Knife Crime

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

This is my first opportunity to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I welcome the chance to talk again about knife crime in this place and I will outline the ways in which this heinous crime is marring communities and claiming too many lives. Although I wholeheartedly disagree with the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) on most topics, this is an important debate. I hope for the sake of all victims that we can make constructive suggestions to improve the situation. I think we can all agree, across the political divide, that young people in every corner of the country should not be growing up in a climate of fear.

I have outlined the Liberal Democrat approach several times, because, unlike the Reform party next to me, we believe in evidence-based policymaking. The public health approach to knife crime, which has worked in Scotland and has also shown signs of success in London, holds the most promise. I reiterate that the Liberal Democrats are clear on the need for a proper joined-up approach to youth diversion, making it a statutory duty with proper funding, so that every part of the country has a pre-charge diversion scheme for young people up to the age of 25.

I am increasingly conscious that over the past year or so figures on the extreme right of British politics, seemingly with the backing of a stream of American malcontents who reach from the mad fringes to the White House, have chosen to weaponise the issue of crime in London. They paint a picture that few Londoners recognise of a city rife with violent crime on every corner. It is as though we have all descended into lawlessness, scared to walk the streets because of a mad, feverish crime wave, driven by liberal, middle-class squeamishness.

As a proud Londoner, I totally reject that nonsense. Violent crime fell in London by 6% in the year to last March. The following three months saw a 19% fall in knife crime compared with the same time last year. Knife-enabled offences have dropped in each month of 2025 from the same months in 2024; I invite the hon. Member for Ashfield to correlate that with the reductions in stop and search over the same period. I have been to Scotland Yard with colleagues and heard that the Met’s action in recent months has been modestly successful. I believe that, given the Met’s increasingly limited resources, it is affording the issue the priority level it deserves.

To avoid the risk of being misrepresented, I will be clear that I do not wish to minimise the issue, for two reasons. First, looking further back in time, knife crime has gone up dramatically since 2016 under the Labour Mayor’s watch, as Conservative Government cuts to local government and the police obliterated the community support networks that the public health approach relies on. The hon. Member for Ashfield was happy to be part of delivering those cuts as a Conservative MP. Secondly, every childhood snatched, every pavement stained in blood, every family with one too many chairs at the dinner table is one too many.

Policing alone cannot and does not pretend to effect the culture change we need. For that, we need to deliver the public health approach properly. In London, the growing funding gap for local councils after years of austerity is about to be made worse by the Government’s unfair funding review and the risk of new Labour austerity. That means that the cracks in the system are now chasms.

For too many young people in Britain, feeling unsafe is not an occasional fear; it is part of the everyday fabric of their lives. I have met young people in London and in my constituency of Sutton, Cheam and Worcester Park for whom that sense of vulnerability sits in the background of everything they do. What we too often fail to recognise is that, when young people start to believe that no one else will protect them, they ask themselves a simple but devastating question: “If no one is going to keep me safe, how do I keep myself safe?” For some that is a turning point, when anxiety stops being a feeling and starts becoming a plan. Far too often, that plan involves carrying a knife.

We cannot wait until a child reaches that point. We have to intervene before that fear hardens into a decision to carry a weapon. Last May, 60% of young people surveyed told the Ben Kinsella Trust that they feel worried about knife crime. A 2009 study by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies showed that 85% of young people who carry a weapon say they do so for self-protection. Many of the knives they carry are not the exotic or illegal zombie knives that attract headlines, nor weapons smuggled in on small boats; they are kitchen knives. That is not organised criminality; that is the tragic banality of a deteriorating everyday experience.

[Jim McMahon]

I understand the hon. Member is still developing his argument, but does he accept that one place young people should feel safe is in their own home? With the online world and messaging platforms, any intimidation, abuse and threats that might take place in school or on the street follow them 24 hours a day. Many parents, sometimes in the next room, have no idea what threats and intimidation their children are facing.

[Luke Taylor]

I agree that ensuring protection online is important, but as we have already heard, the loss of officers who most closely support children outside the home, such as those in schools, is equally important. The loss of those in London will be devastating to our communities.

Tackling knife crime cannot just be about enforcement; it must be treated as a health issue. It must be addressed early, consistently and systematically, and it must bring together a range of services that deal with young people, such as early intervention schemes, councils, NHS workers, carers, police officers, teachers, community leaders, social media influencers, parents, mental health workers, restorative practice advocates, and the various arms of Government that young people interact with, all under serious, mission-driven violence reduction units. That needs political buy-in, rather than meaninglessly aping its language without funding its tenets—a mistake that the former Government made with their serious violence strategy in 2018, and that the Mayor of London has made by not giving the violence reduction unit in London the tools it needs to do its job as effectively as possible. If we married that up with other key steps, it could be utterly transformative, turning good public policy into a vision for wider social renewal for young people.

The Minister may be aware that I met her predecessor to discuss that approach in more detail earlier this year, and I ask whether she would be willing to meet me to continue that discussion and see where we can work together on this vital issue. Surely in 2025 we have grown beyond the two-dimensional approach to the causes of crime, or the response to knife crime that the hon. Member for Ashfield presents. Surely by now we should be able to recognise that violence spreads among the most vulnerable like a virus, but it can be stopped in its tracks by good interventions acting as a vaccine to stop the spread. Surely by now we have learned that we cannot punish or scare away violent crime, and that good deterrents are not enough to stave it off when it has already buried its roots far too deeply in our neighbourhoods.

Not so long ago, a leader of the Labour party pledged to be

“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”,

and all I ask is that the Government recognise that we have done far too much of the former, and far too little of the latter. They must show that they recognise it is finally time to properly adopt a public health approach to save lives, save communities and save futures.