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Is vital evidence going ignored in London’s struggle against violent youth crime?

Three criminologists have argued that responses from police and politicians could be ineffective and even make matters worse
Dave Hill

At The Conversation, criminologists Becky Clarke, Patrick Williams and Robert Ralphs write:

It seems strange to us that little mention has been made in the current youth violence debate about the obvious failure of the ending gangs and youth violence (EGYV) policy. A number of academics, including us, have questioned the validity of government-led responses to gun and knife violence, which over the last decade have focused on policing gangs.

They cite “the ongoing conflation of gangs and youth violence” as a particular shortcoming, pointing to research undertaken in Manchester and to Metropolitan Police data and scrutiny sessions at City Hall which show that the connection between apparent gang membership and the committing of violent crime is tenuous. It was, indeed, explained in a session about gangs in the final months of Boris Johnson’s time as Mayor that “gang crime is a small percentage of serious youth violence”. A slide from the presentation is shown below:

Screen shot 2019 03 11 at 18.45.23
Graph for MOPAC shown 2 February 2016

 

 

 

Connected to this has been the use of “targeted” or “intelligence-led” stop-and-search as part of an anti-gang strategy. However, Clarke, Williams and Ralphs say that a ten-year analysis by the College of Policing of the use of the tactic in London “demonstrates that there’s precious little evidence of a meaningful effect of this on reducing crime”. The analysis itself, which covers the period 2004-2014, found “only limited evidence of stop and search having acted as a deterrent at borough level”.

A third important piece of knowledge the trio of authors say is in danger of being overlooked is what they call the “significant link between carrying a weapon and distrusting the police”, which has been found to hold across England and Wales. They link to a 2018 paper by Iain R. Brennan whose abstract says that “lack of trust in the police” is among the factors explaining why people carry weapons that are more important than worries about their personal safety.

Are the Met and the current Mayor taking such research findings on board as they seek to address violence by and against young people in London? The Mayor has endorsed an increase in “weapons-focussed” stop-and-search of “almost 20 per cent”, despite saying when seeking election that he would like to reduce its use. In early November, Met commissioner Cressida Dick reportedly pledged to target 190 gangs which she considered to be fuelling the capital’s violent crime wave. Yet in August, the BBC had reported Met figures saying that while violent crime had increased considerably since 2010, “gang-related” violence had fallen sharply during the same period.

The Met said at the time that this reduction had been achieved by “identifying high-harm gang members and targeting them through intelligence-led enforcement” using its gangs matrix database. Yet three months later, shortly after Dick’s pledge to focus on gangs, the Information Commissioner’s Office gave the Met six months to get its use of the matrix into line with data protection laws, saying it was unclear, confusing, lacked “effective central  governance”, created the potential for disproportionate action to be taken against people who no longer posed a risk and had “the potential to cause damage and distress to the disproportionate number of young, black men” whose details were included on it.

Those are only a few headlines and there is far more to the Mayor’s and the Met’s approach to addressing serious violent crime by and against the young and in general. But let us hope that the fears of Clarke, Williams and Ralphs are not being borne out.

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Becky Clarke, Boris Johnson, Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police, Mopac, Patrick Williams, policing, Robert Ralphs, Sadiq Khan, youth crime, youth violence

Andrew Boff: Sadiq Khan’s talk of rent controls is a populist distraction for a policy that wouldn’t work

Experts and commentators from across the political spectrum agree that if the Mayor secured the powers he requires it would only make matters worse
Andrew Boff

Sadiq Khan has made clear that he is going to make the issue of private sector rent controls a key plank of his 2020 re-election bid, even though the Mayor of London has absolutely no statutory power to cap rents. The sad reality is that these pronouncements amount to nothing more than a populist distraction from his failure to get crime down, build more houses and improve our transport network.

Nevertheless, it is up to us Conservatives to explain to Londoners why such a move would be deeply flawed and extremely damaging were the Mayor ever to secure the powers he seeks from national government. Make no mistake, the rollout of rent controls could actually push up the cost of rent as well as limiting the supply of new places to rent and drive down the quality of homes.

It really is no surprise that experts and commentators from across the political spectrum have repeatedly pointed out that rent controls simply do not work. When he chaired the London Assembly’s housing committee, the rent control- obsessed Labour AM Tom Copley instigated an investigation into the effect thy would have on the capital’s housing market. Virtually all the experts agreed that far from reducing rents, this policy can in fact lead to costs going up.

When rent controls were introduced in central Paris, prices started to increase across the city’s suburbs where no cap was in place. If Mayor Khan applied rent controls across Inner London, where prices are highest, it is likely that it would be private renters in Outer London boroughs such as Bromley, Havering and Hillingdon who would be hit in the pocket. Even if the Mayor was to freeze rent prices across the whole of Greater London, the already high rents across the wider south east of England would most likely rocket as a result.

In Berlin, the introduction of rent controls saw rents shoot up for new tenants as landlords compensated for having next to no flexibility over rent charges for existing ones. Rents in that city had been rising by just one to two per cent each year before the rent brake was introduced in 2015, but new renters were hit by a 10 per cent jump in prices in the three years after its introduction. Such discrimination against new renters in London would have a devastating impact on the city, with high rents already putting people off moving here.

And while some rents may go up, it is likely that the number of rental properties available would go down. The evidence from San Francisco shows that landlords unable to vary their rents are forced to resort to more lucrative ways of using their properties. In that city, the rental housing stock went down by 15 per cent as landlords increasingly sold their houses and flats to owner-occupants or redeveloped the buildings.

Those landlords who don’t pump up rents for new tenants or redevelop are likely to have less money available to invest in their properties, as academics at Stanford University have found. Any Londoner who has rented a property in our city knows that the quality of the homes in London needs to improve, not deteriorate. In those few cases where Mayor Khan’s plans for the rental market would bring rents down, this would come at the expense of good property maintenance.

Across the world and across the decades, rent controls have failed time after time, which is why a whole host of experts have again denounced this policy approach. Left wing commentator Stephen Bush has said that rent control “incentivises landlords to remove their properties from the private rental market” and “creates steeper barriers to entry for new tenants”. In a similar vein, the Institute for Directors have warned that they would lead to landlords leaving the rental market, which would hit the poorest the hardest.

As has been the case for years, we need to get London building and increase the housing stock rather than playing around with rent controls. It is becoming clearer by the day that the Mayor is failing to build enough homes. Only a few weeks ago the Evening Standard revealed how he is at risk of missing his target of 14,000 affordable homes for the financial year to April. This is extraordinary  given Mayor Khan’s habit of double counting affordable housing starts in order to boost his statistics.

Sadiq Khan owes it to Londoners to stop pumping out populist policies which he knows will do nothing to improve housing conditions in our city. His focus needs to be on using the billions of pounds he has at his disposal to finally get more homes built – that’s the only effective way to address affordability in London.

Andrew Boff is a Conservative Londonwide London Assembly Member and a member of the Assembly’s housing committee. Sadiq Khan has asked his deputy mayor for housing James Murray and Westminster North MP Karen Buck to “develop a new blueprint for stabilising or controlling private rents in the capital”.

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Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, Evening Standard, housing, private rented housing, Sadiq Khan

Florence Eshalomi: London government still does not reflect Londoners’ diversity

A new report has found that the capital's ethnic minorities are under-represented in its town halls and the story does not end there
Florence Eshalomi

It is a source of great pride to me, the first black woman to represent the GLA constituency of Lambeth & Southwark at City Hall, that I am part of a London Assembly political group that reflects the ethnic diversity of the city we serve. Half of the Labour Group are women, and many of us come from London’s diverse BAME communities.

The Mayor’s office has made its own impressive strides in become more representative of London’s population. Sadiq Khan himself is, of course, both from a working-class background and of Pakistani heritage, while his deputy mayors include seven women and three BAME Londoners out of a team of ten. There’s also some genuinely impressive work underway to reduce inequality both among the City Hall workforce and for Londoners generally.

It’s clear that where the political will exists, real strides can be made. But the reality is that government in a city as diverse as London remains shockingly unrepresentative. A new report by Mercy Muroki and Philip Cowley of Queen Mary, University of London found that the number of black Londoners in the capital’s council chambers is around half of what it would be if it was in proportion to the number of black Londoners as a whole, and that – incredibly – there are five boroughs with no black Councillors at all.

The situation isn’t limited to the capital’s local authorities. Just 31 of London’s 73 MPs are women, 14 are BAME, only four identify as LGBT and just one – yes, one – identified as having a disability. To set this in context, 22 per cent of the working age population are disabled.

The judiciary doesn’t fare much better. As of 2018, less than a third of judges were women, and nine per cent were BAME. More encouragingly, the efforts to recruit a greater diversity of people to serve in London’s magistrates’ courts appears to have paid off – an impressive 58 per cent of magistrates are women and 28 per cent are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

It is incumbent on us all to strive to do better. The average age of a local councillor in Britain as a whole is over 60. While experience is to be valued and many of our older councillors in London make a huge contribution to public life, we cannot reasonably expect our boroughs to understand and address the needs of London’s young people unless there young councillors.

One statistic that really stands out for me is the fact that just four per cent of staff working at major national museums are BAME. How can we meaningfully tell the complex story of our country – a story of colonialism, migration, integration and profound change – when people at the very heart of that story simply aren’t there to help tell it?

The place of role models in society is incredibly important too. In an interview last week, Nish Kumar spoke of how the seminal BBC sketch show Goodness Gracious Me gave British Asians “permission to be comedians”. We need role models right across society – yes, in politics, but also in business, the arts, science and sport. What message does it send to black boys and girls that there are more FTSE 100 CEOs called Steve than there are people from ethnic minority backgrounds? What does it say about us that our ethnicity pay gap is a staggering 17.3 per cent?

So let’s step up. We all have a part to play in making our workplaces and our public life more representative. And we all have a part to play in giving our young people from all walks of life that “permission” to fulfil their potential.

Florence Eshalomi is London Assembly constituency member for Lambeth & Southwark and a member of the Assembly Labour Group.

On London depends on donations from readers to keep going and growing and is now actively seeking funding from suitable organisations. Read more about that here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: ethnic minorities, Labour, Lambeth & Southwark, London Assembly, Mercy Muroki, Philip Cowley, Sadiq Khan

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 81: Blackfriars monastery

Its great hall was once the home of parliament
Victor Keegan

The recently completed £1 billion European headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Farringdon Street is situated on the exact footprint of the first medieval Blackfriars monastery. It was built for mendicant Dominican friars in 1224. They moved 50 years later to their main home near today’s Blackfriars station, a few hundred yards down the same street on the opposite side of the River Fleet. 

But the apparent contrast between God and Mammon is not as clear cut as it may seem. Goldman Sachs turned out to be mendicants of a kind on an industrial scale when they received $10 billion in emergency support from the US Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis. Nor were the monks model mendicants. Piers Plowman, the 14th century poet, accused them of debauchery and luxurious living on a grand scale. 

Nothing remains of the original monastery and there are only scattered remnants of the second one, which occupied a vast eight-acre walled estate stretching to the Thames from Ludgate Hill. Fragments found in dozens of archaeological digs were destroyed or left buried under new buildings.

Vicblackfriars3
Remains of the original monastery

The only bits of the original building still visible form part of a wall along Ireland Lane (see main picture) and the remains of a window preserved behind glass in one of the office blocks, which you need permission to see. Otherwise, apart from a window arch in the garden of the Selsdon Park hotel and a column at St Dominic’s church up in Haverstock Hill, nothing is left of this historic 13th century monastery, which once had close links with the Crown. 

Its great hall was once used to host meetings of parliament, which was convenient for Henry VII whose main London palace, Bridewell, was a few yards away on the other side of the Fleet. Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII was once staged in the very hall where that monarch’s divorce petition against Catherine of Aragon had been debated decades earlier. It included some of the actual words used during the original trial. 

From 1536, after the dissolution of the monasteries, Blackfriars became a highly desirable residential neighbourhood where aristocrats and cronies of the monarch, as well as the likes of Ben Jonson, lived in relative tranquility until that man Shakespeare arrived – of which more next week. 

All previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here.

On London depends on donations from readers to keep going and growing and is now actively seeking funding from suitable organisations. Read more about that here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Blackfriars station, Farringdon Street, Haverstock Hill, Ireland Lane, Ludgate Hill, River Thames

Richard Brown: the closing of Kensington Place restaurant ends a chapter in London’s history

The Big Bang boom brought a dining culture to match
Richard Brown

‘There’s a Big Bang in the City, We’re all on the make.” (Shopping, Pet Shop Boys, 1987).

The news this week that the Kensington Place restaurant is to shut its doors is more than just another restaurant closure. It completes a chapter in the incredible story of London’s 30 year resurgence.

The years 1986 and 1987 were pivotal for the capital and the high water mark for Thatcherism. In April 1986, amidst a blaze of fireworks and protests, the Greater London Council was abolished alongside other metropolitan councils, banishing the spectre of “socialism on the rates”. And in October – after years of wrangling – the “Big Bang” transformed financial services.

The details of the Big Bang are complex. Essentially it was a package of reforms that deregulated stockbroking, opened up London’s Stock Exchange to foreign-owned firms and enabled computerised trading to replace the frantic scrum of “open outcry” trading on its floor. But the Big Bang represented something more – the apotheosis of confident capitalism, personified by the mobile phone-toting Yuppie, in TV dramas such as Capital City, and by Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney – conceived as satire, but sometimes treated as a role model.

The Big Bang was also cited as a factor in the revival in net international migration, which meant London’s population started to grow again – albeit just by a few thousand a year – after decades of decline. At the time, London’s return to growth was seen as an anomaly, or even a blip. Writing in early 1987, Tony Champion and Peter Congdon suggested that the “surge in net international migration for City jobs will settle down after Big Bang”.

In 1987, as the Conservatives celebrated their third consecutive election victory, and the City of London was rocked by the twin shocks of the “Black Monday” crash and the emergence of Canary Wharf to the east, the Big Bang was also having an impact to the west. Three restaurants opened to cater to London’s growing gang of globally mobile professionals with sophisticated palates. In doing so, they put London’s food scene on the road to transformation from international punchline to global draw.

In Hammersmith, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray took over a disused warehouse building next door to Ruth’s husband’s firm, Richard Rogers Partnership. The River Café started by serving lunches to local workers, before gradually opening for longer hours and a wider clientele. But from the outset Ruth and Rose focused on fresh flavours and carefully chosen ingredients, an Italian cuisine that was a world away from the mounds of pasta, check table cloths and straw-covered chianti bottles of traditional trattorias.

In South Kensington, Terence Conran opened Bibendum in the opulent Michelin Tyre Company building on Fulham Road. Chef Simon Hopkinson’s cuisine was as deeply rooted in the rich sauces and offals of French country cooking as the River Café’s was in in the bright and earthy flavours of Tuscany. But, also like the River Café, Bibendum matched this respect for the classics with a stripped-back modernist ethos. Both restaurants were a world away from the tweezered pretension of 1980s nouvelle cuisine.

A little further west, Rowley Leigh opened Kensington Place, serving modern British food (almost a contradiction in terms at the time) in deliberately informal surroundings, dispensing with table cloths to create a London version of the neighbourhood brasseries that dotted Paris, and pioneering dishes such as scallops with pea puree that have now become gastropub standards.

By 1989, the “Lawson Boom” that had driven the ebullience of yuppie culture had run out of steam and the UK began to dip into a recession that hit London particularly hard, with soaring interest rates, a property market crash and thousands of homeowners facing negative equity. But the three restaurants that reinvented London’s food scene survived, and London’s population growth picked up pace. As Kensington Place closes, to be redeveloped for housing, it is caught in the undertow of the wave of change that it surfed.

Richard Brown is research director at Centre for London. Enjoy Shopping by the Pet Shop Boys here.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Big Bang, Fulham Road, Greater London Council, Kensington Place

London business group chief renews call to ‘stop the clock’ on Brexit

Revoking Article 50 would be even better, says chief executive
Dave Hill

The chief of executive of leading business organisation London First has urged MPs to “stop the clock on Brexit to avoid crashing out with no deal” by “extending Article 50 or, better still, revoking it”.

Jasmine Whitbread was responding to call by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to extend Article 50 by a year in order to consult voters more fully and to, as he put it, “avoid chaos on 29 March and prevent an impending national political disaster”.

Parliament might have the opportunity to vote for an extension of the withdrawal process timetable next week if they first again reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal and then reject a “no deal” approach.

Whitbread, like Brown, said that extending or revoking Article 50 would “allow the time and breathing space needed to find a way forward that parliament can support”, adding “if that can’t be done, the decision must go back to the people”.

Extending Article 50 would require the blessing of all EU member states and mean that Brexit would be postponed. The European Court of Justice ruled in December that it would be legal for the UK to unilaterally revoke Article 50 and therefore cancel Brexit. However, the Prime Minister has ruled this out and MPs do not currently have the option of revocation before them.

In January, prior to the first Commons vote on May’s deal, London First, which represents many of the capital’s largest employers and a number of its leading education institutions, urged the government to “buy more time” in order to secure a deal MPs would back and if unsuccessful to hold a second referendum.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has repeatedly warned against a “no deal” outcome and last week held a meeting attended by Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick, London Fire Brigade chief Dany Cotton, Transport for London commissioner Mike Brown and health service and local government officials to “review how well the capital is prepared” to cope with one.

London First says that a recent “snapshot poll” of its members found that the senior management teams of almost one in five of them are now spending one day a week on Brexit preparations. The organisation has also been advocating a “pro-growth” immigration approach post-Brexit to ensure that the capital and the UK as a whole continues to be able to hire the workers it needs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Brexit, Cressida Dick, Dany Cotton, Jasmine Whitbread, London Fire Brigade, London First, Metropolitan Police, Mike Brown, Sadiq Khan, Theresa May, Transport for London

End school ‘off-rolling’ and give boroughs more power over exclusions to help reduce violent crime, says Sadiq Khan

The London Mayor has made the call along with police and crime commissioners from elsewhere in England and Wales
Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan has joined with police and crime commissioners (PCCs) from other areas to call for the removal of fewer children from schools as part of a strategy to reduce violent youth crime.

The London Mayor, in his capacity as PCC for the capital, along with counterparts for the West Midlands, South Yorkshire, Humberside, Northumbria, West Yorkshire and South Wales have asked Prime Minister Theresa May to outlaw the practice of “off-rolling”, which sees difficult pupils taken out of schooling without being formally excluded.

City Hall cites “growing evidence” that the most vulnerable children are more likely to be off-rolled or excluded and research indicating that those who fall out of mainstream education are at “significantly greater risk of becoming involved in or affected by serious youth violence”.

The Mayor and his fellow PCCs say they want local authorities to be quickly given “powers and responsibilities over all school exclusions.” He added: “Time and again we are hearing how the fragmentation of the education system and the breaking of the link between schools and local authorities has led to a lack of accountability, coordination and action.” They see this a way of combatting “significant variation by school as to what will result in exclusion”.

Education watchdog Ofsted has defined off-rolling as: “The practice of removing a pupil from the school roll without a formal, permanent exclusion or by encouraging a parent to remove their child from the school roll, when the removal is primarily in the interests of the school rather than in the best interests of the pupil.” Ofsted calls this a form of “gaming” the school performance assessment system, enabling students unlikely to secure good exam results and affect league tables to be taken out of the picture. It has said that the issue is particularly marked in the capital.

City Hall says a report by the Children’s Commissioner to the Mayor’s recently-formed Violence Reduction Unit, set up in order to address the roots of the problem more effectively, underlined that more needs to be done to keep children in mainstream education, with those who fall out of it more likely to be disadvantaged and vulnerable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: crime, education, Ofsted, Sadiq Khan, youth crime, youth violence

Jack Brown: the government’s Stronger Towns Fund ignores London’s poor communities

Not only is the money paltry, its distribution seems to reflect political priorities that help no one
Jack Brown

If, for some strange reason, you need a reminder of where British politics is at right now, have a look at how Monday’s announcement of the government new £1.6 billion Stronger Towns Fund has been received. This is a new pot of money to be invested on a “needs-based formula” designed to “boost growth and give communities a greater say in their future after Brexit.” What’s not to like, right? Yet it has gone down like a bucket of sick – and not without reason.

Some have described the fund as a bribe, designed to “buy off” Labour MPs who represent the mostly Leave-voting towns and convince them to vote for the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal. Others have perceived a slight cynicism in announcing funding for areas the Labour Party perceives to be key electoral battlegrounds that will play an important role in deciding the outcome of the next general election, whenever that may be.

Many have noted too the paltry size of the fund. Comparisons with the amount of European Union money currently received by each English region make it look utterly insignificant. As such, it is also fairly irrelevant. A replacement for that EU funding should be provided at some point by the UK government-administered Shared Prosperity Fund, though it is unclear what that will actually look like. Comparisons between the Stronger Towns Fund and the scale of funding cuts endured in recent years by each region are perhaps more apt.

But the really interesting thing about the Stronger Towns Fund is how it fits into wider debates about the regional allocation of national public spending. The government has announced that the fund will be split into £1 billion allocated using an slightly opaque “needs-based formula”, which considers “a combination of productivity, income, skills, deprivation metrics and proportion of the population living in towns”. The other £0.6 billion is to be awarded competitively. The government has also announced where in England the needs-based funding will go. On a per head basis, it is overwhelmingly heading north. Curiously, the South East is to receive more than the East of England or the South West, but these remain the three regions set to receive least. Greater London region has been left out entirely. Presumably, that is because none of its people are considered to live in a town.

My recent report for Centre For London, entitled London, UK, highlighted how discussion of the regional allocation of transport infrastructure investment has become toxic and unproductive. There is a risk that anti-London sentiment is now playing a part in wider decision-making. Centre for Cities found that national austerity has, in fact, seen London disproportionately hit by funding cuts. As my report also noted, the capital is home to some of the most deprived communities in the country, and Londoners in the lower half of the income scale are worse off than their equivalents elsewhere after housing costs. Greater London may generate a huge “fiscal surplus” that is distributed around the country, but not all Londoners share in this prosperity.

In fact, much of the city has more in common with deprived towns elsewhere in the nation than it does with its most affluent areas. London’s history is one of the near-uncontrollable growth of a series of towns and distinct communities into one larger, built-up urban area. But London still contains numerous disconnected places that economically, culturally and socially behave and feel like towns. As Sadiq Khan said at Centre for London’s 2018 Conference, “Whitehall might be based in London, but it’s as politically remote to the residents of Sutton, Southwark and Stanmore as it is to those in Stirling, Swansea and Stoke.” Many of the 10 per cent of most deprived communities in England are in London. Have a look at this map and see for yourself.

The Stronger Towns Fund should be welcomed in principle. But it must be recognised that this is simultaneously a tiny amount of money and no replacement for EU funding or for the forthcoming Shared Prosperity Fund, (whatever that turns out to be), and that such investment is needed across the country wherever deprivation exists. Leaving London’s poorer communities out helps no one, and can only reinforce disadvantage.

We need to change the way we talk about place in this country and end the London versus the rest, cities versus towns, and north versus south debates. They are not doing anyone much good.

Jack Brown is senior researcher for Centre for London and a lecturer in London Studies at King’s College. 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, Centre For Cities, Centre For London, poverty, Sadiq Khan