Tackling the spectre of knife crime that has haunted successive prime ministers and their officials is at the heart of Keir Starmer’s pledge to make the UK’s streets safer. The mission sets out to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and in the criminal justice system.
It is the latest in a series of attempts over the years to get a grip on a crime that has continued to rise and blight the lives of victims and their communities. Despite various efforts by previous administrations to crack down on knife crime, cases are now almost at record levels.
There were 55,008 knife crime offences in England and Wales in the year to September 2024, a rise of 4%, according to the Office for National Statistics. This was only just below the record level of 55,170 in the year ending March 2020. And it is more than double the 23,945 offences recorded in 2013-14.
The grim picture painted by statistics is amplified by individual cases such as the brutal killing of Kelyan Bokassa earlier this year. The 14-year-old was stabbed 27 times on a London bus on the way home from school in January. Just weeks later, 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose was stabbed to death at school in Sheffield in what Starmer described as a “horrific and senseless” incident.
The prime minister, who has described the issue as a “national crisis”, hosted a knife crime summit at Downing Street last year and launched a coalition to take action. Hollywood star Idris Elba, a longtime anti-knife crime campaigner, is a prominent member of the coalition who has been using his profile to help keep the issue in the media. Elba recently fronted a knife crime documentary on BBC1, in which he described his aim to “get everyone talking about the challenges ahead so that we can all push those in power to take action and find real solutions”. The documentary showed Elba at the summit last September. “Talking is good but action is more important. We need joined-up thinking,” he said.
Taking a mission-led approach to focus the machinery of government on tackling knife crime sounds good in theory, but how plausible is it in practice? Jon Yates, executive director at the Youth Endowment Fund and a former chief policy adviser at the Department for Education, thinks it is the right way to proceed. Previous attempts to tackle the problem have failed due to not having “an underpinning institutional architecture” and having been temporary, he says. And, he adds, “they failed to recognise that most of the levers to actually reduce knife crime don’t sit with the department which is responsible for crime”. Youth-offending teams come under the Ministry of Justice, provision for children excluded from school sits in the DfE, while the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is the lead department for youth services.
YEF is the UK’s What Works Centre for preventing and reducing youth violence and was founded with a £200m endowment from the Home Office in 2019. It funds trials to provide evidence for the effectiveness of different approaches and Yates stresses the importance of “evidence-led practice” in tackling knife crime. He tells CSW that “the mission approach is absolutely the right one to take but that’s not the same as saying it’s going to work”. Yates says: “It will require a clear focus with clear stocktakes led by the prime minister. It will also require that the present Spending Review has a very effective way for the safer streets goal to really pressurise and play into non-Home Office departments. And if you can’t do those two things, I don’t think you can get the thing to work.”
Professor Martin Innes, director of Cardiff University’s Crime and Security Research Institute, agrees that the mission-led approach is a sensible one to take for such a complex issue. However, he notes that taking it from a “policy construct” to “something meaningful that delivers results” is easier said than done: “One of the challenges they’ve got is that many of the frontline street-level workers you would be able to enlist in the activities that you need to combat something like knife crime aren’t there anymore because local public services have been stripped out.”
There needs to be a focus on partnership working and investment into programmes proven to work in tackling knife crime, argues Lib Peck, director of the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit. The long-term approach is one of the things that makes the latest government attempt to tackle knife crime different to what has gone before, in her view. “I think the notion of a 10-year strategy and the notion of a wider partnership are two hugely important components to managing to do something about this issue,” she says.
The Safer Streets Mission Board, attended by ministers from various departments, is chaired by the home secretary, with the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster acting as deputy chair. And a small team of officials working on safer streets is part of a Mission Delivery Unit in the Cabinet Office which is led by second permanent secretary Clara Swinson.
FDA general secretary Dave Penman points out that one difficulty will be ensuring that the mission is prioritised in departments that will have their own separate priorities. “That means someone’s got to say, ‘This is now your priority, you’re now going to spend this money on this rather than the other things that are your ministerial responsibility,’” he says.
As ever, a major stumbling block will be having the resources to execute the best-laid plans. The forthcoming Spending Review will indicate just how much the government is prepared to invest to make mission-driven government a reality. It will be “an important litmus test”, Peck says, while Innes remarks: “If you are going to take something like knife crime on, then you do need to resource it.” He adds: “One of the problems that has always bedevilled policing is that ability to sustain focus on something like knife crime, when there are all sorts of other things happening that also demand a response and you need to do something about.”
Tiff Lynch, acting national chair of the Police Federation, says that without “sustained and increased long-term funding”, there is the risk of an initiative tackling one problem “taking the lion’s share of police resources, at the expense of other, equally important policing matters in communities: effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul”.
Funding concerns are echoed by Heather Kidd, chair of the Local Government Association’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board. “Ongoing financial pressures have had an impact on councils’ ability to provide the necessary services to help address the problem,” she says.
Questions also remain over the details of just how knife crime will be reduced. The Safer Streets Mission has only one measurable milestone set for the duration of this parliament, which is to have 13,000 additional police officers, community support officers and special constables in neighbourhood policing roles by 2029.
“Politicians from all parties need to collaborate and support effective solutions, so they endure longer than a term of office”
Patrick Green, The Ben Kinsella Trust
The ambition of halving knife crime within a decade has been repeatedly stated, but the Home Office did not respond when asked by CSW which baseline data will be used to measure this, and from which date. Ben Bradford, professor of global city policing at University College London, remarks: “I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that’s a rather silly target. It’s really not clear how police, criminal justice or, indeed, wider government action could produce this outcome.”
But Commander Stephen Clayman, knife crime lead at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, sees it differently. “The target of halving knife crime is ambitious, but we absolutely need to be ambitious in our fight to keep communities safe,” he says. Baroness Longfield, executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives, agrees and says it “will focus minds across Whitehall to prioritise safety on our streets, particularly for our young people”.
Police and crime commissioners are fully behind the target, according to Simon Foster and Matthew Barber, joint leads on serious violence at the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. However, they add that “evidence shows poverty and school exclusions are prevalent factors in areas that experience high levels of knife crime, so we cannot expect policing to solve the problem alone”.
Foster and Barber argue that “it is vital that the government works across departments to achieve societal change” and claim that a “multi-agency public health approach is the most effective way to drive down violence”.
Patrick Green, chief executive of anti-knife crime charity The Ben Kinsella Trust, says that such a target will only be achieved through a “joined-up strategy where different parts of the government and stakeholders with frontline experience of the problem work together, sharing expertise and resources”. He adds: “Politicians from all parties need to collaborate and support effective solutions, so they endure longer than a term of office. This ensures consistency and long-term commitment, which are essential for tackling such a complex problem.”
There are major challenges for those officials tasked with putting the missions into action. In the government’s Plan for Change, published in December, Starmer claimed that the mission-led approach “will demand, from Whitehall and Westminster, a profound cultural shift away from a declinist mentality, which has become so comfortable with failure”.
Mission-led government will require a “fundamentally different way of working”, according to the Institute for Government’s latest Whitehall Monitor report. The annual assessment of the state of the civil service argues that the missions need “a clear and radical governance structure” if they are to “function in a truly cross-government manner”. The report warns that “while mission boards have been established, they have not yet gripped their tasks and have been created alongside existing government structures rather than replacing and directing them.”
When it comes to budgets, it will be “essential” that they are “aligned to priority missions, and that mission boards have the authority to direct cross-departmental activity”. The report says the forthcoming Spending Review “will be a make-or-break moment for mission-led government”.
Putting financial concerns to one side, progress is already under way in several areas. It has been illegal to own or sell zombie-style knives and machetes since September, and the government is in the process of outlawing ninja swords. It has also confirmed that there will be stricter age-verification checks and a ban on doorstep deliveries of knives ordered online, and that senior executives of social media companies could be fined a five-figure sum if they fail to swiftly remove knife crime-related content from their platforms. The measures will be included in the crime and policing bill, which is expected to be introduced to parliament in the coming months.
Meanwhile, the government is under mounting pressure to phase out pointed kitchen knives, in the wake of research by Graham Farrell, professor of crime science, and Toby Davies, associate professor in criminal justice data analytics, at the University of Leeds. In a paper published in the journal Crime Science in December, they wrote: “While public debate has centred on zombie and other ‘status’ knives, the most prevalent homicide weapon is a kitchen knife.” The paper claims that replacing pointed-tip kitchen knives with safer round-tip knives would “cut knife-related homicide in half, reduce other knife crime and criminality, and prevent thousands of non-criminal knife-related injuries”.
Elba recently backed the suggestion and in early February, home secretary Yvette Cooper stated: “We are looking at the point that Idris Elba has made… we will look at any issue that might make children safer.” In addition to the efforts already underway, such as the ban on ninja swords, work is needed on education, early intervention, and identifying at-risk individuals. These factors “are critical to breaking the cycle of criminal behaviour and ensuring that no potential offender is overlooked”, according to Pooja Kanda, whose son Ronan was fatally stabbed in 2022.
“Creating a better future involves substantial work, dedication and determination from the government and public. I would like to believe that the government is on the right path, but I would like to see actions taken more swiftly,” she says.
In a statement, a Home Office spokesperson said the “ambitious aims” of the Safer Streets Mission “will require a dedicated coalition of government, public services, the private sector, charities, and the public themselves, to be successful in achieving them”.