Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to tackle knife crime across England.

We have set a clear and ambitious target: to halve knife crime in a decade. We are already seeing results. Since the start of this Parliament, knife crime has fallen by 10%, knife homicides are down 27%, at their lowest level in a decade and knife enabled robberies are down by 15%. We have also banned dangerous weapons such as ninja swords and zombie style machetes and have taken more than 63,000 knives off our streets.

But we must and will go further. Our recently published Halving Knife Crime Plan sets out a fully resourced package of measures, bringing together action across Government and wider society to stop people turning to knife crime, and to ensure that perpetrators are caught and brought to justice.^[EB1]

^[EB1]Recommend keeping this shorter as it's asking about the national picture, which is all set out in the Plan.