CRIME WAVE BRITAIN

Will it ever end? Three stories that lay bare the horror on our streets

KNIFE crime has reached record levels with an average of 112 offences every day, figures revealed yesterday. One police force saw knife attacks rise by a third in a single year.

And nationally, the number of killings reached their highest level for a decade – with four in ten of them involving a knife or sharp object.

The shocking reality of the figures was highlighted with another appalling day of violence across Wild West Britain. Police are hunting a knifeman who fatally stabbed an 18-year-old boy in the neck near a Birmingham golf club.

In nearby Dudley, police revealed that an elderly woman died days after she was tied up and robbed in her home by a gang posing as water board officials.

And in Essex, an off-duty police officer was taken to hospital in a serious condition after being repeatedly stabbed in the chest.

Last night Sajid Javid called for ‘action on many fronts’. The Home Secretary, who was visiting a police training college in Maidstone, Kent, said: ‘I’m very concerned, like anyone I think, about the huge rise that we have seen in serious violence over the last three or four years, including, of course, knife crime.

‘I wish there was one single thing that could be done that would bring it down dramatically. But there’s not one thing, I think we need action on many fronts, and that’s what we’ve been pursuing.

‘It means giving police confidence to use existing laws and that’s why we’ve made some of the announcements around stop and search, giving them more confidence to use them as well.

‘And then the last thing, which I think is also just as important, is early intervention. You cannot arrest your way out of this type of crime.’

According to the Office for National Statistics, 40,829 offences with knives or sharp objects were recorded by police in England and Wales in the year to December 2018.

This was up by 6 per cent from 2017 although the total number of cases is actually far higher as it excludes Greater Manchester Police, one of the largest forces.

There were 732 killings in 2018. In total, crime reported to the police reached a 15-year-high with 5.8million offences in 2018.

This included 1.6million violent offences – such as assault, robbery, murder and manslaughter – a 19 per cent increase in a year. Incredibly, separate Home Office figures showed only 8.2 per cent of all crimes led to someone being hauled before the courts, down from 15 per cent four years ago.

Some individual forces recorded worrying increases in knife crime as they battled chaotic street violence and county lines drug gangs.

Merseyside Police recorded a 35 per cent increase in offences involving knives or sharp objects in one year, up from 910 to 1,231 in 2018.

Derbyshire Police saw a 22 per cent rise while in North Yorkshire cases were up by 21 per cent.

British Transport Police recorded a 54 per cent increase, although the numbers were much lower than for most other forces.

Earlier this month Theresa May described the rise in violent crime an ‘infectious disease’. The Prime Minister and Mr Javid called for a public health approach to tackling youth knife crime.

They want doctors, teachers and the police to be legally obliged to report warning signs such as truancy or suspicious injuries.

But police chiefs say they are less capable of preventing violent crime because they have fewer officers and substantially reduced budgets. Earlier this week Greater Manchester Police admitted that its officers were not properly investigating four in ten crimes because of funding cuts. Other forces reported similar numbers.

Alex Mayes, of charity Victim Support, said: ‘We know from working with those bereaved by murder and manslaughter through our national homicide service just how devastating the impact is on family and friends, witnesses to the crime

÷Record 112 knife offences every DAY ÷Killings at highest level for a decade ÷Violent crime up 19% in just a year

and the wider community.’ Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said: ‘The police are completely overstretched and crime prevention work is far too limited.

‘The problem of violent crime is going to get worse unless the Government acts, and it is families and communities across the country who are paying a terrible price.’

Chief Constable Bill Skelly, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, highlighted how police are battling on many fronts.

He said: ‘We are dealing with a raised terror threat, rising crime and more complex, resource-intensive cases like modern slavery, child sexual exploitation and cybercrime which is putting a strain on forces. Further long term funding is needed.’

Police minister Nick Hurd said: ‘The statistics show that your chance of being a victim of crime remains low, and the Metropolitan Police’s more recent figures suggest that action to tackle violent crime is having an impact.

‘We have given police forces additional powers and have this year put more than £1billion extra into policing, including council tax and £100million specifically for those areas worst affected by violent crime.’ ONS figures also showed that more than 3.6million fraud offences were reported last year, an increase of 12 per cent on 2017. One in every 15 people was the victim of a scam in 2018.

Car theft has soared to the highest level in a decade following a surge in keyless car crime – where thieves use gadgets to hack into keyless cars without having to pick a lock or smash a window. ONS figures showed that 113,037 vehicles were stolen last year – more than 300 every day. This was a jump of 9 per cent on 2017 and a 60 per cent increase in six years.

Attacks on prison staff have increased by a fifth in year, with an average of 27 every day. Ministry of Justice figures showed there were 10,213 incidents in 2018, of which 995 were classed as ‘serious.’

THERE’S something about the words ‘Customer Care Team’ that shrivels the vital organs and fills the soul with foreboding. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky, but I have long found that customer care is the last thing on the minds of people who work for large companies in what used to be called, with rather more honesty, the Complaints Department.

Instead, they seem to see it as their job to procrastinate, obfuscate and generally fob off unhappy customers with weasel words of apology for any inconvenience suffered, without doing anything to redress the grievance in question.

They appear to count it a victory if they can drag out a dispute for so long that the complainant gives up in despair.

Such, anyway, has been the experience of our teacher son, Archie, in his protracted, ongoing campaign to extract justice — or at least straight answers — from the Customer Care Team at the online booking agency lastminute.com. Except that our lad never gives up. As it happens, he had a run-in with the same company some 15 years ago, when I agreed to paid for him to fly with our youngest boy to visit their older brother, George, at Edinburgh University.

Trouble

On that occasion, Archie had attempted to book the flights from London and back online, using my email account and debit card. But as the day for the trip approached, he had still received no confirmation from lastminute.com (it eventually turned up in my junk mail).

So he made the big mistake of booking again — though by this time the price of the tickets had risen sharply. By £233.67, to be precise.

Only after I had driven the boys to Heathrow Airport did we discover from the woman behind the check-in desk that lastminute.com had booked four return tickets on my card.

Apparently, it had not struck the company’s computer as odd that two people with identical full names and having the same date of birth had chosen to book the same flights to Edinburgh and back, travelling with two other people identically named, who also shared a date of birth.

That’s the trouble with booking online. When everything goes smoothly, it’s wonderfully convenient. But any human travel agent would have spotted the mistake the moment Archie tried to book again. The computer couldn’t see it.

But no matter. The nice woman at the airline check-in desk said she’d alert lastminute.com to what had happened and I’d be refunded for the two surplus tickets. The trouble was that when my refund arrived it was £233.67 short. The online agency or the airline (I don’t know which) had cancelled the earlier booking, rather than the more expensive one. This smacked of sharp practice to me.

At first, lastminute.com refused to investigate my complaint unless I agreed to pay an ‘ administration fee’ of £45 — which, like any wronged Englishman, I refused to do. So it was stalemate.

It was at this point that I burst into print, airing my woes in a newspaper column — which, incidentally, prompted a flood of correspondence from readers who had suffered similar ordeals.

The very next day, I received an email from Brent Hoberman, multi-millionaire co-founder of lastminute.com, agreeing to refund the disputed £233.67 and promising to look at reprogramming his computer algorithms so as to ensure that the same mistake wouldn’t be made again.

As I observed at the time, it seemed a very poor show that because of my privileged platform in the media, I was offered gold-star treatment denied to other customers. Shortly after this incident, by the way, Hoberman and his fellow co-founder Martha Lane Fox sold their stakes for a reputed £300 million. So that’s two people, at least, who had reason to be satisfied with lastminute.com.

Which brings me to this week, when I received an anguished email from Archie, beginning: ‘Here are the shocking details of my lastminute hell.’ Attached were pages of tweets and other exchanges between himself and the company’s Customer Care Team.

Cheap

I haven’t nearly enough room here to reprint the full correspondence. All I can do is summarise his woes.

His story starts way back in October last year, when he booked to fly in July 2019 to Catania in Sicily with his wife, Lisa, their 16-month-old son, and Lisa’s mother. The idea was to visit Lisa’s Sicilian relations.

Flights for the family — outward by Air Malta, easyJet coming back — cost £594.46 (which sounds wonderfully cheap to me; or, rather, it would have been cheap if everything had gone to plan).

To be extra safe, Archie also paid £56 for lastminute Fullflex insurance, which would guarantee him his money back if he had to cancel the flights.

Now fast-forward to March 5 when the Customer Care Team emailed him to say that Air Malta had cancelled his outward flight (God knows why, with four months to go before take-off, but airlines seem to be a law unto themselves).

He was told he could either contact the airline to find an alternative, or request a refund — though when he called lastminute to ask what the refund would be, they couldn’t say.

Nor would anyone tell him what alternative flight would be offered.

Only after his fifth call did lastminute come up with another flight. This would take 11 hours and 20 minutes, including a seven-hour stop-off in Malta, instead of the three hours and 25 minutes of his original booking.

With a mother-in-law and baby in tow, he understandably didn’t fancy the idea. So he asked for that refund, though lastminute still wouldn’t tell him how much it would be.

Rather fittingly, on April 1 — almost a full month later, with flights costing more every day as July approached — he was finally told what his refund for the outward journey would amount to: a measly, pathetic, risible £152. As for the insurance he had taken out on a flight that no longer existed: ‘We are unable to honour the refund of the Fullflex service.’

As you may imagine, Archie felt royally ripped off.

Was it really possible that the cost of the outward flight, including air passenger duty of £78, came to a mere £152 (or £18.50 a head, before tax), while the return cost nearly three times more? Or was he being taken for an expensive ride?

Raging

Not unnaturally, he wanted chapter and verse on where his money had gone, including proof that lastminute.com had paid easyJet more than £400 for the return leg. He also wondered what had happened to that air passenger duty on a non-existent flight.

So began the long series of exchanges that has been raging ever since, with Air Malta refusing to say how much it had charged lastminute for the original flight, and lastminute refusing to release documentary evidence of anything.

All of which makes me wonder: when one half of a return trip is cancelled, has any reader ever received a refund — from lastminute or any other online agency — amounting to more than half the total cost of the two-way ticket?

Or is it standard practice for companies to claim that the cancelled leg was the cheaper one?

The upshot for poor Archie is that lastminute still refuses to refund him a penny more than £152 — and he’s had to shell out £597.88 for one-way tickets to Catania with BA.

Call me a hardened old cynic, but I have a feeling the outcome might have been happier for him if instead of teaching in a state school, he’d followed his father’s trade.

Wouldn’t this be a better world if large companies treated all their customers with the same care and courtesy they show towards columnists who air their complaints in print?