QC Bruce Houlder: ‘Young people in this country have been abandoned for a generation’

As knife crime spirals in London, the capital’s teenagers are the victims - and solutions are in short supply. Here, retired QC Bruce Houlder tells Katie Strick why he hopes his new initiative can change lives
Bruce Houlder
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

Bruce Houlder is listing the reasons why a young person might fall into a life of knife crime: peer pressure, the community they’re born into, county lines gangs offering them money “beyond their wildest dreams”.

“We all know the stories,” says the former QC, who retired last year after a 44-year career as one of Britain’s top criminal barristers, former chairman of the Criminal Bar Association and the country’s first director of service prosecutions.

According to latest figures, London has the highest volume of knife crime in the country, with more than 13,500 offences recorded in the last year. At least 19 teenagers have been killed with a knife across the capital since the start of the year, threatening to make 2021 the worst year on record for stabbings (in 2020, it was 14). Houlder, 73, grimaces. He’s seen first-hand what happens: children as young as seven being terrorised into carrying knives; groups of teenagers locked up in aggression-filled young offender institutions; 16-year-old boys at the Old Bailey, facing a lifetime behind bars.

“Young people in this country have been abandoned for almost a generation now,” he tells me as we meet to discuss his new project, Fighting Knife Crime London, as part of the Standard’s ongoing investigation into London’s knife crime crisis. After a career spent focused on jail-time, he’s been left “dissatisfied”. Now he wants to tackle the problem at its root. “Society wants to throw away the key once [a young person] has done something like that. What I’d rather do is prevent these guys from ever ending up there in the first place,” he explains, politely.

Stabbings in London
PA

Over a lunchtime pale ale near Waterloo, Houlder reaches into his briefcase and hands me a pair of coasters emblazoned with the logo for what he hopes will be a solution. His new online platform, fightingknifecrime.london, launched in June and aims to “give a leg-up” to those affected by gang violence and bloodshed in the capital, with hard-hitting testimonies, educational videos, and a directory of practical resources for disaffected young people and those wanting to help them. So far, Houlder and his team have secured £50,000 in donations to operate for the next three years and they are already working with Sheffield Hallam University to launch a Sheffield arm. They hope to expand to other areas beyond London in the coming years.

Today, Houlder meets me in casual trousers and a green North Face jacket, relieved he no longer has to wear a suit for work. He might be enjoying a more relaxed dress code, but he is far from slowing down, rushing between meetings with his briefcase and a MacBook Pro from his home in Barnes, where he lives with his wife Stella, who is also retired but still volunteers locally (“I could not have done anything without her support”).

Society wants to throw away the key. I want to prevent knife crime happening in the first place

He never planned to launch a full-time career after leaving the law, but he felt a sense of duty. Since the site went live this summer, he’s been inundated with messages, from teachers to filmmakers. Yesterday, a young woman in Chelmsford asked for advice on how to help her brother, who she suspected was carrying a knife. The previous day he met a director making a virtual reality film about the effects gang violence can have on a community. “It shows the story from all sides,” says Houlder.

He has experience of being on the receiving end of a knife attack. Twenty years ago he was approached by two boys, aged 11 and 13, on a morning walk on Copacabana Beach during a work trip in Brazil. “That was scary. I was really shaken up,” he has said of the attack, which saw the older of the two brandishing a huge knife. They only stole some banknotes and his handkerchief but it was a reminder of that universal feeling of vulnerability.

Bruce Houlder
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

But he is far from desensitised after years witnessing the rough end of the law. Clearly he is a man who cares, deeply, about the next generation, a group he feels has been “abandoned” and faces a “sense of building hopelessness” as government cuts continue to close youth centres and cut off support. In the decade between 2010 and 2020, spending on youth services in England was slashed by 73 per cent, with 760 youth clubs closing and 4,500 youth worker jobs lost.

The first edition of his platform’s new quarterly magazine came out in June, featuring powerful interviews with a trauma surgeon and the president of the National Black Police Association. Houlder hands me a copy, but pamphlets won’t solve London’s knife crime crisis and he is well aware of this. He knows Sir Keir Starmer personally and believes the Labour leader would be “much better placed than the Tory party” to solve the issue — he was invited to meet one of the Prime Minister’s special advisers at Downing Street when his site launched, but left unsatisfied. “They left me with the impression the Government had a plan to do something, but the pandemic got in the way,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I wasn’t convinced.”

The government left me under the impression they had a plan to deal with knife crime but Covid got in the way. I wasn’t convinced

In Houlder’s view, current politics is too “short-termist” to solve knife crime, and there is too much of a blame game. Boris Johnson and Conservatives including Shaun Bailey have been quick to criticise Mayor Sadiq Khan on his tackling of knife crime, claiming “crime in London is at a historic high” and “out of control”, but Houlder thinks the issue is “too big a problem” for local mayors and needs greater funding from central government.

He has since written to the Prime Minister following his Downing Street visit, asking for support. He hasn’t heard back, but he won’t let that deter him from putting the pressure on. The pandemic has created a “perfect storm” for London’s knife crime crisis, leaving increasing numbers of youths disaffected, falling behind in education and suffering with poor mental health.

March To Stop Knife Crime Takes Place in Central London
Getty Images

More than two-thirds of those killed this year are black, and recent figures show that young black males are 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched. Houlder believes this just “alienate[s] the whole community of people who want to actually solve the problem”. He insists he’s not some kind of “Left-wing liberal” who doesn’t believe in punishment, but thinks stop and search techniques are not currently working and that more “compassionate” solutions “involv[ing] an understanding of our developing young minds and how people can change” would be more effective.

“If someone’s got a knife, the emphasis is always on locking them up. But we don’t accept what goes on in the brain of a young man, whose cerebral cortex is perhaps not as developed as it might be and has always been struggling to find an outlet for his bubbling emotions which tend to give rise to moments of aggression rather than reason,” he says.

The pandemic has created a perfect storm for London’s knife crime crisis

Youth violence is currently estimated to cost the country £780 million a year and Houlder believes more “intelligent” solutions would save the country “considerable” amounts in the long-run, too. He’d like to see a social tax introduced, managed by an independent body and spent on schemes such as jobs, mentoring programmes and state-of-the-art youth centres like the £6.5 million Legacy Youth Zone in Croydon. “Disused church halls and derelict buildings are not of much interest to young people — they also demonstrate a certain lack of respect,” he says. “That one kid is offered a one-to-one mentoring or a job that he’s helped to stick to — that will give him so much more in life than six weeks in a young offender institution at a huge cost to everybody else.”

Houlder admits he’s become increasingly political as his platform has grown. He thought he’d get trolled on social media but hasn’t had a single word of negative feedback — a reflection of the fact that ultimately, everyone wants the same thing: a solution to the knife crime crisis. Two months in, how does fighting the issue compare to his career in the law? Houlder pauses for thought, then answers confidently. “Apart from marrying my wife...,” he says, “I think it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”

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