Teenagers have it “much, much harder” than previous generations because of knives, mental health pressures and social media, Yvette Cooper said as she announced plans for a new unit to prevent violent crime among young people.
Following the deaths of young people in stabbings in Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Croydon, Cooper told the Guardian she was setting up a new, cross-governmental ‘young futures’ unit based at the Home Office, as part of an ambition to halve violent crime in a decade.
She described the recent murder of three children in Southport as “deeply traumatic and simply awful”.
Speaking from a youth centre in the Manchester suburb of Gorton, Cooper said there were links between knife crime and poor treatment for mental health conditions, with the current state of provision posing “serious challenges”.
As part of this campaign, the Home Secretary will tell local councils and police forces they have until Christmas to submit proposals to tackle youth crime.
New Home Office guidance, due to come into effect at the end of this year, sets out how networks of police, mental health professionals, local schools, youth crime teams and charities can work together to divert teenagers from crime.
“It’s always been tough getting through the teenage years, but for Gen Alfa it seems to be much, much harder now,” said Cooper.
“You have the pressures of social media, county lines and criminal exploitation of children, the increase in antisocial behaviour that we have seen, and … pressures on the mental health of children and adolescents. So we are responding to that.”
Cooper, who first announced an ambition for a £100m “youth future” policy at Labour conference last year, said there would also be “youth centres” for teenagers, similar to how the Blair government launched Sure Start for babies and toddlers.
The programme aims to give all teenagers the best start in life. Part of the work will involve “identifying or mapping” young people most at risk of being drawn into violence, exploitation, crime and anti-social behaviour.
After weeks of struggling with the police response to racist riots, the interior minister said she also wanted to deal with other priorities.
“It is part of our mission to halve serious violence and restore trust in the police and criminal justice system,” she said.
“The Young Futures program is part of that, a vision for the next ten years. It’s about how we prevent young people from getting into crime in the first place, and also about how we give them back their future.”
Cooper said support for teenagers had become severely fragmented and neglected under successive Conservative governments, leaving councils overstretched and struggling to coordinate activities.
The Young Lives Commission describes “a consistent story of missed opportunities, unmet needs and a confusing tangle of services” when it comes to high-risk teens.
Children also face long waits for NHS mental health services, with the number of children referred to emergency mental health services in England having risen by more than 50% in three years.
This week’s A-level results also showed that while national exam scores were among the highest in decades, there were regional differences, with areas further north lagging far behind the south-east.
Cooper highlighted the young lives lost to crime and in particular the government’s commitment to halving violence against women and girls.
She expressed her frustration with the pace of change, saying, “For too long it has been treated as something that will always be there, and there has only been an incremental change approach.”
“The first Reclaim the Night marches were in Leeds almost 50 years ago, and we should not still be having the same conversations as my mother’s generation almost 50 years later, and we should not be allowing our daughters and granddaughters to have exactly the same conversations as we are having now about violence against women and girls,” the Home Secretary added.
She admitted that the target of halving violence against women and girls was a “challenge” but that there was now “the opportunity to mobilise the whole country” to take a significant stand.
However, Cooper did not say that the Southport attack, in which three girls were killed and other children and adults injured during a Taylor Swift dance class, should be seen in the context of an epidemic of violence against women.
“It’s really important for me not to go into the details of the case,” she said, “Otherwise it was deeply traumatic and just horrible. What happened, I think, to three little girls as well, it’s just unbearable to think of what the parents and families must be going through.”
The attack sparked unrest based on false information that the suspect was an asylum seeker. Politicians such as Nigel Farage questioned whether the police were withholding information, a comment branded “irresponsible and dangerous” by Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat.
The reform movement leader also disputed Keir Starmer’s argument that the violent protests were the fault of the far-right, saying they were “a response to fear, discomfort and unease shared by tens of millions of people”.
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Asked whether the political rhetoric of Farage and others had contributed to the tensions, Cooper replied that the rioters had only themselves to blame, but that their behaviour could not be justified by arguing that they had legitimate political grievances.
“I think the responsibility for what has happened in the last few weeks lies with the criminals and those involved who have to take responsibility for it… I don’t think anyone should be apologizing for them. I don’t think anyone should be trying to suggest that this is about protest or grievances.”
While stressing that enforcing the rules governing the riots, both offline and online, was the most urgent issue, Cooper stressed the “responsibility of social media companies” who “must take this seriously”.
She added: “We have the online harms bill and the implementation of that, and the Prime Minister has said that all of that needs to be looked at.” Cooper said a number of measures had been put in place to prevent misinformation during the election that had since “disappeared” and could be picked up again.