Interview:
Victoria Atkins is no stranger to the sharp end of crime. She spent years prosecuting hardened criminals and is one of only 30 barristers in the country trusted to take on specialist serious fraud cases. She also saw off a purse snatcher with a look so cold it forced the potential thief to gingerly replace her cash and dash off in another direction after she fell over in the street.
“I just sort of looked at him and was like ‘Seriously mate?’ and in fairness, he walked off,” she laughs, recounting her experience outside Waterloo station before she became an MP.
Ms Atkins was appointed a Home Office minister in November last year after joining the Commons in 2015. She has one of the most challenging briefs in government, including knife crime, terrorism, gangs and internet safety.
After months of stabbing attacks across the UK, resulting in nearly 50 deaths in the capital alone this year, stopping people carrying weapons is one of her biggest tasks.
To tackle it, Ms Atkins, a mother of one son, says parents must check their kitchen drawers to make sure their children aren’t taking knives to school.
“I don’t want to scare people or set hares running on this, it’s such an important topic so there’s enough fear anyway because of that,” she says, adding that her message to parents is “just to look in your kitchen drawer and count your knives and make sure you know where the knives are”.
This, she says, applies to parents in cities and in small regional towns and villages due to the rise in so-called county lines gangs which often recruit vulnerable youngsters to sell drugs.
The tough approach is part of a plan to look at the reasons young people join gangs, including how domestic violence desensitises children.
Tougher sentences for anyone caught with a weapon more than once have been introduced and age verification checks stepped up online to prevent the sale of acid and knives.
But Ms Atkins admits there is still some way to go. Almost 40per cent of second-time knife offenders do not get the mandatory custodial sentence judges are supposed to hand down.
“I wouldn’t say it’s not working,” she says. “The question I have posed of the Ministry of Justice, and of course judges are independent and I am not attacking that independence, [is] if they can ask judges why they’re not using it in every case.”
The answer may be that knife crime and the reasons behind it are complex and often start when children are in school, if not earlier.
It is part of the reason Ms Atkins left the legal profession to become an MP. “I got to a stage that by the time a case had already come to me in court it was too late,” she explains.
The Tories have always been tough on crime but there are signs of a new approach, looking at prevention and counselling instead of jail time.
The shift, following Theresa May’s departure from the Home Office, can be seen in its approach to immigration and more recently in a decision to review medicinal cannabis use.
Ms Atkins makes clear: “We still maintain the focus on law enforcement because we have to ensure if someone commits a violent crime they should be brought to justice. But we are also mindful that more and more young people are being dragged into this so we want to try and intervene and prevent them from getting into these criminal gangs and criminality in the first place.”
Much of the violence, campaigners say, is being fuelled by a desire among young people to belong to a powerful group, in many cases as a result of absent parents, particularly fathers.
Many gang leaders recruit so-called “soldiers” to do their dirty work, carrying weapons for them so they avoid being caught in possession.
There are tally schemes to score points and gain respect from older members, and initiation tasks to check new members can be trusted. Some involve stabbing innocent members of the public while being filmed.
Ms Atkins explains: “The gang leaders are incredibly manipulative, sophisticated criminals. These are people who think nothing of recruiting their soldiers, as they call them, and they are utterly insensible to them – they do not care about these young people. We have to match their ruthlessness with our own determination to take them on.”
She says one of the ways to do this is to make sure police have all the powers they need to act on the spot.
“If they search someone’s address and they have suspicions this person is at the head of a gang or they’re recruiting young people to a county lines gang, I want the police when they get into the house and they find a zombie knife to have the power to arrest that person on the basis of that, so they’ve got all the tools they need to lock people away.”
She backs a scheme to evict the families of gang members in serious cases, in order to drive them away from crime. “With these people who are exploiting young people, making the lives of local residents a misery, putting fear into people’s hearts... I think absolutely they should understand the consequences of their criminal behaviour.”
Ms Atkins also takes aim at technology companies who do not do enough to prevent knives being sold online or violent videos being shared.
“The technology companies are beginning to realise – slowly, frankly – but they’re beginning to realise the public is losing patience with them. I think [they] have to up their game on this, the public expect them to.”
She explains after years of enjoying the internet, people are waking up to the dangers. “We’re at a very interesting point in history. We’re beginning to understand the downsides and I’m very clear the public are fed up with it.”
‘The technology companies are beginning to realise, slowly frankly ... the public is losing patience with them’