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Knife Crime

I appreciate the Liberal Democrats welcoming the plan. I join the hon. Gentleman in praising the Ben Kinsella Trust and Patrick Green. Patrick has been brilliant throughout the development of the strategy, as have the members of the coalition that brought together a group of people, many of whom have lost loved ones in very difficult circumstances, to push for action to stop other people losing their loved ones. I pay tribute to all of them.

The funding for the plan will come from across Government, not just the Home Office. Home Office funding amounts to about £130 million—a substantial sum—but the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is leading on the Young Futures hubs, the Department for Education is leading on interventions in schools, and the Ministry of Justice is making a huge investment in the youth justice system, so there is a big cross-Government approach.

I have done a lot of work over the years on the public health approach. It is quite simple; it basically says that violence is catching. If people have violence in their life, they are more likely to be violent. Someone who was in a domestic abuse situation as a child is more likely to be violent; people who join a gang are more likely to become violent—it is relatively straightforward. The interventions that we are putting in place are designed to prevent those crimes and stop that violence spreading. That is why the figures on violence are coming down, and we are seeing the first shoots of success.

On the numbers, there has been a 0.6% drop overall in the number of police officers from March 2025 to September 2025—that is a very small drop. The key question is: what are our police officers doing? Having 12,000 officers behind desks is not right; they should be out in our communities. Obviously, some of them need to do jobs that do not involve being out on our streets, but we want our officers out on our streets. We have always said—we said it in our manifesto—that the 13,000 will be a mix of new officers, police community support officers and redeployed officers.

We are introducing new technology, so that we can free up the equivalent of 3,000 officers’ time. It is much better for that 13,000 to be a mix of officers; it means that we have already been able to deliver 3,000, some of whom are already trained officers, so they know what they are doing. If we were just recruiting new people, there would be the challenge of new officers not having the experience that others have. We have always said that we would be taking a mixed approach. The point is that we are putting 13,000 police officers into our communities and neighbourhoods, which is what the public want. Those officers will help to tackle the epidemic of everyday crime, and knife crime too.