Surrender of Offensive Weapons (Compensation) Regulations 2020

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I am happy to support the regulations before the House and endorse many of the comments made by noble Lords in this short debate. Like my noble friend Lady Kennedy of Cradley, I sometimes think that these weapons are illegal so should just be handed in. I see no reason why anyone would need to own a zombie knife. Equally, I can see the point about compensation, particularly the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about people who own antique weapons, but that is almost a different case. I certainly do not know why anyone would ever want to buy a zombie knife or what you would need one for.

As we heard in our debates on the Offensive Weapons Bill, my fear is that when we quite rightly ban these weapons, I suspect you will still be able to buy them over the internet. You can probably log on, buy these weapons abroad and have them posted to you. That was one of the issues we discussed many times during the passage of the Bill. What will we do about that? This is again a question of the internet companies that host these sites. What are they doing? Why are weapons that can do huge damage to people allowed to be sent into our country?

My noble friend Lord Mann mentioned the excellent work of the National Crime Agency in shutting down that illegal communication system last week. I think we were all very pleased and pass on our thanks for the work done by the Metropolitan Police. I hope that by that being shut down, the trading of the illegal weapons mentioned here will be reduced, so that was very good.

I also endorse the comments of my noble friend Lady Wilcox of Newport about working with young people. A couple of years ago I was very lucky and did the parliamentary police scheme. I spent many days out with the Met in different parts of London. One day I had an excellent day out with the Met in Greenwich, with some of the teams that work with young people. They showed me in a container the knives they had collected. It was like a huge sweet jar of all sorts of weapons they had collected. They were doing lots of really good work with children in schools. They also used to do searches around schools. As they were going into the schools, some of the children involved in knife crime were burying the knives in their local council estate and would dig them up on the way home. We went around digging on the council estate, collecting all the knives. They were ingenious. It was really good work, getting these knives off the street but also talking to the children and trying to get them away from using knives.

As we know, knife crime destroys lives when people lose their lives, but it also destroys the life of the person using the weapon. As many other noble Lords have said, it is important that we try to ensure we deal with it. I will leave my comments there. As I said, I very much support the regulations and look forward to the Minister’s comments.