Knife Crime: Children and Young People

Judith Cummins Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) for securing this important debate, and for his thoughtful speech. I join him in paying tribute to Ciaran Thapar, whose work took place in my constituency. It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Mr Foster), who made a moving statement on behalf of his constituents. I grew up near Parbold Hill and Southport, and it grieves me deeply to hear about the appalling violence in both those communities.

I rise to speak in this debate on knife crime with great sadness, because today, just after 5 am, a young man lost his life on Coldharbour Lane in my constituency after being stabbed. I visited the scene this morning and stood at the police line as the forensic officers undertook their work. I spoke with community members who were confronted with the shocking aftermath of this violence as they went about their day. I thought about the family, whose day would begin with a knock on the door from police officers, and the utterly devastating news that their loved one would not be coming home ever again. It is hard to feel anything but despair in these circumstances.

I know that hon. Members across the House will wish to join me in expressing our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the young man who lost his life. We do not yet know his identity, but we know that there will be people who loved him, and who are suffering the most visceral pain and loss today. I also pay tribute to the emergency services who attended the scene this morning.

When this young man’s name is released, it will join the names of others who have lost their life to serious violence and knife and gun crime in my constituency since I was first elected to this place in 2015. They are Jude Gayle, Kyall Parnell, John Ogunjobi, Donnell Rhule, Glendon Spence, Dennis Anderson, Beatrice Stoica, Filipe Oliveira, Chino Johnson, Ronaldo Scott and Keelen Wong. Each one was loved by their family and friends, and each one leaves a community traumatised by their loss and the circumstances of it.

When a knife or gun crime is reported in the media, we see the names in the headlines for a few short hours, and maybe again if the case comes to trial. We never hear about the ongoing trauma left behind in the local community, and the sense of loss felt not only by the immediate family but everyone who watched that person grow up and saw them out and about daily, those whose children went to school with them, and those who recognised and knew them. There is a sense of fear among parents that next time, their child might be the victim, and there are the mental health consequences of living with loss, fear and anxiety.

The causes of knife crime are complex. We need to take a public health approach to it, as though it were a disease. We should understand its pathology and take steps to prevent it taking hold, stop its spread, and treat the causes and the symptoms. I introduced a private Member’s Bill in the last Parliament to stop the availability of the most horrific weapons on our streets. I have met the lead consultants in the emergency department at King’s College hospital, who described the horrific injuries that are inflicted by machetes and zombie knives—weapons that can cut through bone, and serrated blades that inflict the most complex injuries on internal organs. They spoke about the survivability of many such injuries, compared with wounds inflicted with domestic knives, and described machetes and zombie knives as

“weapons of war on our streets”.

No one in our communities needs a machete or a zombie knife for any legitimate purpose, but they have been readily available for purchase online for as little as £10. I therefore welcome the Government’s action since July to further restrict their sale. I want further action on domestic knives. In particular, we should look at whether further restrictions can be introduced regarding age verification of those purchasing knives with pointed blades. I also want action further up the chain, to tackle those who exploit and groom our young people into serious violence—the county lines exploiters, the drug dealers and the serious organised criminals who are not spoken about enough in these debates.

In my constituency, in part because of the tragedies that we have experienced, we have seen inspiring responses from community organisations working with public services. The embedding of youth workers in hospital emergency departments was pioneered by Redthread at King’s College hospital. They provide options for young people who have been injured, or have seen their friends injured, allowing them to access support to keep themselves safe. I welcome the Government rolling out that intervention in other parts of the country.

I am also grateful to the Mayor of London’s violence reduction unit for funding Ecosystem Coldharbour through the My Ends programme. Ecosystem Coldharbour is a coalition of grassroots organisations working with young people and families in the Brixton part of my constituency. It has been working for the last three years and has delivered some really impressive results. It has built up the trust and confidence of young people and families, so that they can access help and support. It provides mentoring and training opportunities, and leads the community response when tragedies occur. It delivers trauma support to families and communities. Our communities feel empowered by that work. It is particularly inspirational to see a group of mothers who have all lost a child to serious violence working together, under the banner “Circle of Life Ignite”, to support each other and prevent further deaths.

I am inspired by the way that young leaders have been equipped through that work. I pay tribute to the work of Abdoul Lelo, an extraordinarily impressive young man who has been working with McDonald’s in Brixton to embed a youth service in the restaurant. It takes support and positive opportunities to young people where they are. There are also benefits for the staff, who have often felt unsafe and overwhelmed in their workplace. I also pay tribute to the work of Sergeant Nigel Pearce from central south basic command unit, who has pioneered a different approach to community policing, based on trusting and listening to the community, and responding respectfully and supportively to their needs and experiences. If we had more officers working in this way across the Metropolitan Police, trust and confidence in policing would be much higher.

The partnership in my constituency is called Ecosystem because of the belief of the organisations in it that all the solutions to serious violence are in the community—but the community needs help and resources to find them. That is what we have had through the violence reduction unit. My plea to the Minister is that funding for such vital work be put on a long-term footing, so that we can keep on delivering and working to tackle the scourge of serious violence. In fact, as the Minister thinks about the design of the Government’s Young Futures project, I invite her to visit Ecosystem, because we have much good practice to offer for the development of that national programme.

The debate today is about young people and knife crime, but to tackle the scourge of knife crime, we must properly understand the nature of the problem and who is affected. Of the victims who have been murdered in my constituency since 2015, only two were under the age of 18. The majority were young men in their 20s, a cohort who grew up at a time when funding for youth services was being stripped away, who may find themselves unable to access employment often due to minor criminal convictions, who often have very poor mental health, who are accessing deeply damaging online content and for whom society can seem like it has very little to offer. There is currently no protocol or good practice for tackling serious violence in that cohort. The only part of the system obliged to try to help is the criminal justice system, if the person in question has committed a crime. Social services have no formal role or responsibility and mental health services are not designed with this cohort in mind, despite the fact that they are so often traumatised by the experiences, what they have witnessed in their communities and what they have seen their friends go through.

If we want to end the cycle of violence in our communities, we must turn our attention to that group. They are siblings, cousins and parents to the next generation. The key to prevention must therefore lie in helping them to turn their lives around, making support services more visible in our communities, making it easier to ask for help through services that are designed with their needs in mind and properly resourcing effective rehabilitation.

I welcome the Government’s focus on halving knife crime. My communities have suffered far too much from its devastating effects and we continue to suffer today. I urge the Minister to work with us to devise services and interventions based on the experience in our communities, because we utterly reject this violence and we just want to see it stop.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Before I call the next speaker, I want to try and get everybody in, so please can people stick to around four minutes?

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate on knife crime among children and young people, an issue that continues to devastate communities across the country. I thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) for securing the debate.

Very few people can say that they are not deeply concerned about the rising levels of knife crime, particularly among children and young people. As has been heard from my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), in the early hours of this morning a young man was stabbed and killed in Brixton, a town centre that we share along with my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi). Our thoughts go to the young man and his family at this time. It is a tragedy, but even more sadly, it is a tragedy that we hear far too often.

The latest figures show that there were more than 50,000 knife-related offences in England and Wales last year. Alarmingly, around one in five knife possessions involved young people under the age of 18. In 2023-24, there were 53 records of homicides using a sharp instrument where the victim was aged between 13 and 19 years. Though those statistics are alarming, we have to remember that they are not just numbers but young lives that are being lost, and with each one comes a family that will be left grieving and a community that is scarred.

I know that many hon. Members will point to the need for more policing, increased stop and search and harsher sentencing, and restrictions on who can buy a knife as solutions. Indeed, successive Governments, including this one, have introduced measures along those lines to tackle the surge in knife crime. I certainly will not stand here and argue that we do not need to review how we police the issue, although I believe that increased policing measures such as stop and search need to be thoroughly thought-through and must be intelligence-led. Increased policing and sentencing are not the only solution and cannot work on their own. Youth and knife crime are a wider societal issue that require a holistic approach. If tougher sentencing and more stop and search powers were all it took, we would have solved this crisis a long time ago. We cannot take reactive steps alone; we have to take preventive ones.

I know Conservative Members do not particularly enjoy our pointing out their record in government, but we cannot let this debate go by without mentioning the impact of the past 14 years. This is not a political point but a factual one, because over that time we saw the systematic dismantling of the support systems that helped keep young people away from crime. Research from the YMCA showed that youth services have been cut by 73% since 2010, with over 750 youth centres closed and the number of youth workers falling by a third to 1,662 full-time equivalent roles. The result has been fewer spaces, mentors and positive role models for young people.

A recent Unison report revealed that in England 1,036 council-run youth centres were closed between 2010 and 2023, and only 480 remained open in April 2023. Funding for Sure Start children’s centres, which provided early intervention and family support, has been decimated. Funding for police community support officers, who play a vital role in building trust between police and young people, has been drastically reduced. School budget cuts have squeezed pastoral support, mental health provision and behavioural interventions, increasing exclusions overall. The link between school exclusions and serious violence is well known. Excluded children often fall through the cracks. Many enter pupil referral units where gangs recruit vulnerable young people. Others disengage entirely, making them more susceptible to criminal activity. Those cuts have consequences, and when young people lack support, opportunity or hope, they become vulnerable to criminal exploitation. Gangs step in where the state has stepped back. It is no coincidence that as these services have disappeared, knife crime has risen.

Conservative Members cannot ignore the direct correlation between austerity and serious youth violence, but equally Labour Members cannot either. If we maintain the cuts or extend them even further, that is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. As a starting point for tackling youth violence and knife crime, I strongly urge the Government to look at reversing the cuts and investing in youth services.

I also urge the Government to look at how local councils tackle the issue. I point to my council in the borough of Lambeth. Lambeth Made Safer was launched in 2021 by Councillor Jacqui Dyer. It takes a public health approach to violence reduction, focusing on prevention, early intervention and community-led solutions. It prioritises targeted outreach, family support and investment in community initiatives. It is obviously woefully under-resourced, but it is the sort of initiative and community-driven approach that should be rolled out nationwide. There is no single solution to this crisis, but we can begin to address it by ensuring that young people have the wraparound services that we know prevent them from being involved in, or the victim of, crime.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

We will now start with a formal four-minute time limit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

This is a timely debate, as Members considered the knife crime provisions of the Crime and Policing Bill only last week. I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on granting time for it, and thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) for his compelling speech. We have heard some emotional speeches, which show the empathy that Members on both sides of the House have for victims of knife crime and their families.

Over the years, I have met constituents who have had their lives irrevocably changed by knife crime, whether it resulted in the murder or a loved one or a serious injury. I have spoken with mothers who have lost their children, and adult children who have lost their elderly parents after they were stabbed to death. Knife crime can affect anyone, and the pain that the surviving family members live with after such horrific events is palpable.

The Minister will know that I want to talk about harm reduction; I have spoken about this in this House, and with her, on several occasions. Two thirds of knives that have been identified as having been used to kill people are kitchen knives. That is in deaths where we know what the weapon is. That statistic should not be surprising; many murders are unplanned and committed on the spur of the moment with little thought, and kitchen knives are the weapons most readily to hand.

There has been much in the media this week about the new Netflix drama series “Adolescence”, which is a commentary on the many problems faced by young people growing up, not just knife crime, but it highlights how an easily accessible weapon can be used to cause devastation and change the course of many people’s lives forever. For years, bereaved families, support groups, youth groups and schools have called for the Government of the day to do something tangible to stop this, and to allow children to have a childhood. Their calls are now joined by prominent voices such as those of Idris Elba and Stephen Graham, the latter describing a “pandemic of knife crime” in our country.

I know that this Government are listening and want to make a change, but we need to do it quickly and thoroughly. The previous Government’s measures did not go far enough. The new measures in the Crime and Policing Bill go further, but more can still be done. There is a growing campaign to phase out kitchen knives with pointed tips as an everyday household item, and replace them with kitchen knives with rounded tips, as the hon. Member for Huntingdon mentioned. It is well documented that pointed knives are more likely to pierce vital organs and sever arteries—injuries that are far more likely to be fatal. Rounded knives are much less likely to cause lethal injuries, and most of us rarely use the pointed end of a kitchen knife when cooking.

The Crime and Policing Bill limits the purchase of new knives, but there are already millions of pointed kitchen knives in drawers around the country. The safer knives group, of which I am a member, has suggested a pilot scheme to convert pointed kitchen knives into safer, rounded-tip knives. We need to encourage manufacturers to replace pointed knives with rounded knives, and to discourage the sale of pointed knives by creating a price differential.

As I have said, making knives safer is only one step in reducing the number of deaths and serious injuries. Education, intervention and support, following the methods of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, would produce long-term solutions. It is also vital that we collect more data on the types of knives used in any knife-related crime. Information, policy changes, legislation and expert advice are all important, but it all has to lead to a change of behaviour, so that communities stop killing each other with knives, and that must be a national priority. I know the Minister agrees with me on that, but we must see action, and we all have to work on that.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Taylor]

I completely agree. I will come on to that later in my speech. I have spoken to the organisers and leaders of the Chris Donovan Trust in my constituency. They spoke about the challenge of getting into some schools to talk about knife crime, because of the perception that talking about it was a problem in itself. That was so frustrating to hear.

We need to have honest, open conversations with young people in schools. Teachers must be equipped with materials to educate the next generation, so that we break the cycle of violence. Even if a child is not at risk of committing a knife-related offence, educational programmes serve a critical role. They can teach children about the consequences of knife crime long before they consider carrying a weapon. That is vital. We need to reach young people and win the war for their hearts and minds before the prevailing climate of fear and the harbingers of toxic mindsets start their offensive. I urge the Government to consider introducing mandatory personal, social, health and economic lessons on the consequences of weapons possession, and to put the principles of restorative practice on the curriculum, in recognition of the great work of groups such as the Chris Donovan Trust in my constituency. We teach children from an early age about the dangers of diseases caused by smoking or alcohol; why, then, are we not having open discussions with them about the health risks associated with carrying a knife? Creating safe spaces for discussion, and building relationships with young people, can ensure intervention before thoughts of crimes arise, and deaths can be prevented.

To fully realise the nourishing, community-focused element of a public health approach, though, we must invest in youth services and community programmes that engage young people. Winning the war for hearts and minds means providing young people with opportunities to build skills, pursue education, and find alternatives to gang culture and criminal activity. However, as was mentioned in many speeches, we have seen a dramatic decline in youth services funding over recent years, with cuts totalling £1.1 billion since 2010. This has left too many young people without the support they need.

Investing in youth services is not just about providing safe spaces; it is about providing young people with alternatives to violence, so that we break the cycle of crime, shift the culture of violence, and empower communities to work together to prevent crime before it escalates. The targeted early help and integrated support team at Sutton borough council in my constituency does exactly this kind of work, offering opportunities to young people who are not often afforded the luxury of such attention elsewhere in their lives. However, these programmes rely heavily on grants from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the Ministry of Justice, and violence reduction services. Those grants are subject to constant uncertainty, often approved at the last minute and often only allocated for 18-month to two-year periods, preventing proper forward planning. We must do better than that. We need to consistently get serious funding to these initiatives in a timely manner. I echo the calls from the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) about funding for these community schemes.

Lib Dem Members will continue to push the Government to make youth diversion a statutory duty, so that every part of the country has a pre-charge diversion scheme for young people up to the age of 25. That will ensure better outcomes for young people and less strain on police resources, but let us be honest with ourselves: police resources are already strained beyond breaking point in too many places, and education and early intervention alone are not enough to properly implement a public health approach. Visible community policing starts with actual police numbers in our London boroughs. To tackle knife crime, it is important for young people to see bobbies on the beat in London. Their active and engaged presence creates a sense of safety and security. We have to get back to meaningful community policing, returning the police to their proper duty as a positive, engaging arm of the state in people’s lives.

Building trust between young people and the police is also crucial. This trust communicates that there is no need to carry knives for protection, as young people know that the police are there to keep them safe. As I have said before, when 17-year-old Ilyas Habibi was stabbed to death outside Sutton station in my constituency in December 2023, he was just minutes away from a police station. If we cannot expect visible policing in town centres and the areas closest to police stations, how little have we come to expect of community policing? To be clear, that is not a criticism of the police, but a criticism of successive Governments and mayors, who have consistently failed to get the police the resources they need to do their job. In London, far too many police are abstracted away from the communities they are supposed to serve to help plug gaps.

I was deeply concerned to learn of Sadiq Khan’s budgeting decisions, which have led to dedicated police officers in schools in London being removed. Under the “A New Met for London” plan, officers will no longer be stationed in schools as part of the safer schools officers programme. While the plan claims that officers will still work closely with schools, the change reduces the consistent direct contact between officers and young people. That contact is crucial in building relationships with young people to foster trust. There should be plenty of positive interactions and experiences with the police throughout young people’s formative years. That can be achieved through school assemblies or classroom workshops. Young people need to understand that the police are there to keep them safe on the streets and are not the enemy, but when sparse police resources are focused on only the most extreme forms of deterrence, such as live facial recognition and stop and search, and when there is no community focus, it is unsurprising that they do not.

The hallmark of a meaningful public health approach that invests not just money, but serious political capital, is that it brings together all groups in our communities. It creates a coalition of care, breaks down the silos between projects, and builds a team across society committed to doing what it takes to rescue young people. On behalf of countless experts, professionals and parents, and on behalf of young people, I implore the Government to build that team, to create that coalition of care and to finally implement a meaningful public health approach to knife crime.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the shadow Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for telling the House about the excellent work in her constituency, in particular the role of the PCSOs.

Time is short and a lot of questions were raised with me. If I do not have the chance to answer all of them, I will write to hon. Members specifically. The House will know that, under the safer streets mission led by the Home Secretary, we are driving a whole-of-Government approach to halving violence against women and girls, halving knife crime, and restoring confidence in the policing and justice system. As a part of that, the plan for change sets out our key reforms to strengthen neighbourhood policing, tackle antisocial behaviour and improve public confidence in law enforcement.

On offensive weapons, any effective response must include action to get dangerous knives and weapons out of circulation and off our streets. We have already demonstrated our commitment to putting in place stronger controls in the months since the general election. We implemented the ban on zombie-style knives and zombie-style machetes on 24 September. It is now illegal to sell or own those weapons. Furthermore, we committed in our manifesto to banning ninja swords. We have consulted on the legal description and are progressing our plans to bring forward an effective ban later this year.

A number of hon. Members referred to online sales. We are clear that we need stronger checks in place to prevent under-18s from being able to purchase knives online, which is why, last October, the Home Secretary commissioned Commander Stephen Clayman, as the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for knife crime, to carry out a comprehensive review into the online sale and delivery of knives, which was published on 19 February. We are taking immediate action on a number of key recommendations from the report.

We have also announced Ronan’s law, named after Ronan Kanda, who was fatally stabbed in June 2023, following dedicated campaigning by his mum, Pooja Kanda. Ronan’s law will comprise a range of measures including requiring online retailers to report any bulk or suspicious-looking purchase of knives to the police, and the introduction of a new offence of possessing an offensive weapon with intent for violence.

The Home Secretary has also announced that the Government intend to strengthen age verification controls and checks for all online sellers of knives at the point of purchase and on delivery. As raised by the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, we will be bringing forward amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to enact our manifesto commitment to introduce personal liability measures for executives of online companies that fail to take action against illegal knife and offensive weapons content.

The coalition to tackle knife crime, announced by the Prime Minister in September 2024, brings together campaign groups, families of those who have tragically lost their lives to knife crime, young people who have been impacted and community leaders, united in their mission to save lives. It is important that we have the lived experience of young people in that coalition, and we are working with our member organisations to ensure they have a platform to hear those young voices share their views, ideas and solutions for making Britain a safer place for the next generation.

Many of my hon. Friends have referred to Young Futures hubs and prevention partnerships, including my hon. Friends the Members for Luton South and South Bedfordshire (Rachel Hopkins) and for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal). We know that too many children and young people today are facing poorer life outcomes, including becoming involved in knife crime, because they are not effectively identified and supported early on. This can be caused by limited life opportunities or because they are particularly vulnerable. To address these issues, we have committed to the creation of the Young Futures programme, which will establish a network of Young Futures hubs and prevention partnerships to intervene early on, to ensure that this cohort is identified and offered support in a more systematic way.

The Young Futures hubs will bring together the support services that tackle the underlying needs of vulnerable children and young people, making them more accessible to those who need them. The hubs will promote children and young people’s development, improve their mental health and wellbeing, and prevent them from being drawn into crime. The Young Futures prevention partnerships will identify children and young people who are vulnerable to being drawn into crime and violence, including knife crime, antisocial behaviour and violence against women and girls, and divert them by offering them effective and evidence-based support in a more systematic way.

I will refer briefly to county lines and child criminal exploitation, which was referred to by a number of hon. Members. County lines is the most violent model of drug supply and is a harmful form of child criminal exploitation. Through the county lines programme, we are and will continue to target exploitative drug dealing gangs and break the organised criminal groups behind the trade. We know that knives play a huge part in that. [Interruption.] I can see, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you want me to conclude.

There is so much more to say on this, but, in conclusion, I again want to congratulate the hon. Member for Huntingdon on securing this debate. We have to get a grip of what is, as we said in our manifesto, a national crisis. The public want change and we are determined to deliver it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Ben Obese-Jecty to wind up quickly.