Home secretary joins Birmingham county lines raid

Home Secretary Priti Patel joined police on an early morning raid tackling a suspected county lines operation exploiting young people.

Police believe the house in Birmingham is a base for sending children to Telford and Worcester with drugs.

Officers forced their way in and led a man away from the property.

Ms Patel, who watched the raid from outside the home in Perry Barr, said it was "streets like this" where children were being used as drug mules.

"We are seeing too much associated violence - young people and gangs carrying weapons to protect their own territory, to conduct their own business, so to speak, and this is why the police are working incredibly hard," she said.

BBC Midlands Today special correspondent Peter Wilson

The scale of the county lines problem was brought home to me recently when two young men, who go into schools to give talks about drugs and gangs, told me that out of a class of more than 30, only two had not been approached by gangs to become couriers.

Two weeks ago, a 17-year-old Birmingham teenager was stabbed to death in Leamington Spa in an attack which Warwickshire Police is linking to the county lines network.

The home secretary told me this morning that the public would be impressed with just how much the police are already doing to disrupt these gangs.

After more than 30 years as a journalist covering such dawn raids, they never seem to make more than a temporary dent in the so-called war on drugs.

I put that to a senior detective, but the question and the answers are too big.

All the police can do is to make life as difficult as possible for the shadowy people who work in the most lucrative trade in the world; the drug business.

Ms Patel said she had been interested in the work police forces were doing to tackle the scourge of county lines since she became home secretary.

"In fact, I've been around the country with other police forces as well, looking at the tactics they are using to get to the perpetrators of these appalling drug crimes, the people that are running trafficking lines, the people that are exploiting vulnerable children to peddle drugs."

More than 20 officers from specialist regional teams carried out the raid on Friday morning.

Det Chief Supt Richard Baker, from the regional organised crime unit, said the county lines issue was a "continually evolving" problem

"We're seeing county lines starting up relatively frequently, but equally we're taking a lot of county lines out," he said.

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