Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what resources her Department plans to allocate to support anti-knife crime initiatives during the school summer holidays.

Tackling serious violence, including knife crime, is a key priority for this government and we are doing everything we can to keep young people, families and communities safe.

We know that violence often increases over the summer months. The government is taking concerted action to try and mitigate any spike in violence and tackle its underlying causes, deploying a twin-track approach of tough enforcement to remove dangerous weapons from the streets with programmes that steer young people away from crime.

This financial year, the Government has made over £110m available to tackle serious violence. This includes continued investment in our Violence Reduction Units (VRUs), located in the twenty areas most affected by serious violence, which bring together local partners to tackle the drivers of violence in their area. VRUs continue to deliver preventative activity to young people at-risk of involvement in violence over the summer, providing early intervention programmes to divert young people away from a life of crime.

We are also continuing to invest in our ‘Grip’ hotspot policing programme, which operates in the same 20 areas as VRUs, and which will help to drive down serious violence this summer through using data to identify serious violence hotspots – often down to individual street level – and target operational activity in those areas. The combination of these two programmes have prevented an estimated 136,000 violent offences in their first three years of operation.

We are also supporting the police every step of the way in their efforts to crack down on knife crime. We have given them more powers and resources to go after criminals and take knives and other dangerous weapons off our streets, including through the recruitment of 20,000 additional officers and increasing police funding. New powers like Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs) have been introduced to tackle repeated knife carrying, giving police the automatic right to search convicted offenders with an order.

Police recorded crime showed offences involving knives or sharp instruments decreased by 9% for the year ending December 2022, compared with the year ending March 2020.

The Crime Survey of England and Wales finds that violent offences have fallen by 41% and homicides by 11% since 2010.