Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the prevalence of advertisements for the sale of items prohibited under the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 (a) on social media platforms and (b) by online retailers; and what steps she is taking to end the sale of those items.

The UK has some of the toughest legislation in the world in relation to the sale of knives and offensive weapons. The sale and importation of a wide range of knives and other weapons are prohibited under the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959 and the Criminal Justice Act 1988. The Offensive Weapons Act 2019 extended these prohibitions to include possession in private. We will be banning ‘zombie style’ knives following our recent consultation on new knife legislation proposals to tackle the use of machetes and other bladed articles in crime. We will also be raising the maximum sentence for those who sell prohibited weapons to two years imprisonment.

Despite this legislation we are aware of ongoing advertising of prohibited items on social media and by online retailers. To combat advertisements on social media, Schedule 7 of The Online Safety Bill (set to achieve Royal Assent (this Autumn) sets out a series of priority offences which include the sale of weapons. Companies, including online marketplaces, will need to take particularly robust action to prevent the proliferation of this content online and ensure that their services are not used for offending. This means companies will need to proactively mitigate the risk that their services are used for illegal activity or to share this illegal content, to design their services to mitigate the risk of this occurring and to remove any content that does appear as soon as they are made aware of it.