Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of placing a ban on a) machetes and b) large hunting knives.

Knife crime has a devasting impact on families and communities across the country, and the Government is aiming to halve knife crime in the next decade. We keep the law in this area under constant review, and this includes the continuing availability of machetes and large hunting knives.

The Government has already taken action to ban zombie style knives and zombie style machetes in September 2024, and more recently, we took action to ban ninja swords in August 2025. We are continuing to take measures to strengthen the law on knives.

In the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, currently going through Parliament, we are increasing the penalties for illegal sales of knives, creating a new offence of possessing a knife with the intention to commit unlawful violence, a duty on sellers to report bulk or suspicious sales, strengthened age checks on online sales and delivery, and we are giving the police a new power to seize knives likely to be used in unlawful violence. On 16 December, the Government also published a public consultation paper on proposals to introduce licensing schemes for those who sell or import knives or other bladed articles and this builds on the earlier recommendations in the Independent End to End Review of Online Knife Sales published in February 2025.