00:00Nobody around this table needs me to describe again the terrible impact that
00:06knife crime has on the lives of so many in our communities, particularly young
00:10lives in too many cases. And knife crime has gone up, not down, in recent years not
00:15withstanding the steps that have been taken. So we need to deal with that. Today we've
00:20got a number of strands to that which we can explore. I won't go through them in
00:24great detail. Availability is one. Far too many knives are too easily available.
00:31We've met a few times, we've talked about this before your seat in government and
00:36everything you said you were going to do, we're here, we're doing it. So thank you for doing that.
00:41Why am I here? I guess I'm here as a concerned citizen and as a parent.
00:47Five, six years ago I started an organisation called Don't Stop the Future in reaction to a young lady
00:53that lost her life outside of a tube station. I was just appalled. And I used Instagram, I used social media and the effect of that was incredible that people wanted to hear a voice like myself that had a soapbox to use and speak up and say something.
01:11Five years later, six years later though, unfortunately we're still talking and, you know, talk is good, but action is more important.
01:22One of the things that the Prime Minister and I spoke about during this run up to here was how do we make the action points, what does that look like?
01:33It felt that we needed the coalition, we needed joined up thinking, we needed so many different perspectives, parents' perspectives, youth workers' perspectives, charity organisations, governance, policing.
01:50We need all these perspectives to sit round the table and think about this.
