What is to be done about the blight of blade culture?

It’s fair to say that Monday’s knife attack at a dance school in Southport, which resulted in so much death and injury to children, has shocked the nation. It also follows a number of other serious, high-profile incidents.

- SEAN O'GRADY

All are necessarily suigeneris, and under active investigation as to the motives and the events that led up to the killings. Varied as they are, these cases have served to intensify a widespread public concern about the use of knives in violent crime, especially among younger people, and more often in our bigger cities (though, as Southport shows, this is hardly confined to urban centres).

It is not a new problem – indeed, it is as old as the bladed weapon itself – but it is now becoming a political issue, though the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has been cautious in her public remarks...

Is knife crime on the increase?

Broadly speaking, yes. The official crime statistics show that the trend is uneven, but broadly upward over time. The pandemic obviously saw a marked decrease in such incidents, and in some other criminal activities, but the number of knife crimes in 2023 was still lower than in the last full year before the pandemic, by about 7 per cent.

On a 10-year view, though, we can see that there were about 28,000 in 2014, a recent nadir, compared with over 50,000 last year. Experts add that, because some knife assaults aren’t reported and thus do not appear in the crime figures, hospital admissions might serve as an additional indicator. There were 3,775 “hospital episodes” involving blades and the like in 2023, around 10 per cent up on 2022, though only a little higher than in 2014.

Is it a factor in the murder rate?