Sadiq Khan deserves credit for following the Scottish public health approach to serious youth violence with London’s own violence reduction unit (VRU). When I was Bedfordshire’s police and crime commissioner, I had oversight of that county’s VRU, putting money and political capital behind it, rather than reaching only for enforcement. From hospital-based interventions to tackling persistent school absenteeism it is the right thing to do.
I say that as a London Conservative councillor who wants a serious evaluation of how the capital tackles this problem, not a point-scoring one. But I think the Mayor’s approach is missing something that I also see missing from most youth violence strategies in this country – a focus on the home.
Too many of our young people are exposed to violence, not online or on the streets but at their homes. Research by Youth Foundation and other academics has proved this, and I learned it first-hand from scrutinising local chief constables when I was a PCC. The numbers are very disturbing.
I recently spoke with the chief executive of a London local authority who had seen some of my writing on this subject. I asked her what proportion of her interventions were built primarily around the caregivers and parents of those children, rather than the children alone.
She told me about a meeting she’d held with parents whose children were those most exposed to the criminal justice system. They, in her words, hated the authorities and had given up on them. Some worried daily, hoping “the streets” did not claim their child’s life, as had been the case with the school friend of one of them. Yet they felt like spectators of a support process from which they themselves were excluded.
Such stories are not unusual. They also reflect what I saw first-hand as a mentor to young people in prison. Most of the parents I met through my work were not neglectful. They were exhausted, unsupported and, although from an older generation, often navigating exactly the same pressures their children were under.
I have experienced some of that pressure myself. I arrived in England from Nigeria at the age of 13. My family then moved home five times in two years, from Earl’s Court to Ilford to Bromley-by-Bow and finally to Canning Town, while my dad worked three cleaning jobs.
I wanted Air Jordans like my friends had, but got trainers from Rathbone Market instead. At the time, I hated it. But what I had that some of those friends didn’t was a home life that felt rich even when our finances weren’t. That is the difference a supported, stable home makes, and it’s the difference our youth violence strategies still underrate.
London’s current model, like the national one, is built around what’s sometimes called a “child first” approach. It is correctly protective in cases of abuse or neglect, but is also applied as a default to the much larger group of families who are struggling, not failing.
An alternative “home first” approach would also work with the caregiver, not just the child, as the primary point of intervention. It would deliver parenting support without the stigma of a social services referral, help that shows up before a school exclusion or an arrest rather than after, and services designed by people who’ve actually sat down with these families rather than around them.
The honest question, and the one I’d expect sceptical readers to ask, is what happens with parents who aren’t coping well, or aren’t trying to? That group exists, and safeguarding has to remain the backstop where a child is genuinely at risk. But in my experience, this is the exception, not the rule, and building an entire strategy around the exception is precisely why so many “good enough” parents disengage. We need a major paradigm shift if we want to have meaningful change.
As a single father who has raised three children into adulthood, I know how hard parenting can be. That is why I am calling for a much greater emphasis on seeing the care setting of young people as the key starting point for approaches to tackling youth offending. It is not a panacea, but treating a young person’s home life as a secondary consideration is unsustainable strategy at a time when public sector budgets are being squeezed and demands continue to rise.
It is time to invest more in helping to build stronger homes by providing support for parents who have fallen into a crisis cycle. A safer and stable home can go a long way towards creating safer streets.
Festus Akinbusoye is a councillor in Westminster’s Abbey Road ward and Westminster Council’s deputy cabinet member for enforcement. Follow him on X/Twitter.
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