Mr David Lammy
MP for Tottenham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I am delighted to welcome the shadow Housing Secretary to the Dispatch Box. He, of course, could have been doing that job every week if he were better with numbers.”
“The right hon. Gentleman has not proposed what the Conservatives would do if they were in office. They released 10,000 under four different schemes, with no impact assessment when they released them, no victim contact when they released them, and no warning. They did it on the sly.”
“This is a very serious issue and the right hon. Gentleman is experienced in this House. He knows that while he was Home Secretary, the Conservative Government had an early release scheme that let out 10,000 offenders—10,000. They had six schemes within a year.”
“I have been asked to reply on behalf of the Prime Minister, who is attending the NATO summit. Working with our allies, we are strengthening Europe’s role in the alliance, which remains the cornerstone of our national security.”
“The right hon. Gentleman insists on proving that he cannot count. We lost 16,000 police officers when the Conservatives were in power. The British people have not forgotten what they did to our country. After two years of this Labour Government, I will compare our record with theirs every day of the week.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I have the honour to say that His Majesty the King has accepted our advice to grant Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, a conditional pardon. [Hon.”
The complete record
Every one of 3,387 lines we hold for Mr David Lammy, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 57 of 68.
“Forty or 50 years ago, the tobacco industry was largely responsible for driving up cancer in our country. It took the Department of Health many years to start to regulate what was going on in the industry and deal with it on behalf of the taxpayer. It is clear from looking at some drill music and its relationship with knife crime and gang culture, and self-harm among young people, that mental ill health is being driven by much of this social media. Will the Secretary of State say something about the intersection between the Department of Health and Social Care, the chief medical officer and the new regulator?”
“Will the Home Secretary undertake to publicise the scheme as widely as the EU settlement scheme? Will he ensure that there is no use of non-disclosure agreements around how much compensation people get? Many people were driven into poverty and therefore crime as a consequence of the scandal, so will he say whether people with criminal convictions will still be entitled to use the scheme?”
“The hon. Gentleman is recalling childhood friends of his own, but will he also reflect on childhood today? There is a whole suite of crimes and temptations resulting from social media—let us think of sexting, where someone might get a criminal offence aged 15 or 16 for inappropriate behaviour with a girlfriend or whoever. Can it really be right that an employer, years later when the person is into their early 30s, should need or want that information? If the employer gets that information, what exactly are they expected to do about it? I am thinking of us, employing young people; do we really want to know that that happened 10 years ago?”
“The hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned Ban the Box in a positive light, and I am sure everyone in the Chamber would welcome it, but does he acknowledge that the problem with that initiative is, first, that it is voluntary and, secondly, that it is about the recruitment stage? The fundamental point about the work by the Select Committee and others who have raised this issue is that, beyond recruitment, there are questions about whether things should be disclosed to employers in the first place. It would be important for the Government not to lose that principle, which is rightly being raised by the hon. Gentleman and the Select Committee.”
“It is now understood that adulthood really kicks in somewhere between 25 and 30, so for all those reasons it is important to think about the age of maturity.”
“They were the ones who said to me, “Could you put this into your review? We are aware of a group of offenders who reach about 25 or 26 years old and want to move away from their criminal past but continue to reoffend because, as they grow up, they cannot get a job due to the regime that we have.” That testimony of police officers dealing with those young men day to day persuaded me that this cohort get trapped into a life of crime at the point at which they want to get out of it. I therefore did some further research. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a quite well known child psychologist on Radio 4, Professor Peter Jones, Dr Aamodt and many others have now established that the brain continues developing well into a person’s 20s before it concludes—perhaps not concludes, because I hope we are all still learning.”
“It is important to emphasise that I conducted that review in a cross-party spirit, as did the advisers to the review. I am pleased that the issue of disproportionality in our criminal justice system remains an issue that concerns all political parties in this House. It is above the day to day of politics. Reoffending is estimated to cost the taxpayer between £9.5 billion and £13 billion per year. A third of those on jobseeker’s allowance in our country have previous convictions. We note very sadly that recidivism rates among black men in our country are the highest in the system, with 45% going on to reoffend within two years. That is extremely concerning. However, this issue really came across to me when I met the Trident team of police officers in the Metropolitan police, who deal with gang violence day to day.”
“It is important to fully understand that while this is an issue for all young people, whatever their backgrounds in the criminal justice system, we also know—following work done by the Department for Work and Pensions over the past two decades and a range of other research—that we are unfortunately still living in a society where people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds have a penalty in the public sphere, in relation to employment. That penalty, unfortunately, is that there are still aspects of discrimination when ethnic minorities apply for employment, particularly for those who have a criminal record. That is why this issue came under the purview of the report that I was asked to do by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and that I was pleased to present to Theresa May when she took over as Prime Minister.”
“I am hugely grateful to the Justice Committee for this excellent work and the way in which the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) outlined the importance of this area. My concern with criminal records arose from the review that I did for the Government on the disproportionality of black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals within the criminal justice system. When I began that work, I did not really understand the effect that our criminal records regime was having on disproportionality.”
“Absolutely. Those of us with teenage children—I had a firm word with my 13-year-old son yesterday, who had got into trouble at school—know that the assessment of risk and risky behaviour is important.”
“I urge the Government to reflect hard on what we see of the job market, the double penalty that exists for minorities, and why recidivism rates are so high—because people are effectively trapped in unemployment. I want to make the case clearly that we have to give our young people from urban communities hope. The challenge of getting employment when someone reaches the age of maturity is a fundamental part of that. I urge the Minister to think hard about this area.”
“Members that a 12-year-old child convicted of shoplifting two items of make-up on the same day will have to disclose that for life to work as a traffic warden; a 14-year-old reported to the police for sending naked pictures of themselves to a classmate, about which the police take no further action, could have to disclose that for life to work as a teacher; a 16-year-old cautioned for having sex with a 15-year-old partner will have to disclose that for life to work as a vet; and a 17-year-old given a four-month custodial sentence for breaching an order will have to disclose that for a year and a half when seeking to work in most supermarkets. The question is whether that balance is right.”
“My view is that there should be a balance between a rules-based system, which is largely what we have, and which is clearly cheaper—that is effectively why we have it, because there is time and one makes a judgment about spent convictions and disclosure—and a system that is slightly more sophisticated and might cost slightly more. There is a question about who pays. In the Canadian jurisdiction, the individuals seeking to get their criminal records looked at again pay for the system. In my view, a parole board, a magistrate or a judge could make the assessment. I remind hon.”
“He coined the phrase that our system is tougher than Texas—it is one of the toughest regimes in the world. The Select Committee report is really about balance, where the judgment should lie and whether it is out of kilter. The Supreme Court decision could be interpreted narrowly by the Government, but from reading the report, the Committee’s mood suggests that it is an opportunity, notwithstanding all that is going on in Parliament, for the Government to take a broader view and to review our criminal records regime.”
“Let me be clear: a record is never sealed from the criminal justice system, the police or the courts. It is about whether it should be sealed from employers and where the burden is. If it is not to be sealed from employers, we must understand clearly that we are asking the taxpayer to pick up the bill. I repeat that one third of people on jobseeker’s allowance have committed criminal offences. That was my concern. I ask the Government to reflect hard on the Taylor review, which looked at youth justice. The Government will be aware that he said: “As a point of principle, I believe that rehabilitation periods for childhood offending should be far shorter than for adult offenders. My proposals” are “to replace existing court sentences with tailored Plans developed by Children’s Panels”.”
“That is why, in Germany, they have gone in a different direction, and why I suggested that we could look harder at the psychological evidence for where the age of maturity lies. To return squarely to the issue of criminal records, that is also why other regimes allow the young person, as they get into maturity—most often at the end of their 20s and the beginning of their 30s—to come back before a public official, such as a judge or a parole board, to make the case that they have been out of crime for several years, and that they have a wife and children, and have that record expunged or sealed. I recommended the Massachusetts system, because it allows the flexibility for responsible adults to make the judgment. For some young people, I am afraid that the judgment would be that it would not be sealed.”
“I disagree with the hon. Gentleman and I will explain why. In my review, I talk about the German system, which makes an assessment of maturity and particularly focuses on the years between 18 and 21. He will probably recognise that in a previous era, and for some hon. Members present, the age of maturity in this country was 21; it fell down to 18. If we are to make evidence-based policy, it is important to keep that live, because of what the science suggests, although it may be that social media and other things are taking the age of maturity in the other direction. Why does that become important? It was particularly important in my review because we should be very concerned that immature 18-year-olds are sitting in adult prisons with hardened criminals, being seriously groomed to commit more serious crimes.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising the issue in the manner that she has. It is way more effective than I would be if I raised the same point. Does she know that there is a general statistic that child psychologists have found, which is that 70% of young people have committed a crime at some point? The vast majority were never arrested or caught. It is part of that journey to adulthood. Is she aware of this issue, which I have raised in the context of marijuana? Young people are sitting in a campus university as we speak, probably smoking a joint, and if you called the police, people would think you had gone mad. The same young people walking down Brixton High Road or in Salford will get arrested or a criminal record. That is the hon. Lady’s point.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising such an important point. I declare an interest as the father of a formerly looked-after child. Does my hon. Friend agree that the phrase “looked-after” is one of the biggest oxymorons in our language? Of all the cohorts of young people we have discussed this afternoon, none makes as great a case for changing the criminal records regime as those children, who have been let down the most often—not just by their original parents, but by the state.”
“The public health approach in Scotland also involved a cross-party approach, with much of the work beginning under Labour and continuing under the Scottish National party. The whole House wants the Home Secretary to succeed, but we have been on alert since Tanesha Melbourne-Blake was killed in my constituency on bank holiday Monday almost a year ago. I am grateful to the Home Secretary for allowing me to be part of the taskforce in that cross-party spirit, but the questions today are really about the Government’s grip, because of what we heard from the Health Secretary this morning. What more can the Government do? I ask that question particularly because county lines is being driven by a demand for drugs, and we have cut our Border Force as a result of austerity.”
“May I take up the point about social order? I have faced social disorder in my own constituency and rightly condemned it, however hard that condemnation was for some constituents to hear. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that some in our country on the hard right who are suggesting that there will be social disorder forget that this is the country that faced down Mosley at home and faced down Hitler and Mussolini abroad? We can never give in to hard-right pressure.”
“I have not met a Member who supports no deal who has experienced real poverty—the scarcity that, in previous eras, was so common: the destitution that families endured in workhouses in Victorian England, the deprivation in the east end that led to the birth of the Salvation Army. There may be a few left now who experienced forced rationing during the second world war. However, having grown up in the shadow of the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham in the 1970s, I know what it feels like to get home and find the cupboards empty; the indignity of living pay cheque to pay cheque; the melancholy of not being able to spend time with family at weekends because they work three jobs, as my mother did.”
“Lord Lawson of Blaby has applied for French residency, Nigel Farage has got German passports for his children, and Sir James Dyson has moved his company headquarters to Singapore. Mr Speaker, leave really did mean leave for these men. Let me say this directly to those who told us that Brexit was about taking back control. You do not have control when you are living in destitution. You do not have control when you cannot find work. You do not have control when your rights are sold off and dismantled for profit. There is no dignity in poverty, only shame. So shame on the ERG for what they are doing to this country. Shame on the Prime Minister for failing to say “no. And shame on anyone who would vote to make this country poorer. We should take no deal off the table.”
“The Prime Minister has made a Faustian pact with the hard-right mob in her party who want to dismantle the EU’s social protections at any cost. Brexit is a con by multi-millionaires to convince the poor that the metropolitan middle class has screwed them, knowing full well that the financial crisis is the fault of their own gambling on the markets and that Brexit is a chance to double down on it again. The Brexiteers have enough capital to profit out of this disaster, so I will call them out. The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) has already moved two investment funds to Ireland. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has campaigned for a hard Brexit while advising investors to pull their money out of the UK.”
“We will fall out of the EU’s crime-fighting agencies and lose the European arrest warrant. No-deal Brexit is a dereliction of the first duty of a Government, which is to keep the public safe, so I suggest to the Government that they should say tonight that they would vote against that no deal. Crashing out of the EU without a deal would be the single greatest failure of this Government and of any Government in modern British history: a failure of leave campaigners to deliver the utopia they sold to voters in 2016; a failure of Parliament to stand up for our constituents; and, most of all, a failure of the Prime Minister to put the country before her party and her narrow self-interest. By refusing to rule it out herself, she is deliberately causing confusion, pain and panic.”
“I will not, because of the time available. If we do not stop a no-deal Brexit, a whole generation of families will be impoverished. “Project Fear” will become project reality. The Government’s own assessments, forced out last night, estimate that no deal will make our economy up to 9% weaker over 15 years. Food prices will rise and customs checks will cost British businesses £13 billion per year. This will make the 2008 recession seem like a blip. Hundreds of businesses and thousands more jobs will leave the country. The Governor of the Bank of England has warned that house prices will crash by up to a third. Sainsbury’s, Asda and Co-op told us that no deal will leave our shelves empty. The Health Secretary could not rule out medicine shortages causing early deaths. Britons living in Europe will lose their rights overnight.”
“I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I have worked with the Home Secretary and the Minister on these issues, and I am grateful to them for extending an invitation to me to the serious violence taskforce.”
“The local context is important, and I am very concerned about the rise in drugs in this country, the rising market and the need to fully grip what we, as a nation, are to do about it.”
“The other colliding force affecting all young people across our country is of course social media and technology and, in this context, some of the rabbit holes down which young people can go in relation to particular types of music and particular types of violence. My concern is that much of that remains heavily unregulated and voluntarily policed by the industry. We have to do more to protect young people. It affects all young people. We see it in terms of suicide, anorexia, bulimia and those sorts of mental health issues among young people. In this area, it has a bearing on some of the increase in violent crime as well. I look forward to continuing to work with the Home Secretary, but there are issues with funding. It does not all fall to the police.”
“The subject has come up in the serious violence taskforce and I remain concerned about the amount of young people who are effectively excluded from school, who are not getting an effective education and who are falling into the hands of adults who are exploiting them. That takes us to another issue: how do we address not the young people but the grown men who are exploiting them and trafficking them across the country? Is the law robust enough to send the message to these modern-day pimps—because that is how we should describe them—who are exploiting these young people in this way? The frustration is that we can go back quite a number of years, back to Dickens, and there will always be adults there to exploit young people. We have to bear down very hard on them.”
“They do it alongside the police—we turn to the police so often—but much of this falls to local authorities. My sense—I got around a lot when I was doing the review for the Government on the disproportionality of the criminal justice system for black and ethnic minorities—is that it is patchy across the country. It is not just patchy in terms of strategy and approach, but in terms of resource to address some of the problems, so investment in new services is important. It certainly means that issues such as how the pupil referral units are working and how alternative provision is working are central to this discussion.”
“If we want enforcement on drugs and not to relax our position—although I think that is highly unlikely for cocaine—we have to police our borders. When I met people at the National Crime Agency recently, they explained that they cannot possibly prevent the vast majority of drugs from coming into this country, although they do their best. Our Border Force is seriously stretched to police the market that is coming across the Atlantic, up through Spain, or across from Holland. Drugs are the first major issue, and then it collides. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the Opposition spokesman, has raised this, and I hate it being such a partisan issue, but there are real issues at a local authority level. Local authorities set the strategies for youth. They set the strategies for youth violence.”
“What was my young constituent doing in Aberdeen, when I have never been to Aberdeen? I wish that I had been to Aberdeen, but I have not been there. I thought, “Why was he there?” He was there because it turns out there is quite a rich market for cocaine in Aberdeen. There is a middle-class life, with some money and some spend, and like a lot of places here in London and a lot of parts of our country, cocaine is particularly rife. I welcome the review by Dame Carol Black that has been announced. This does open broader questions about drugs in our country, about the war on drugs and its failure, about our position and the repositioning of public policy on drugs, and—I have to raise this with the Home Secretary—the successive cuts in our Border Force.”
“It does not feel like that today; sadly, it feels almost a permanent feature of our urban life, and of course it has spread to areas that are very different from my own constituency. That is the first context that is very disturbing. Why is that? We tend to focus on the violence and on the knives and the guns, but the real issue that drives much of this is not the knives or the guns. It is drugs, money and demand, as well as the increasing quality of cocaine across our country and the drop in price of that product. It is prolific, and I was first struck by how prolific it is when sitting in Highbury magistrates court behind a young man—I think he was 17—who had been arrested for trafficking that drug on county lines, and I was staggered that he had been arrested in Aberdeen.”
“My judgment is that we have not got over the problem, and the situation feels significantly worse over the last period than it has done in the past. I have seen other spikes. I recall the spike back in 2008, and I remember that Ken Livingstone was the Mayor of London, but lost his post in part because crime became a very central issue in the campaign. There have been spikes over this period, but we are clearly in the grip of something at the moment. I want to reflect briefly on some of the contexts of this spike and the national concern. The first is that, once upon a time—when I started, we talked about yardie gangs and Operation Trident had just been set up—I really thought this problem, which we had imported almost from downtown America, would go.”
“It is right to say that that event sparked the current national concern about violent crime in our country. At that point, there was a lot of comment about the murder rate in London overtaking that of New York. I do not think we are quite in that place, but it nevertheless caused tremendous alarm. I think it was because it was a young woman who found herself in those circumstances, just having walked out of her home with a friend to go a newsagent’s, and lost her life, that it caused such concern on that public holiday. I guess the important thing in such a debate—this subject is probably the one I have spoken about more than other subject in this Chamber and in this House—is to ask: is the situation getting worse, is it stable or is it getting better?”
“I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that. This is a very serious issue. Over the almost 20 years that I have been in public life, very sadly, I have had to comfort far too many parents who have lost their children to violence. In fact, when I reflect on my career one day, and this is an apposite day on which to say this, as a member of the serious violence taskforce moves off in a different direction—I am of course thinking of the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna)—it is right to say that two cases stand out in my mind. The first is the young woman, Pauline Peart, who, at the beginning of my political career back in 2003, was shot in a car in my constituency and lost her life. The other was on bank holiday last year, when a young woman, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, was also shot and killed.”
“We found out from the Secretary of State’s Department last week the alarming fact that 51% of our youth offenders now come from a black minority or ethnic background. That puts us in a worse position than the United States. Given that context in our prisons, will he revisit my review, and may I meet him urgently to discuss how we can accelerate progress?”
“Home Secretary, I have asked you to make a statement to the House on the operation of the Windrush scheme. Your Department’s treatment of the Windrush generation has been nothing less than a national scandal. In November, we learned that at least 164 Windrush citizens were wrongly removed, detained or stopped at the border by our own Government. Eleven of those who were wrongly deported have died. You have announced three more today. Every single one of those cases is a shocking indictment of your Government’s pandering to far right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog whistle of the right-wing press. You have spoken about being a second—”
“We are now 20 years on from the Macpherson review, which found institutional racism in this country. I ask the Home Secretary: why is it that still in this country, black lives matter less?”
“Why are you deporting them, given that this review has not reported and there has been no compensation? How can you be confident that you are not making the same mistakes? Movement for Justice is working with 26 of those who are at risk of removal. Thirteen first came to the UK as children; nine came under the age of 10. Eleven people have indefinite leave to remain. Another has a British passport. Thirty-six British children will have their parents taken away by this charter flight—once enslaved, then colonised and now repatriated. Why do you say that these children should live without their parents? Why do you say, to the families of black British people who have been killed by your Department’s incompetence, that this is acceptable? That is what happens.”
“You are quite right, Mr Speaker. Every single one of these cases is a shocking indictment of this Government’s pandering to far right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog whistle of the right-wing press. The Home Secretary has spoken about being a second generation migrant himself. On taking this job he promised to do whatever it takes to put this wrong right. We are now 10 months on from when the scandal broke. Not a penny has been paid out to any Windrush victim in a compensation scheme. The independent Windrush lessons learned review has not yet reported. I say to you, Home Secretary, before the review is even complete, why, why are you deporting people? We have heard about deportation flights to Jamaica this week. You have detained up to 50 black British residents and given them open window removal notices.”
“On the issue of drill music and YouTube, some of the commercial companies have a lot to answer for at the moment, but we should not focus entirely on the music that young people listen to. There are issues across social media with all young people in Britain, including young girls bullied on forums such as WhatsApp and Instagram.”
“Yes, we need a public health approach, but it will have to be more than just a nice slogan or phrase; I am worried that it is becoming one of those in politics. I have seen it happen before. It happened with another phrase that we started using a few years ago: “affordable housing”. Affordable housing? In London? At 80% of market value? We still use that phrase, but it means nothing to ordinary people, and I am worried that the public health strategy, which had a great name when it came out of Glasgow, is being tarnished, because it needs resource, joined-up activity and real co-ordination. I am very pleased that I was asked to be on the violence reduction task force, but there is a hell of a lot to do.”
“The national average is 12%—it is more than twice that for this community. People say, “Oh, why is it always black youth that we see?”, but my mother would have said, “Idle hands make the devil’s work.” It is quite simple. I am sure you too have heard that saying before, Sir Graham. Young people must have jobs, and we must do something about the housing crisis, which is also creating polarised communities: people living perpetually in houses of multiple occupation, again in the context of the housing estates I am describing, with a lack of services, polarisation and increasing poverty, against a backdrop of huge cuts to welfare—they, too, have a bearing on this—and unemployment. The cauldron in which the story we are telling is mixed starts to feel akin to what Dickens was writing about. That is the point.”
“Of course they do not tell the police, because they do not think the police can protect them; they do not see them in the numbers and the police are not present on the estate. It is not an unreasonable judgment that these young people are making. I must also make it absolutely clear what is happening in reality in these young people’s lives and those of their parents. This is not to make excuses: poverty is never an excuse for violence. I grew up poor and working-class. Many Members of this House, including some who have spoken already, grew up in those circumstances. I never, ever say that poverty and being working-class or poorer is an excuse for violence. Nevertheless, black youth unemployment in this country between the ages of 16 and 24 is currently running at 26%.”
“Let us be clear about what that neighbourhood policing is really about; my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) made this point. We have housing estates where, I am afraid, the police cannot be found. That is why the young people are scared. The police are just not there in the numbers they need to be. I think of the Broadwater Farm estate in my constituency, which has 3,500 people. The police are not there in the numbers, and that is why the young people are scared. When those young people are making a decision about whether to tell on a young person they know who has a knife or a gun hidden in his bedroom—“Do I worry about him and his mates on the estate or do I tell the police?”—they are making a reasonable judgment.”
“Much can be said about prevention, but let us address the seriousness of the demand driving this whole agenda and the need to support the different kinds of young people I discussed. Many in this debate have talked about the importance of policing, but there are other crucial services beyond policing. We require our local authorities and young offending teams to set effective violence reduction and youth strategies, but it is hard to be effective when council budgets have been slashed by 54%. Youth centres, after-school activities—gone. Between 2012 and 2016, 600 youth centres closed, 3,500 youth workers lost their jobs and 140,000 places vanished. Spending on universal youth services has fallen by 52%. Interventions at local level have disappeared. That is on top of the neighbourhood policing that we have discussed.”
“We talk a lot about cuts, but if we cut the Border Force it will have an impact on the drug market. Most sane commentators, who in this country stretch from William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative party, to Charlie Falconer, the former Secretary of State for Justice under the previous Labour Government, are beginning to talk very seriously about the idea that the war on drugs has failed, yet we in this place have failed to keep up in our responses. That is for another debate, but let us put that squarely at the centre of this discussion. Sadly, just as was the case when Dickens was writing about London all that time ago, where there is poverty, where there is hardship—I will return to that in a moment—there will always be young souls who can be taken up.”
“I had a young constituent, 17 years old, and the magistrate announced that he had been arrested in Aberdeen. I have been to all four corners of this country, but I must admit I have never been to Aberdeen. I thought, “What’s he doing in Aberdeen?” It turns out there is a big cocaine market in Aberdeen. There is a lot of money coming off the oil rigs, and there was my young constituent, serving the market in Aberdeen—or rather being pimped out by an adult to serve that market. Of course, the trafficking of that drug drives a culture of violence back home. It can affect kids who are not county lines, because it creates a culture of violence in the communities we represent. I must ask the Minister: in that context, why, oh why has the Home Office budget for the UK Border Force been cut by £110 million, or 18%, since 2012?”