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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Grief and anger over stabbing at Greek resort of British youth Robert Sebbage

Former England football mascot Robert Sebbage, 18, who died after being stabbed during a confrontation with a taxi driver in Laganas on the Greek island of Zakynthos. Photograph: ENTERPRISE NEWS AND PICTURES

Bloodstains still mark the place where Robert Sebbage was stabbed. On Friday night, a floral tribute to the former England football mascot was erected at the spot by a mourning procession led by the father of the Greek taxi driver who plunged the knife into the 19-year-old holidaymaker's heart.

For a while, Laganas, Europe's party capital, went quiet as the bars and clubs and open-front restaurants along its neon-lit strip turned off their sound systems.

"This is a double tragedy," lamented Dionysios Morfis, hours after his taxi driver son, Stelios, was imprisoned on charges of premeditated murder after confessing to stabbing Sebbage and four of his friends in an early morning brawl on Wednesday night.

"A boy has been killed and his family destroyed, but my own son will pay for it for the rest of his life. We are a broken family, too."

In 2007 Sebbage walked into Wembley stadium with David Beckham at his side; the then 14-year-old from the town of Tadley in Hampshire was a Reading FC fan who had battled a rare neuropathic bowel disorder requiring regular trips to hospital.

Police are still trying to establish what happened in this instance. But after his death, as the holiday season gets into full swing, Greece's premier island resort in the Ionian sea is seething with barely disguised hatred between British partygoers determined to have a good time and Greek locals disgusted with their behaviour.

"This place is a boiling cauldron," said Giorgos Kallivis, who spent several hours with sweat pouring down his cheeks in the baking heat vainly trying to remove the blood from the pavement in front of his pottery shop. "Whoever says otherwise is closing their eyes to the truth. I'm not excusing what happened, but it was going to happen. And it could happen again.

"Every night there's a fight, someone gets beaten up. Tour operators are to blame: all they are interested in is getting the kids drunk, and that's where they start to misbehave and all the trouble starts."

Greece is accustomed to young Britons who, like Sebbage, are often taking their first holiday abroad alone. But, after Malia in Crete and Faliraki in Rhodes, Laganas has scaled new heights in the realm of anything-goes behaviour.

This week, the debauchery was on full display as beer-swilling youngsters careened around the resort on oversized quad bikes in the morning and emerged from marathon pub crawls in intoxicated fury at night.

"Every morning I see them on the beach totally drunk when I'm laying out the loungers," said Philippos Gorgoras, a hotel employee. "Today there was a couple having sex over there, and 10 others standing around them wildly clapping. What struck me was that the couple didn't seem to mind."

The stabbing has shocked Greeks, but little pity has been shown Stelios Morfis. He had been a member of Athens' elite presidential guard before returning to the island to work for his father's cab firm. Born in Sydney to an Australian mother, the burly 21-year-old has run into trouble before. "Greeks are a hospitable people. What he did was absolutely deplorable," said Nikos Diamantopoulos, a taxi driver in Patras town on the Peloponnese. "He might be saying he lashed out in self defence with his father's fruit knife, but it's unacceptable. A lot of us are very afraid that this will reflect badly on taxi drivers in Greece."

More than anything, the attack has prompted soul-searching among a debt-stricken nation dependent on tourism.

Seated before an icon in his air-conditioned office, the police chief in Laganas, Dimitrios Angeloudis, was in no doubt where Greece had gone wrong. Tourism, he said, had become seriously toxic.

Though British police officers, including rape specialists from Devon and Cornwall, visited the resort earlier this year, Angeloudis believes that no amount of help will resolve a situation increasingly out of control.

"Not even an army could solve it. The root cause of the problem has to be dealt with first, starting with the pub crawls, but nobody wants to do that, because a lot of people would stand to suffer.

"The only way out is if Laganas improves its infrastructure and focuses on a better-quality tourism. But that will require time, and, again, loss of money."

Local officials admit that adulterated alcohol also plays a role. Bars in the resort are notorious for serving cocktails mixed with pure spirit, part of an age-old tradition of making servings go further.

"I've requested that there be quality control, that random tests be conducted on bottles in bars here, and it just hasn't happened," said Angeloudis. "These drinks encourage the very bad behaviour, which includes throwing bottles at taxis and police cars."

For Britons visiting Laganas, there has been shock at the death followed by anger and, among some, a desire for revenge, with holidaymakers threatening to stage protest rallies to "take back our blood".

"Taxi drivers are especially aggressive and it's put all of us on edge," said Alex Cambell, as he distributed flyers outside a club in the resort's main strip. "They get a lot of flak, but they're also well-known for beating tourists up."

Ben Phillips, a criminology student at Hull, put it another way: "I think this year will be my last party holiday. Next year I want to go travelling to see a bit of the world. I want to go to Peru."

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