When could be better time to address our new government directly? They are to be congratulated on the level of electoral success they achieved, and the tone of the Prime Minister’s messaging upon taking office. The word ‘respect’, that he stressed outside Downing Street on 5th July, is a word so much missing in public discourse. It is a dignity that for years has been also insufficiently shown towards our young people. They have deserved so much more. A great deal has always been achieved through the simple expedient of mutual respect whenever it is shown – in public life, the workplace, in our schools, on our high streets and at home.
FKCL’s central concern is the reduction of youth violence, and helping to create, in London at least, a respectful mutuality of interest where all young people can use their latent talents to thrive. These are high aims which can be supported by the way our criminal justice system operates. In this article I make a few new general proposals and make comment on what the government have already said they will do, but also
a positive proposal to strengthen the law as it stands. There is much for the new administration to do, and we wish them well, but lives may depend on early and more effective action on youth violence.
It needs to be acknowledged that there are reasons to be greatly encouraged by the language used by our new government in describing their determination to address these issues. Recent government messaging about young people generally as we as well as how we treat those who have been drawn into gangs and crime as a temporary and often disastrous solution to their lives seems more constructive and nuanced than we have heard for years. There seems a new determination to address youth violence and its causes. We must hold them to the mark.
Our PM appears to accept Idris Elba’s phrase ‘a moral mission’ as a practical and political imperative. His Majesty, King Charles is reported as telling the PM that he is looking forward to seeing his new government tackle youth violence and knife crime. The time had surely come for such clearly expressed passions. Largely, this mission statement will need to be given life by our new Home Secretary, the Rt Hon. Yvette Cooper MP, but it remains an inter-departmental responsibility as well, affecting the way we design, build, and reform our most run-down communities, as well as the way we protect them though enforcement of laws. The Home Secretary has already recognised the failure of the previous administration to recognise ‘the growing vulnerability of many teenagers’. How this issue will be prioritised amongst the many other problems she will face remains to be seen, but when the lives of our young people and the safety of our streets are at stake, then this must come high up her list. Early indications seem promising. The Home Office has received this article and I hope it is supportive of what they wish to change.
But what about those who sell dangerous knives with no obvious legitimate purpose? Should not all knives, with the possible exception of ordinary kitchen knives, be banned from open display, even those like garden machetes. Should not those who sell even kitchen knives be licensed to do so1. Certain knives sold in the UK, just like tobacco products could have specific security identifiers to enable where they can from to be identified. Tighter controls on the importation of knives must be enforced. The kind of bulk imports of clearly ugly and offensive knives should be stopped at the port of entry. Their importation is already banned2 but border controls are simply not sufficiently effective. It is hoped that the new Border Security Command designed to stop illegal boat crossings will not acquire its budget by reducing our ability to prevent illegal importation, whether it be of knives, drugs or anything else that we need to keep out of the UK.
There is a wider issue, which if legislators can be persuaded to implement it, might have a huge effect on such importation and those in the UK who rely on these imports for their own profit. Knife sellers both overseas (in some cases), and within our jurisdiction can in my view be complicit in the crimes committed with these weapons, even possibly gross negligence manslaughter. This is because it is now foreseeable that the more terrifying knives some continue to sell, and display for sale, can be proved to have been used to cause criminal injury. It is now more than ever possible to demonstrate this. One seller has recently wisely recognised this and has now withdrawn from the business of selling dangerous knives of the kind we are all concerned about. There are some legal hurdles and proving complicity in homicide is a high bar for a prosecutor. I know this well from a former life as the UK’s first director of prosecutions for our three armed services, a position I held at the same time as our new Prime Minister was the DPP. Sir Keir and I used to meet occasionally to discuss our joint roles during this time. I believe him to be a man of great integrity, and this is partly why I take him at his word.
Recognising this, there is a new offence I propose (see below) to deal with online sellers, as well as “downstream sellers” in the UK. This could be applied to all potentially lethal weapons, including firearms. This goes farther than the comprehensive ban on lethal weapons and verification processes proposed in the Ronan’s Law, which I completely agree are necessary additional steps that need to be taken. Readers will know that this is named after Ronan Kanda who was brutally killed in 2022 in Wolverhampton with a ninja sword. I set out my proposal towards the end of this article.
The Labour government have pledged to halve knife crime offending within 10 years. The further measures I propose could well accelerate that. It may be helpful therefore to summarise some of the things our government has pledged to do, to see how my proposal might bolster these efforts.
The Prime Minister backed the ‘moral mission’ with several undertakings, including those he gave in his first press conference on 6th July. He has also asked to be held to account. For example:
∙ Sir Keir says he wants to work with victims to tackle online weapon sales. This is something that the last government talked a lot about but ultimately did too little to solve.
∙ He intends to seek a cross-party consensus. Sir Keir does not need FKCL to say we applaud this approach in principle. Is this not one area where a strong majority can be used to good effect and universal acclaim. Although I am usually against trying to tinker with laws to meet every new event, there are some changes which are now justifiable. I will discuss this below.
∙ He intends to stop “these brutal murders carried out by children”. Part of this seems to be using the available evidence to target resources towards those most at risk, and to build a package of support that responds to the challenges they are facing. Well, this information is certainly now available and is already used by the police to target their own resources. It is vital that those who are the youngest recruits to this dark world of knife carrying, are identified, protected and stopped before they ruin their own lives and perhaps those of their families and friends as well. This may have resourcing implications for the police, but AI, and private business investment can give huge impetus to these efforts and save resources too. Safe streets mean greater income generation for business that depend on them.
∙ As part of this diversion programme, the new administration intends to invest in Young Futures hubs around the country to deliver support for these young people at risk of being drawn into crime. So far so good and these would be very welcome additions. I suggest that many local projects and mentoring schemes are already engaged in this work and are staffed by motivated and experienced workers. Direct additional investment in these, and free training for new workers, rather than re-inventing the wheel might be the quickest way to make early gains. FKCL in London provide completely free wide-ranging online signposting information resources. Others like Local Village Network (www.lvn.org.uk) do this as well. Every metropolitan area and county region should have these one-stop information hubs to help locate the kind of project that is designed to meet the individual needs of each young person who needs this help. Our own efforts to signpost young people as we do every day, and to provide wide-ranging resources to prevent youth violence, does easily attract public funding support, because funding criteria are often simply too restrictive to allow projects such as FKCL to gain assistance from public funds. I know this special pleading, but a change in approach here could reap considerable dividends if applied nationally.
∙ The government intend to place youth workers in A&E units (something that already happens quite successfully In London and has been championed among others by Redthread (www.Redthread.org.uk), and by the innovative work in this field being pioneered by Martin Griffiths CBE, the leading trauma surgeon and the national clinical director of the NHS Violence Reduction. Such work-strands are also supported by the London VRU, and in other regions of the country.
∙ The Prime Minister intends to see such workers at pupil referral units, and in ‘communities’ to target young people at risk of being drawn into violence. It is to be hoped that once these young people are identified there will be a clear path to the assistance they need, with a guarantee that that pathway will be sufficiently funded to provide the required assistance. It is not yet clear where the finds will come from. I hope this will be from the existing education budget.
∙ The government say they will also use existing enforcement measures to the full. These include family interventions, the use of curfew measures, penalty enforcement, community work and stronger actions against gangs that target young people. Just to list these measures might remind the reader of how far short we have fallen in being able to achieve this is recent years, and to make the point that this is not resource-free, and will require more enforcement boots on the ground, following up on each case identified for help or greater police enforcement. If the government really do fulfil this undertaking, I hope they will take the opportunity to use every technical means to measure the cost benefit of so doing. The long-term advantage of such measures can now be much more readily ascertained, and using AI, real savings can be evidenced – to our NHS, to the police, to our education services, to criminal justice, and that great unmeasurable - the safety of our streets.
∙ Finally on 6th July, the Prime Minister made four further important statements
∙ he said he wants no child living in poverty. Although he said he can’t yet make any commitment on the 2-child benefit cap, he stressed that his strategy to prevent child poverty was all the more important.
∙ He said that he wants people take out of prison earlier provided they have support in the community,
∙ and he reiterated his support for bearing down on knife crime. He added “this is a difficult problem but I am determined to do it”.
FKCL support everything that the Prime Minister has said here and will back him in whatever way we can. He has asked to be held to account, and I have the strong impression he means precisely what he says.
Can new legislation support the change the government seek?
I believe it can, although I have long been wary of using criminal legislation to micro-manage social ills, which are often far better managed by social investment. It is a given that we need to legislate over online sales and make greater use of trans-national support to defeat the ability of those that export such weapons to the UK from outside our jurisdiction. Ronan’s law would take this even further.
But there are perhaps more draconian measures that might be taken. Our criminal law sets a high bar in proving participation in a crime a secondary party. An online seller is now arguably a secondary party if a ugly looking knife, that such seller has sold, ends up killing another. This is not only a foreseeable event these days by any measure, but there is now evidence that these weapons can be directly connected to those initially selling them (see e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn3dpx82kv1o). Such sellers may also be complicit is lesser violent crimes where a knife is used. Those who sell already acknowledge the duty of care they owe to those who buy these knives (a necessary precondition to a prosecution for gross negligence manslaughter) and those against whom these frightening weapons might be used, by seeking ‘assurances’ and other verification processes from the purchaser as to age, and to intended use. Noone sensible would be fooled by some if these unverified assurances, but they might provide powerful evidence against the seller that he is aware of the risk he is taking with others’ lives, and thus acting with extreme and culpable negligence in permitting such sales to go through, particularly when the appearance of the knife shows that it is unlikely to have a legitimate purpose, and that it’s use is likely to be to frighten another at the very least. I don’t intend this to be a dissertation on law, but the rest of the required legal requirements to bring a charge arguably fall into place. It’s a prosecution, in the right case, that might very well succeed.
If I am wrong and the bar I am setting for proof is too low, (and prosecutions of this kind can be fraught with difficulty), then more needs to be done. In such a case, a new crime should be directed against sellers and suppliers of such weapons. Perhaps it should become law anyway.
FKCL’s Proposal for reform
It may seem draconian, but it could change much for the better, and, as those against whom it is directed know well, it would save lives. We must now target the sellers of these knives with greater powers than are at present available. The kids that use them will not stop being able to get hold of these terrible weapons until this is addressed. After working as a criminal barrister for over 50 years, I no longer practice at the Bar or sit anymore as a judge, but I hope I remain sufficiently aware of the need for careful drafting of such a provision. So, this my attempt. I am sure it could be improved: “A person commits an offence if
1. (a) he sells or supplies a weapon falling within prohibited categories, or in contravention of any regulation or statutory instrument affecting the sale of such a weapon (these categories would be listed in a schedule), or (b) he sells or supplies anything made or adapted to cause injury, and (c) any such weapon or item as described in subsection a) or (b) above can be shown to to have been used subsequently in the commission of any violent criminal offence, or used to threaten or attempt or commit any violent offence (again these violent offences would be listed in a schedule) and
2. At the time of so selling or supplying he was or should have been aware in all the circumstances that his actions might result in injury or a threat of the use of such weapon to another.
3. Section 1 (c) above would be satisfied if the use described therein was committed by any person, notwithstanding that he might be unknown to the person described in subsection 1 a) or b) above.
4. Anyone found guilty of the offence shall be liable to a sentence up to and including the maximum for the offence shown to have been committed by anyone as described in section 1(c) above.”
*Subsection 2 is important as it makes clear that such an offence would require neither foresight nor knowledge that the weapon was to be used in that way. The schedule could provide specific exemptions for bona fide kitchen or other instruments which have a legitimate purpose which has been properly ascertained and verified prior to sale or supply. ‘All the circumstances’ would be relevant, including the extent of the verifiable measures taken to ensure that the purpose for which the item was being sold was a legitimate one. Such a conviction would carry a much heavier sentence than for those where simply a sale or supply was proved and be capable for reflecting the true criminality of the and, in a worst case scenario, could lead to a discretionary life sentence in a case where a weapon was used to kill or seriously injure, and the seller was aware that this might be the result. I suggest that such a proposal might carry cross-party support and might strike real fear into those foolish enough to supply or sell such things ever again.
My reasons for suggesting this new legislative approach are as follows:
∙ As touched upon above, there is now substantial evidence that knives sold online can be identified as having come from particular identifiable online sellers, and also that those who sell them know this. One online seller (see https://www.dnaleisure.co.uk) has recently stopped selling these knives for precisely the reason that they know that knives sold by them were used to kill.
∙ It should now be inconceivable that there could be any objective justification for a claim by a seller that they were not aware of the risk that their weapons they sell might be used for violent purposes. The Police and the Home Office might play a part in disseminating the evidence to support this,
∙ The kind of verification processes used by some sellers are clearly insufficient and rely too heavily in self-certification of age, identity and the alleged purpose identified for the use of the weapon to be sold. Any small or large-scale bulk sale of zombie knives self-evidently are unlikely to have a legitimate purpose, and specious arguments to the contrary are unlikely to convince.
∙ The very fact that sellers are requiring these verification procedures (however inadequate they may be) provides additional evidence that they are aware of the dangers of selling to those who have a legitimate need for such weapons.
∙ The fact that verification procedures need to be used also demonstrates that the sellers are also accepting the duty they owe towards those who might be adversely affected by such sale, through their illegitimate use. If complicity in manslaughter were later to be alleged this would be a relevant legal consideration.
∙ I have considered whether it is proportionate to impose this kind of criminal liability on the those who sell online or supply weapons in the retail market. The benefits of such a legislative provision to end the carrying of these weapons should far outweigh any legitimate concerns that some might have. I further suggest if the above conditions are satisfied, then of course it is fair.
Low Level Offending
There is increasing evidence a that Out of Court disposals (OoCRs) for those found in possession of a knife as a first offence, without any aggravating features, is often a considerably more productive way to go than prosecution. It is certainly true that greater investment in out-of-court disposals is needed (see https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprobation/research/the-evidence-base-youth-offending-services/specific-types-of-delivery/out-of-court-disposals/).
OoCRs can also be used to advantage across a range of offending which otherwise might have formerly required the full force of the criminal justice system engagement. Our partners at Make Time Count Today (MTCT), are leaders in using the latest technology to ensure that police forces, service providers, offenders, victims, prisons and probation services are digitally connected in a way that’s never been done before. They have developed data-driven technology that can reveal the significant cost savings OoCRs can deliver to police forces.
Put simply, if the Sentencing Council’s Guidelines do not make custody necessary, then we should consider an alternative, speedier, and constructive means of disposal, which the victim too can accept. Prosecution would not be necessary, but a deferred prosecution would be available in the event of non-compliance. For those requiring more information about earlier developments in OoCRs they can read about it here too https://www.fightingknifecrime.london/news-posts/a-millennium-of-experience-focused-on-diversion.
Plans for these kinds of changes now seem to be moving forward with greater energy. Investment and training to support OoCRs has the potential to save reduce the current costs of using the full force of law, and given the evidence that low level sentencing damages lives rather than rehabilitates, it offers a much greater advantage to the rest of us, and an even greater possibility of changing lives for the better.
In order to reinforce this, I would gently recommend that more discretion than at present exists is afforded to sentencing judges. The ‘guidelines’ do bring structure, but the removal of individual judicial discretion, now usually compelling judges into following structured sentencing codes to the letter, is, as I know, viewed by some recently retired judges, as having placed sentencing into an undesirable straitjacket. I include myself in this. All judges are required to give reasons for their decisions. They take care to get it right. They should be trusted to deal with differing circumstances of each offence without being bound by rules detached from the living reality that different circumstances can throw up.
Another proposal that FKCL encourages is in the still controversial area of stop and search. New technology, it can be implemented, might offer a considerable increase in public acceptability and trust by removing the stigma of what otherwise might appear be random and unjustified searching based on often too loose intelligence. There are now small technological tools that can, without the use of weapon arches and similar scanning technology, identify those who are carrying weapons at a safe distance. These discreet tools allow police to identify before the need to close on a suspect, that someone is carrying what appear to be weapons. Once such technology is known to be in use, those who carry will have real cause to fear detection. This technology can also reduce the chance of escalation, as police officers need only close on a clear suspect to make a search.
Whilst there may be privacy concerns, they are easily allayed. Such an intrusion, in the right circumstances, or any potential infringement on individual rights is more than justified by the benefits to society, and arguably far better than present procedures which put officers at greater risk. I have spoken to one of the developers of this technology and am sure it could work. I hope to hear soon that a decision has been made to deploy this. If it is to be done, there should be no secret about it either.
This magazine is as much a forum for championing the work that others do to help young people, as it is to provide the evidence and ideas to support change. I hope that anyone who has a serious, thought-through, and workable idea to help reduce youth crime will consider writing to me about it.
Bruce Holder CB KC
Founder of Fighting Knife crime London (FKCL)
www.fightingknifecrime.london
Further Reading:
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/import-controls-on-offensive-weapons#importing-knives-swords-and-other-offensive-weapons-into-the-uk
[2] FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN THE EXISTING VOLUNTARY AGREEMENT WITH RETAILERS SEE https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers
