Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment her Department has made of trends in the level of knife crime in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England in each of the last five years.

There were 3157 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by West Midlands Police in year ending June 2020, an 11 per cent increase compared with the previous year, and a 54 per cent increase since 2015/16. Across England, there has been a 2 per cent decrease compared with the previous year, and a 57 per cent increase since 2015/16. These increases are thought to be partly a genuine increase and partly due to improvements in the police recording of these offences. Data for Coventry is not available from the Home Office.

We are taking determined action to tackle knife crime across the West Midlands and the rest of the country. This is why police funding is increasing by more than £1 billion this year. The amount of funding available to the policing system for 2020/21 will increase by more than £1.1 billion, totalling £15.2 billion. We have provided over £12.5m over two years to West Midlands to support their operational police response to serious violence, funding additional patrols in hotspot areas and the night-time economy.

We have tightened the law on knives through the Offensive Weapons Act 2019, which also introduced Knife Crime Prevention Orders. We have also recently completed a public consultation on the introduction of new Serious Violence Reduction Orders. While it is vital that the police have the resources and powers they need to tackle knife crime and serious violence, this is not a matter for the police alone. It is important that we also invest in prevention and early intervention to stop young people being drawn into violence in the first place. This is why we are investing over £200 million into early intervention projects to stop young people from committing violent crime in the first place. And it is why we are also investing £70 million in setting up 18 Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) across England and Wales to establish and implement a long term, multi-agency approach seeking to tackle the drivers of violent crime to prevent it from happening in the first place. Over the past 2 years, we have provided over £6.7m to the West Midlands VRU.