Draft Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) (Amendment, Surrender and Compensation) Order 2024

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 General Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Rees.

Knife crime is a scourge on our communities. In 2022, we saw the highest number of people killed with a knife for over 70 years, and the biggest increase was among young boys aged 16 to 17. Compared with 2015, total knife crime was up 70%, and that included record levels of knife-enabled rape and threats to kill. Last year, 75% of teenage homicides involved a knife or sharp instrument.

As a result, we are now in a situation where it is thought that more than 200,000 children are vulnerable to serious violence. In 2021-22, a record number of children were victims of crime. Those numbers can blur into one, but behind every one is a family, broken hearts and an empty place at the table at Christmas. Many people do not recover from the trauma of that. It is therefore right that we want to act in this space.

Seemingly frequently, we see horrific attacks and threats by people using such weapons as zombie-style knives and machetes in the media. These weapons trade on their supposed aesthetic appeal and the harm they can inflict. It is chilling to see how these weapons are advertised and, frankly, how easy they are to purchase. Any member of this Committee could have bought one, probably a couple, during the length of the Minister’s speech; that is how available and well advertised they are. The intent to cause serious harm is abundantly clear there.

Campaigners have pushed hard to get the Government to act on this, and I pay tribute to those incredibly brave families who have turned their experience of dreadful personal loss into heroic campaigning. This is their day. It ought to be recognised that this is a ban that has been announced 16 times by the Government in some form or other. It should have been introduced sooner, but it is welcome and we certainly will support it in this Committee. We have long called for such a ban, and we now want to see it as swiftly as possible.

The Minister may be able to help me with a technical point. Like colleagues, perhaps, I always find compensation for the surrender of such weapons to be a jarring concept. However, as they were legal products at the point of purchase, it is probably fair, as well as being in line with the Offensive Weapons Act 2019. Article 5 of the draft order sets the compensation at £10, but the surrender and compensation scheme claim form set out in the schedule states that an individual must be owed

“£30 or over to be eligible for compensation.”

Am I right in my understanding that a person would therefore need to return three items in order to be eligible for compensation? Does the Minister have any concerns that that may impair surrender rates? I wonder what modelling has been done.

I want to put on the record my frustration that this measure appears in secondary rather than primary legislation. The Government consulted on knife crime last year and then set out a welcome series of changes that they intended to implement in response to it. The draft order makes one such change, but there are others; those that require legislation have tended to be contained in the Criminal Justice Bill. A Bill is amendable: hon. Members and Members of the other place have a chance to table amendments to it and debate them at length in a Committee Room on this corridor. Today, however, we have been deprived of that chance and have been given a yes or no question. The answer must be yes, but we still feel that there are gaps, particularly in relation to ninja swords.

Ninja swords are very much in the same spirit as a zombie knife: they are sold and marketed to young people for their aesthetic appeal and their threat. We know that they are being used to cause serious harm; the dreadful case of the murder of Ronan Kanda with a ninja sword in Wolverhampton springs to mind. I always apply the Ronan Kanda test: would the action that the Government are taking have taken that weapon off the street? It would not have, and it still would not. That result is a shortfall. Can the Minister say why ninja swords have not been included in the ban and why the strategy is being implemented in a two-tier way via primary and secondary legislation? We might be missing an opportunity here.

Can the Minister tell us where the Criminal Justice Bill is? It contains hugely significant provisions relating to knife crime and organised crime, and it is the pledged vehicle for the stand-alone offence of violence against retail workers. However, we read online, seemingly every weekend, that perhaps it will not be coming back. Can the Minister confirm that it will?

We need a broader approach to tackling knife crime. Bans like this one are a really good start, but when the Minister talks about the policing approach, he knows as well as I do that there are 10,000 fewer neighbourhood police deterring and detecting on our streets than in 2015. That means that there are weaknesses in our attempts to tackle knife crime. Similarly, education and youth services have been denuded in the past 14 years, which has weakened our approach.

The draft order is welcome, but there is much more to do. I hope that the Minister will address the issues that I have raised and that we can go a little further in the remaining stages of the Criminal Justice Bill, if not today.