Southwark is among the worst boroughs for county-lines drug dealing – the practice in which older dealers send out children and young people across the country to sell on their behalf.
Southwark has the fifth-highest number of people involved in the out-of-London drugs trade, behind Croydon, Lambeth, Newham and Brent. Lewisham and Greenwich came immediately afterwards.
Police found 1,784 young people – aged up to 25 – across the whole of London who were involved in county lines in 2020/21. No exact figures were available for Southwark, but a report commissioned by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said there were between 83 and 138.
Despite Southwark being among the worst boroughs for the number of vulnerable people involved in county lines, it was well down the list for the amount of young people referred to support services, at tenth. Some 24 young people were referred to support services in Southwark last year, up four from the year before.
Southwark’s worst areas for county lines involvement were around the Old Kent Road and north Peckham, with Camberwell and Bermondsey also relatively high. Young people in Dulwich were the least affected.
The report looked at the ‘rescue and response’ project set up by Khan in 2018 to tackle county lines, working with charities St Giles Trust, Safer London and Abianda, as well as the police. The project aims to ‘rescue’ young people caught up in county lines by giving them support and showing them that they have opportunities outside crime.
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Just over half of the young people referred to the service in 2020/21, the third year of the project, were black – an increase of eight per cent since the start of rescue and response. But young white women were more likely than young women of any other ethnicity to be referred.
Interestingly, the Covid-19 pandemic did not have an impact on the number of people involved in county lines, report authors said, despite the effect on young people’s mental health.