Knife Crime

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s welcoming of the statement—it is appreciated.

Stop and search is a really important tool. I am not entirely sure what “saturation stop and search” is, but if we stopped and searched everybody, all our police would spend all their time stopping and searching people to no particular end. Stop and search has to be evidence-based and targeted, and that is what the police are doing. We support that. We want more intelligence-led stop and search. It is a good thing, but anyone who thinks that it is the only answer misunderstands the problem. We have to prevent crime from happening in the first place, as well as to tackle the perpetrators who are already involved and make sure we address reoffending. Doing one intervention without all the rest is not going to work, which is why our action plan involves multiple Government Departments, lots of funding, and lots of support from the Prime Minister down.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Bedfordshire police welcomes the Government’s plan to refer all child knife possession cases to youth justice services, building on its work with the NHS, schools, charities and community groups to discourage under-16s from carrying knives. Can the Minister outline how the new national co-ordination unit will crack down on illegal online knife sales in order to strengthen such local partnerships, which are working to prevent young people from having knives in the first place?

[Sarah Jones]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and pay tribute to the police in Bedfordshire, who I know are doing a really good job.

Among all the agencies he talked about, the NHS has a really important role to play. Of course, we put youth workers into most of our A&Es, so that if a young person who has been stabbed comes in, we have some chance of intervening with them to get them out of the cycle of violence they are involved in. The brilliant investigative police officers at the new National Knife Crime Centre will be investigating the sale of knives online. That will be a focused piece of policing work, and the Government are providing £1.7 million for it. Those officers will look at the sale of knives online and go after the people who are selling them illegally. Increasingly, we are seeing young people in the grey market buying knives in bulk and selling them to each other. We are going to make that very difficult for people to do, but where it does happen—where knives are coming in from countries that they should not be coming from, where age verification checks are not being done, and where companies are making money in a way that is not legal—we will come down on them like a ton of bricks.