I come from a black working-class environment, born and brought up by my single mother on the North Kensington estates in London. Where I live the peer pressure to offend surrounds you. Crime is everywhere. The teenage pregnancy rate is well above the national average. There is a drugs epidemic. There are significant mental health and disability issues. Most people remain trapped.

Yet just a few yards away, on the other side of Ladbroke Grove, you can find houses worth millions of pounds where bankers, celebrities and media stars discuss being attacked and the threat of burglary rather than the problems of today’s youth.

I am one of the lucky ones. Thanks in part to a determined mother, I just scraped into university. But I returned to the North Kensington estates seven years ago as a volunteer youth worker and I came to see from street level how the cycle of deprivation and crime works in the inner cities of Britain.

The level of crime on the estates was already astonishing, but over the past four years the levels of violence with drugs, guns and knives among the younger kids has got much worse.

Eight years ago it would have been fantasy stuff to carjack. Four years ago maybe you would have found one person who’d entertain it and everybody would have thought he was a lunatic. Now I could show you at least 15 people who would consider it, 10 or 15 who would do it and five who have done it.

Kids are carrying guns now because guns are linked to bigger crime. They are selling crack because crack has a shorter turnaround and a higher profit than the likes of weed and heroin. People who smoke crack are so desperate they’d do anything for the money. And the dealers get high on the power.

I know one guy who’s only 17 years old and is a very successful crack dealer. “It’s not so much the money, Shaun,” he told me, “it’s the fact that I’ve got people who work for me.”

For rock he was able to get people to wash his car, clean his house, beat people up, steal stuff for him, send them on missions just because it made him feel powerful.

Crime starts younger, spreads wider and goes further. The number of kids growing out of crime is getting smaller. It’s why we get this horrible stuff with guns and knives: the serious nature of their offences is growing as the percentage of kids staying in crime rises.

The real scary thing is the young age at which it happens. Serious criminals used to be in their late twenties. If you came into my area and interviewed my boys, they have been involved in quite horrible stuff and they are not yet 16 or 17.

THE estates themselves are part of the problem. The blocks were badly designed. We are all too close to each other. On top of each other. One of the estates was built for 1,100 people but now houses 1,450.

There are a lot of Moroccans, a lot of blacks. Everybody there is poor. Overcrowding has an impact on how young people behave.

Most of the flats are built in such a way that nobody can sit around a table. Traditionally a table is where a family has discussions, where parents give attitudes to their children. If children come home and their parents are cooking them food, it establishes their dependency. It gives the parents authority. They can say: “You need to come in for dinner.” They can set rules and boundaries.

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