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The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Vaz. I thank and congratulate the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) for securing this debate and the hon. Member for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) for managing to make her contribution as well.
This is an incredibly important topic; any of us who have attended the funeral of a young person who has been the victim of knife crime will know that. I very painfully recall attending the funeral of 15-year-old Elianne Andam, who was murdered in Croydon on 27 September 2023 at 8.30 am. Seeing the grief of her family, her parents Michael and Dorcas and her little brother Kobi is something I will never forget. All of us need to keep in mind the tragic stories of young people who have lost their lives and the importance, therefore, of the work we are doing in making sure that we protect as many as we possibly can.
It is worth setting out some of the facts. When we see reports on social media about knife crime and individual tragic incidents, it sometimes creates the impression that homicides caused by knife crime are more prevalent than they are. We need to keep in mind where we are with progress made. In the year running to March 2010, there were 620 homicides across England and Wales. Last year, there were 577—a reduction in the number of homicides over that period, even though the population of the country has grown.
Over the same period, the Crime Survey for England and Wales—according to the independent Office for National Statistics, the most reliable source of data on offending—reported that violent crime was down by 44%. Hospital admissions following injury by a knife is another measure used to get to the heart of how much knife crime there is. Since 2019, that has reduced by 26% for people under 25.
As those figures show, quite considerable progress has been made, with reductions in homicides since 2010, reductions in violence since 2010 and a reduction in hospital admissions following a knife injury in the five years that we have been tracking those, since 2019. Despite all that progress and all those improvements, more needs to be done because every single death and every single injury is a tragedy. That is why the Government are determined to do everything possible to end the scourge of knife crime up and down the country. Of course, part of that is ensuring that the police have adequate resources. We now have record police officer numbers across England and Wales. In March 2023, we hit 149,566 officers. That is more than we have ever had at any time before. The police funding settlement this year is at a record level. The frontline budget spent by police and crime commissioners went up by £922 million this financial year compared with the last one. The resources are being made available to the police, but we need to do more than that.
We heard reference to banning different kinds of knives. We have been progressively widening the scope of knife bans. Far more knives are banned today than was the case in 2010. The most recent tranche of bans will come into force on 24 September, which will ensure that all zombie-style knives and certain kinds of machetes will rightly be banned. Curved swords have of course been banned since 2008. Wherever we see evidence that a particular kind of knife needs to be banned, we will take action to do that, but I remind the House that possession of any kind of knife, even a kitchen knife, in a public place without reasonable excuse is itself a criminal offence punishable by up to four years in prison.
Jim Shannon
I must say how encouraged I am by the Minister’s response to the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson). I mentioned in my intervention buckle knives, which the Police Service of Northern Ireland has indicated are something new that is coming through. The Minister is right that the law will encompass all those issues, but is it possible to contact some of the regional police forces to ascertain some of the issues they face? That would help in bringing forward better legislation.
Chris Philp
We are always open to consulting with police forces around the country, including Police Scotland and, of course, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, to ensure that we are quickly picking up those trends, as the hon. Member says.
We heard some discussions around the online sale of knives. The Online Safety Act 2023 passed through Parliament last October. When it is fully commenced—Ofcom is currently consulting on the codes of practice to implement that—it will impose obligations for the first time on social media platforms and online marketplaces, such as Facebook Marketplace, to ensure that they are applying the law to take proactive steps to ensure that, for example, under-18s cannot buy knives online. The Criminal Justice Bill, currently going through Parliament, will increase the penalty for selling a knife to an under-18 to up to two years. The Online Safety Act, which I worked on with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) when he was Security Minister, will do a great deal to prevent the sale of knives online.
We heard some discussion around prevention, which is critical. That is why the 20 violence reduction units up and down the country are receiving about £55 million of funding a year. Next year we will increase that by 50%, and that 50% increase in funding will ensure that those preventative interventions are made. It will fund things like mentoring schemes, cognitive behavioural therapy, diversionary sporting activity and so on to ensure that young people at risk of getting on to the wrong path can be helped. We are doing that in partnership with the Youth Endowment Fund, which has £200 million to invest. The fund researches which interventions actually work, because some interventions sound like they might work but in fact have no impact. I was discussing those interventions with the fund’s chief executive Jon Yates just a few hours ago.
A new initiative that we will be pioneering with the Youth Endowment Fund this autumn is a piece of work starting off in four local authorities, but I hope it will be expanded to all local authorities, to identify in each area the 100 young people at risk of getting into serious violence. That is not youngsters who are already involved in serious violence, who are being supported already, but younger people, maybe in their early teens, who are at risk of getting into serious violence and where we can make an early intervention to stop them ending up on that path. If the pilots in the four local authorities are successful, as I think they will be, part of the extra violence reduction unit funding that I mentioned could support its roll-out nationally, which I would certainly like to see.
The prevention, the bans, the Online Safety Act 2023 and the violence reduction units are all preventive measures, but we also need proper enforcement action. That includes the use of stop and search, which I have not heard mentioned so far this afternoon. Stop and search is important. In London it used to take 400 knives a month off the street, but in London the use of stop and search has gone down by 44% over the last two years, whereas in the rest of the country it has been maintained. It might be no coincidence that knife offences in London have gone up at the same time as stop and search has gone down, which bucks the national trend.
I was very pleased that the commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said that he would increase the use of stop and search—done, of course, lawfully and respectfully— because it does take knives off the streets and save lives. Victims’ families have said to me, “I wish the person that killed my child”—typically a young man—“had been stopped and searched before my son was murdered.” So stop and search is an important tool that needs to be used.
To support that, we are developing new technology. It is not ready to deploy yet, but I hope it will be ready to deploy experimentally by the end of this year. It is technology that allows police officers to scan someone at a distance of, say, 10 or 20 feet—perhaps the distance that we are standing apart now—and detect a knife in a crowded street, enabling officers to identify and remove knives from the people carrying them. We are investing about £3.5 million to expedite the development of that technology. I saw it demonstrated last week. It is not quite ready to deploy, but it is very close. As soon as it is ready, I want it to be trialled. I will certainly volunteer Croydon, the borough that I represent—
Chris Philp
Wandsworth might want to volunteer, and perhaps Tamworth also, and get those knives off our streets.
Also when it comes to technology, the use of both retrospective and live facial recognition is helping us to catch the perpetrators of knife crime and other crimes who would otherwise not be caught. We debated this a lot in the Criminal Justice Bill Committee. The technology is getting more powerful every day and is enabling the police to catch criminals who would otherwise not get caught. Facial recognition, obviously within guidelines and respecting privacy and so on, will help us take more dangerous people off our streets.
The other thing we are pushing is hotspot patrolling. In areas where there is antisocial behaviour and serious violence, all the evidence shows that hotspot patrolling helps stop criminal offences, so we have given police and crime commissioners additional money for the current financial year, over and above their regular budget. It totals about £66 million, of which London is getting about £9 million. That is to fund hotspot patrolling in areas where the police have identified a particular problem. The evidence from pilots last year shows that intensive hotspot patrolling reduces antisocial behaviour and serious violence. I expect that money to fund, in the current financial year, about 1 million hours of extra hotspot patrolling to keep our streets safer.
In summary, it is good that violence and homicide are lower now than they were in 2010, but there is more to do. Every single death is a tragedy and it behoves all of us to do everything we can. I have set out our plans in the preventive and law enforcement arenas. I am sure all of us would want to work with police forces in our constituencies to make sure they have the support that they need to catch perpetrators and keep the public safe.
Question put and agreed to.