THE independent panel set up to explore the causes of last summer’s riots (News, 12 August) presented its final report to the Prime Minister this week.
The cross-party Riots Communities and Victims Panel interviewed people in the communities affected by the riots, as well as charities, local authorities, and employers. The causes of the riots which it identified included “a lack of opportunities for young people, poor parenting, [and] a lack of shared values”, a statement from the panel said. The panel recommended that a “Youth Job Promise” scheme, funded by the Government and local public services, should be set up to find jobs for young people who had been unemployed for more than one year.
Darra Singh, who chairs the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, said: “There are people ‘bumping along the bottom’, unable to change their lives. When people don’t feel they have a reason to stay out of trouble, the consequences for communities can be devastating — as we saw last August.”
Responding to the report, the policy director of the Children’s Society’s, Enver Solomon, said: “It is of little surprise that this independent report has pointed to factors like lack of opportunities for young people as causes behind last summer’s riots. . . We know from our work that there is a significant link between a child’s material deprivation and their overall life satisfaction. Clearly, tackling this is crucial to avoid further unrest among children and young people.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight on Tuesday, David Lammy MP, a former member of the Archbishops’ Council, in whose Tottenham constituency the riots began, said that there were “young people growing up, and their parents before them, without any culture of work. And part of what we saw in the summer was that.”
He said that “there are underly-ing issues which our country needs to grip. I hope this is not another report that festers and nothing is done.”