Diane Abbot

We in Britain have a tiny gun crime problem compared to the United States of America. But few things excite more fear in the minds of people who live in our big cities than gun crime.

Gun crime has been a problem in my inner city constituency of Hackney for some years.

It was partly a problem of guns being used by drug dealers but it was also an escalating problem of young men being sucked into a gun culture where guns were used to settle petty personal disputes and even as a "style accessory".

But only recently has the issue attracted national attention. For along time there was a perception that the problem was confined to marginal inner city areas and a national response was not needed.

It took the high profile murders of three young women Charlene Ellis, Letisha Shakespeare and Toni-Ann Byfield in Birmingham to push the issue onto the national agenda.

Now stories of gun violence across the country are common place. The problem is spreading, like drugs before it, to areas way beyond the inner cities.

Shootings in the suburbs of Nottingham, Reading and across the UK have seen an increase in national gun crime of 41 per cent in the last two years alone.

In the 1990s, without a national response, it was up to local groups and progressive police forces to take the initiative.

London's Operation Trident and Manchester's Multi Agency Gang Unit have both combined targeted policing with community liaison, and use of local advisory groups, to ensure the problem was addressed fully and with sensitivity. As an example of the success of these schemes Operation Trident have just announced a 50 per cent drop in murders within their remit in the last year.

Last year I formed the all party parliamentary group on gun crime, which went on to publish a report in the scale of the problem of gun crime nationally.

One of the reports key findings was that although good work is done in certain areas, there was no coordinated national effort.

The government, to its credit, has tried to address this by increasing information exchange between police forces and backing national gun crime community schemes like the Disarm Trust.

There is much work to be done and although the government has made steps towards combating gun violence it still needs to work hard on issues such as replica weapons, witness protection and social exclusion.

If there is one piece of legislation that I and my colleagues in the all party group would like to see implemented it is a total ban on the sale and possession of replica weapons.

Most inner city gun crime is performed with replica weapons that have been adapted to fire real bullets.

The good work done at a local level must be mirrored by commitment at a national level to stem the disturbing rise in gun crime. And beyond that we have to look at the social conditions, including issues like educational underachievement.