Short-term or Long-term solutions?

Speech by Ashley Lumsden on Tue 20th Feb 2007

The sad deaths of three young people in the local area shakes us all out of our complacency. It is a sharp reminder of the lives that some local teenagers are living.

The fact is that shootings are now so common that they rarely make the national news. But the shooting by and of teenagers is newsworthy because it is a worrying trend.

But the questions I've been struggling with concerns the response of the council and its councillors.

I'm certain that in the short term it is the police who need to take a lead in working with the local communities that have been affected. And they've done this very visibly. I went along to the meeting called in Streatham after the shooting at the ice rink and the police officer who spoke was sincere and open minded in what he said.

I'm not convinced that police's other actions are going to be as helpful. The headlines say that they are increasing armed patrols on Lambeth's streets. The small print undermines the claims but then headlines are they so that Ministers can say that "something will be done". And as for tougher sentences for gun-crimes - well the evidence from America is that this doesn't lead to a down-turn in crime - just an ever-increasing prison population.

But I think long-term action is needed. And that's where the council must face up to things.

One Labour councillor has succumbed to the "Something must be done" disease that dogs politicians. So he has demanded a rethink of the entertainment licence for the Streatham Ice Rink Saturday night disco. I don't think there's anything to suggest a link between ice-dancing and gun crime. And the police have already exonerated the ice-rink over the shooting there. But Cllr Mark Bennett will haul them before the Licensing Committee so that he can seen being as tough as John Reid and Tony Blair.

To my mind long-term solutions don't come out of knee-jerk reactions.

So I've put forward an amendment to the council to get the long term thinking under way. A cross-party commission to sort the facts from the rhetoric and short-term from the long-term.

I don't have the answers but I do have some ideas. Ideas about youth work for younger children - working with them before gangs and guns become an attractive way of life. Ideas about finding those young people excluded from schools and working with them to find alternatives between school and crime. And there are many people saying that the problem is parents and they way they bring up their families. This needs to be challenged to find out what is behind this thinking. I for one don't accept that blaming single-parents is going to help find answers.

It all now depends on my fellow councillors to step up to the table and start the serious work of developing those long-term answers.