Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to support the police with preventing knife crime.

Tackling knife crime is a priority and the Government is determined to crack down on the scourge of violence devastating our communities.

The Government is supporting the police every step of the way in this effort. including through the recruitment of 20,000 additional officers and increased police funding.

The Government is proposing a total police funding settlement of up to £17.2 billion in 2023/24, an increase of up to £287 million when compared to 2022/23. Assuming full take up of precept flexibility, overall police funding available to PCCs will increase by up to £523 million (3.6% in cash terms) next year.

Suffolk Police’s funding will be up to £157.0m in 2023/24, an increase of up to £6.1m when compared to 2022/23.

15,343 additional uplift officers have been recruited in England and Wales through the Police Uplift Programme, 77% of the target of 20,000 additional officers by March 2023, as at 30 September 2022. Suffolk Constabulary has recruited 128 additional uplift officers against a total three-year allocation of 179 officers, as at 30 September 2022.

The Government has made £130m available this financial year (22/23) to tackle serious violence, including murder and knife crime. This includes:

• £64m for Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) which bring together local partners to tackle the drivers of violence in their area. VRUs are delivering a range of early intervention and prevention programmes to divert people away from a life of crime. They have reached over 260,000 vulnerable young people in their second year alone.
• Our £30m ‘Grip’ programme operates in these same 20 areas as VRUs and is helping to drive down violence by using a highly data-driven process to identify violence hotspots – often to individual street level – and target operational activity in those areas. In 2020, a 90 day trial of this approach in Southend resulted in an overall fall in violence in the hotspots of around 30% over the period of the trial.

The combination of these two programmes has prevented an estimated 49,000 violent offences in their first two years of activity.

The Government is also supporting the work of the police with new legislation. Knife Crime Prevention Orders have been requested by the police to help steer those most at risk away from serious violence. They are being piloted by the Metropolitan Police in London before they are rolled out more widely.

Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs) were introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and will give the police powers to take a more proactive approach and make it easier to target those already convicted of knife and offensive weapon offences, giving them the automatic right to search these offenders.  SVROs will be piloted in the Sussex, West Midlands, Merseyside and Thames Valley Police areas before a decision is made on national rollout.

The Government also continues to encourage police forces to undertake a series of coordinated national weeks of action to tackle knife crime under Operation Sceptre. The operation includes targeted stop and searches, weapon sweeps of hotspot areas, surrender of knives, including through amnesty bins, test purchases of knives from retailers, and educational events. The latest phase of the operation took place between 14 to 20 November 2022. Officers seized 653 knives, and 6380 were either surrendered or seized during sweeps.