Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will review the guidance for police forces on recording and publishing statistics on knife crime to provide more specific figures than the force-wide level of knife crime.

The Home Office collects and publishes data from the police on the number of offences involving knives or sharp instruments at the police force area level. The Home Office carefully considers the burden on the police in supplying data against the need for centrally requested data on an annual basis. We are presently working with police forces on the level of information that is sent to the Home Office on offences involving knives.

Individual police forces will hold data at a lower geographical level and it is up to individual forces to determine the level of detail they publish at.