Yvette Cooper will set up a £100m “tough love” youth programme to help tackle a knife crime epidemic and a mental health crisis among UK teenagers if Labour is elected, she will announce.
On Tuesday, the shadow home secretary will tell the Labour party conference in Liverpool that the “young futures” programme will target 92 communities under a Keir Starmer-led government that are blighted by youth crime and violence.
Each community will be offered a “youth futures hub” – a type of Sure Start centre for teenagers – to bring together mental health specialists, youth workers and neighbourhood police officers “to prevent young people from being drawn into violence”.
On the eve of her speech, Cooper told the Guardian that Labour wanted to address some of the underlying causes behind recent stabbings and referred to the death of 15-year-old Elianne Andam in Croydon, south London.
She said: “We have had a 70% increase in knife crime over the past eight years and this is just devastating for families. We recently saw the terrible situation in Croydon when a 15-year-old girl was killed on the way to school.
“No parent should ever have to worry that their children won’t make it safely to the school gates. And yet when we have these brutal knife attacks and children losing their lives, far too little is being done. And far too little is being done when teenagers say they don’t feel safe. Nobody listens when you see teenagers start to go off the rails. There’s too little intervention, too little action to help kids get back on track.”
Cooper said the 92 hubs in England and Wales would cost £91.7m a year and would coordinate responses to a rise in knife crime, youth violence and county lines exploitation as well as mental health challenges and the longer-term impact of social media.
The scheme will draw on the work of the former children’s commissioner for England Anne Longfield, who called last year for community hubs to support those more at risk from criminal exploitation.
It also bears similarities to the last Labour government’s youth crime action plan, which was announced by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the then children’s secretary, Ed Balls, who is Cooper’s husband.
A record number of children and young people are seeking mental health support from the NHS, Cooper will argue in her speech. An analysis from the thinktank Crest suggests that more than 200,000 children are vulnerable to serious violence.
Recent police-recorded crime figures published by the ONS showed a 21% increase in the number of knife and offensive weapon offences recorded, from 37,706 in the year ending September 2021 to 45,639 in the year ending September 2022.
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Cooper will tell delegates: “We need urgent interventions to stop young people getting drawn into crime or exploitation in the first place. For too long, teenagers have been pushed from pillar to post between local authorities, mental health services, the police and youth offending teams. That’s why we are setting up a cross-government “tough love” initiative, with new youth hubs and proper local plans to identify those most at risk and help them access the support they need.
“For those who repeatedly cause trouble in their community or are found carrying knives, there also need to be stronger interventions and clear consequences to stop their behaviour escalating and to keep other young people safe.”
Labour will pay £91.7m towards the programme from an estimated £1.7bn raised by charging private schools VAT, sources said. Another £14.6m would be raised by no longer subsidising firearms licensing, the source added.
Cooper, chief secretary to the Treasury under Gordon Brown and the chair of the home affairs select committee for five years until 2021, said the Home Office had never been in as chaotic state as it was today.
“We have had seven Tory home secretaries in seven years and see the scale of their failures – the asylum backlog. The current occupant of the job is a part-time home secretary and a full-time Tory leadership candidate. There are whole areas that have been deeply damaged by the Conservatives,” she said.
