at the start of the financial year averaged 28%, but some local authorities were cutting 70%, 80% or even 100% of youth services, it said. Almost 3,000 full-time staff who work with youths have been lost.

Universal services such as youth clubs have been hit hardest: 96% of the 41 heads of youth services who responded said club activities would be either reduced or stopped altogether by April next year.

MPs on the education select committee warned parliament last month that "disproportionate budget reductions" could have "dramatic and long-lasting" consequences. Graham Stuart, the select committee's chairman, said the current situation was "damaging" and an increase in crime was "inevitable". He said: "Tim Loughton [the children's minister] has said that cuts to children's services are disproportionate and we agree."

Youth services have been cut in every area of the country. According to the union Unison, Norfolk, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire and Manchester part of a "growing number of local authorities planning to get rid of the youth service altogether". Birmingham is likely to reduce youth services by 50% over the next three years; Haringey and Hull local authorities have cut 75% of its their youth services; Warwickshire is facing an 80% cut; the prime minister's Witney constituency, in Oxfordshire, has closed 20 out of 27 youth centres – there is not a youth service in the country that remains untouched.

At the same time London Councils – a lobbying organisation that promotes the interests of the 32 London boroughs, the City of London, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority – has warned about the consequences of slashing funding to youth-offending teams by as much as 30% in some boroughs.

And the Youth Justice Board is to be scrapped, leading MPs to warn that the move could prove costly if crime rates rise.

The government hopes the voluntary sector will play a bigger role in tackling the youth violence, announcing ?18m of funding earlier this year to help charities tackle knife, gun and gang crime after Brooke Kinsella, the actress turned knife crime campaigner whose brother Ben was killed in 2008, released a report.

Some charities argue this is not new money, and with 70% of voluntary organisation funding coming from already squeezed local authorities, according to the union Unison, some in the sector fear charities will be unable to provide a comprehensive system.

Smaller charities, while doing positive work, can be unco-ordinated and much effective inter-agency work will be lost, warned Mick Hurley, an adviser to Greater Manchester police on serious youth violence, who was awarded an OBE last year for services to young people.

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Open public services: Privatisation or innovation?

Phillip Blond and Brendan Barber. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

This week David Cameron released the much-anticipated open public services white paper that declared an end to the "state monopoly" on public services. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber discusses the fine detail with Phillip Blond, architect of the big society. Oliver Laughland listens in.

Brendan Barber: From my point of view, this looks like a pretty frightening prospect. The idea of opening up all of our services to competition is ultimately a route to massive privatisation. Although you might support the idea of other forms of ownership, co-operative mutuals and so on, the reality too often is that it's the private sector that steps in. If you look at the work programme and the big contracts that have just been issued, out of 18, 15 have gone to the private sector. People do not see this marketisation push by government as a move in a genuine spirit of innovation. They see it as another route to cost-cutting and privatisation.

Phillip Blond: I don't think that's the intention. What's clear in everything that's said in the paper is "diversity of providers". There's explicit recognition of what happened under New Labour where most contracts went to just three companies and there was a transfer from public to private monopoly. But I'm not opposed to competition. Competition is a clear driver of quality. Of course, if you just compete on price, this can deliver the wrong sort of outcomes. So what guards against mass privatisation is the requirement for diversity and the payment on outcome.

BB: But what we've not seen is convincing evidence that the private sector is able to deliver better outcomes. The public accounts committee looked at the performance of providers who'd been contracted to deliver some of the key employment services and came up with a wholly negative view of their performance. In terms of mainstream services that people need in the labour market, the evidence simply isn't there.

PB: The state is already failing. When I look at Britain I think in many ways we're turning class into caste. We're making it harder and harder for people from disadvantaged communities to get ahead. I don't think it's the case that all state is bad or private sector good, but let me quote you an example of one solution I favour. Take the Sandwell Community Care Trust, which was spun out as a mutualised charity caring for the elderly by the local authority in 1997. In 2006 it was analysed. The most telling example of success is that residential care for the elderly had cost the authority ?657 per person per week, whereas the trust reduced it to ?328 per person per week. The staff were happier, the residents were much happier. What we do is strip out all the costs of the old model, of the centralised state delivery that was so damaging, and we create a model where staff are valued .

BB: The government can talk the language of mutuals and innovative social enterprises in which employees and their support is key to the model. But the reality is very different because we've seen a host of PCTs, for example, where when the staff have been given an opportunity to express a view – in Cornwall 81% voted against mutualisation, in Plymouth it was 74%, in mid-Essex it was 97% – was there strong employee support? No, but did that stop them from going ahead? They went ahead anyway. This wasn't about empowering employees, this was about railroading employees into a new structure that they didn't support.

PB: I'm not in favour of anybody being railroaded. But to make the broader philosophical point, unless we break down the distinction between capital and labour we're not going to progress as a country. One of the reasons we're falling so far behind is because we've created a workforce that doesn't have a stake in the outcomes it produces. What sort of innovations would you favour?

BB: We've developed, with a body called the public services forum, a toolkit on employee engagement, looking at examples of good practice, where public service managers have sat down openly with the workforce, their manager, the unions, to look at how they capture their ideas, and we've seen the delivery of services transformed in some areas through that kind of dialogue.

PB: It doesn't sound innovative enough. It seems to me that the trade union movement should be more radically behind the John Lewis type model for public service delivery. The real gains that could be there for workers aren't being pursued because future innovations threaten the current structure of representation.

BB: It's not about flashy ideas, it's about real, nitty-gritty, work together.

PB: It sounds like more of the same.

BB: Look, this debate is all taking place against the background of the biggest cuts in public spending we've seen in our lifetimes that are not only impacting on public services and morale in a massively negative way, but alternative providers, as well. The government say they want to bring them in to the delivery of services ... the reality is that all of those sectors have been massively hit by spending cuts, too. This is about privatisation – that's what people believe and I think all the opinion poll evidence supports that.

PB: The difficulty for the big society is that it's been born in the most difficult of times. It has nothing to do with cuts, it was conceived before cuts, before Lehman Brothers etc. I'd much rather have a debate about how we innovate in the face of austerity. This white paper is profoundly innovative.

BB: But there are huge questions about where public trust lies, aren't there? Look at Southern Cross, for example, with a hugely important social function, out there in the market place. Blackstone step in, they fire up ?160m, then three or four years later, they realise a profit of something like ?600m, they take that out of the business, and disappear heading for the hills, with this massive profit, and leave a business massively struggling. It finishes up with David Cameron saying we'll have to pick up the tab. Where is the accountability?

PB: Let's be clear, Southern Cross is the failure of the old, post-Thatcherite agenda. It's not the failure of the big society or of the new government, and I agree completely with Brendan on his analysis of Southern Cross. But in the white paper it's very clear that when you have risk and failure, it isn't something that is picked up by the government. This is what payment by results means.

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Charity cuts: the 'avoidable destruction' of homelessness services

Another roar of pain and anger from the homelessness charity sector. I've written before about the havoc wreaked on vital housing support provision by the cuts (here, here and here) and the likely consequences. Some charities have laid low and accepted their fate: others have spoken out powerfully and eloquently about the short-sightedness of the cuts, and the effects they will have on the vulnerable people they work with.

What follows falls firmly into the latter category. It concerns a piece written by Andrew Redfern, the chief executive of Framework, a Nottinghamshire-based charity, for the introduction to a report celebrating its 10th anniversary. It explains how far services for homeless and vulnerable people have come in the past decade, not least as a result of investment through the Supporting People programme, and how quickly those services will fall apart, now that funding stream has been savaged.

Framework provides housing, employment and health support to the most vulnerable people, an area of preventative welfare that has shown itself to be high impact, both in terms of the social outcomes it delivers, and its cost-effectiveness. As Redfern explains:

"We are about saving tenancies, preventing repossessions and bringing people off the streets. We are getting them into homes, treatment, training and work."

The cuts come, however, as it experiences increasing demand for services from its most vulnerable clients: victims of domestic violence, homeless people, care leavers, refugees, teenage parents, older people, people with mental illness or disability, and ex-offenders.

It's worth pointing out that Redfern is no defender of the status quo. In conversations I have had with him in the past he has spoken passionately of the need to be flexible, to innovate, to integrate services, big society-style, with communities (as Framework been doing for years), and to adjust, like any other business, social or otherwise, to economic realities.

Redfern is furious, however, at the barely-manageable speed, scale, and crudeness of the cuts. I suspect he speaks for many charities, across many sectors, when he writes:

"Much of what has been achieved is now under threat, Change is both inevitable and welcome but avoidable destruction is not."

The bitter irony is that the decision-makers who have overseen those cuts do not seem to disagree with Redfern about the importance of housing support: neither ministers - who exhort councils to invest in housing support (but do nothing to ensure it happens) - nor local authorities, who blame the government's War on Deficit for the (in many cases drastic) cuts they are making to services for the most vulnerable. So what has gone wrong? Redfern explains:

"[Supporting People] is being destroyed by the recklessness of politicians and the incompetence of civil servants. All three parties are implicated. Labour removed the ring-fence from Supporting People [budgets], ignoring much expert advice and many representations from providers and service users. The Coalition has cut the budget and re-allocated it as part of a general redistribution from poor areas to rich ones. With nothing to protect the programme's resources, the winners use the money for other purposes at local level while the losers cut services to the most vulnerable people."

He continues:

"The politicians and civil servants who are presiding over this destruction will no doubt cite the recession and associated public sector deficit as justification for their actions. They have no such defence. The decisions taken at central and local level about the future of Supporting People have little or nothing to do with the economy. They are unnecessary, ill-considered changes driven by arrogance and an unwillingness to listen."

Redfern says the effects of this avoidable destruction are already apparent, both in Nottingham (where the Labour-controlled city council has cut Supporting People budgets by 45%) and in the surrounding areas (where Tory-run Nottinghamshire county council has cut the budgets by 43%). A day centre for homeless people has closed, along with supported housing for young women and rough sleepers, while services dedicated to keeping vulnerable people in accomodation (and not in hospital, prison or on the streets) have been scaled down. He says:

"The reduction and closure of services is already having a visible impact. Informal street counts show an increase in rough sleeping over the past few months. Hostels are beginning to 'silt up' as people have nowhere to go, and more people are seeking immediate help by knocking on the doors of offices, churches and private dwellings... I am especially concerned about the loss of floating support capacity with its inevitable impact on levels of homelessness, rough sleeping, poverty, ill-health and crime."

Disproportionate cuts, targeted at the most vulnerable, he says, don't just affect those directly affected, but they increase the burden on the tax payer by shifting the risk onto expensive crisis provision in hospitals and the criminal justice system. We may save money now, but we will pay many times over in the future.

Framework has had to make tough decisions: between 140 and 190 posts are at risk as a result of the cuts to Supporting People budgets. Remaining staff have taken pay cuts of up to 10%, and holiday and sick pay entitlements have been trimmed. For all this, it remains optimistic about developing new services. For all the anger felt towards politicians, and the frustration at the cuts, there's a determination to survive and succeed. As Redfern says:

"We can hardly cease to care just because times are tough".

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