Evening Standard comment: London’s violent crime crisis must be addressed; Haringey housing waste; good luck for the summer getaway

Today's call by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair for a major overhaul of the way violent crime is tackled will focus further attention on a blight that has wrecked too many lives for too long, while harming local communities and this city’s reputation.

Indeed, Mr Blair says the scale of offending is so bad we are losing the fight against violent crime with the latest official statistics — which show London suffering a 50 per cent rise in knife offending since 2015, nearly half of all robberies nationwide, and 98 fatal stabbings in the past year — providing proof that politicians and police have failed to get on top of the problem.

He is right to demand action because, as the special investigation into violent crime which the Evening Standard began this week has illustrated, not enough is being done to break the current vicious cycle in which knife crime is becoming ingrained in the lives of a seemingly growing number of young Londoners.

Some are dragged into trouble by the activities of drug gangs or the fear of becoming victims. Such challenges are often compounded by exclusion from school and dysfunctional family backgrounds lacking sufficiently strong positive influences, creating a complex range of problems.

One way to tackle this is via a public health approach, similar to that used in Glasgow, in which the underlying mental and social causes connected to violent crime become the focus of attention.

As Mr Blair correctly argues, however, this will work best when accompanied by stronger law enforcement.

Increased stop-and-search and intensified measures to bring criminal gangs to justice remain essential to give the longer-term solutions the chance to work. But the political point-scoring must stop.

Even today, Mayor Sadiq Khan blamed “massive cuts” as he visited a youth project in Hackney.

Saving lives is what is needed now.

Haringey housing waste

If Haringey council’s new leaders had stood up this week to announce that they were cutting spending on housing for local people by £2 billion, there would have been outrage. But that’s effectively what they have done by axeing the Haringey Development Vehicle , a partnership between the council and a private developer, Lendlease.

The scheme was drawn up by the council under its previous leader, Claire Kober. But she was pushed out by hard-Left activists, in part because they were determined to stop the HDV.

They hate it so much that even the part of the council’s own website that described the plans now leads only to a broken link, reading “access denied”.

So what has their victory achieved?

A bill for council tax payers, who must now pay £520,000 in costs on top of money wasted preparing the plans, and might face a legal battle, too. An even sharper shortage of housing in a part of London where people need new homes, now that the plan, which would have seen 6,400 built, isn’t happening.

The 10,000 people on Haringey’s waiting list will have to wait even longer.

The council has made an undeliverable promise to build new houses with public money on public land instead, which is meaningless since the council has no idea how to fund this.

It also means an end to the planned new schools, shops and town centre which the development would have supported. All because of an ideological battle inside the Labour Party.

Sure, some residents had worries about the HDV.

But now their council has thrown away four years of planning, they should focus their protests on making sure the borough gets the new housing it needs.

The big holiday getaway

The big summer getaway begins today in the wake of an act of heroism by the pilot of an inbound British Airways jet from Naples forced to make an emergency landing at Gatwick after a fluid leak on his plane.

We hope the many Londoners looking forward to flying off for their holidays suffer no such alarms and enjoy wonderful summer breaks.