We’re really encouraged to see today’s figures from the Home Office – knife-enabled robbery down 23%, overall knife crime down 11% in target areas, and 230 local plans now up and running across England and Wales. This is real progress, and it reflects what focused funding and coordinated local action, backed by £26.25 million through the Knife Crime Concentration Fund, can achieve when police, councils and local partners work together with a clear plan.
We welcome the two-fold approach the Government is taking forward: strong enforcement alongside prevention. We’re glad to see both threads running through this announcement. Hotspot policing can drive a knife off the street today. It’s education, early intervention and consistent presence in a young person’s life that stops them wanting to carry one tomorrow.
As a charity born out of tragic loss, we’ve always believed the answer lies in early intervention and tackling the root causes of violence and offending, not just the symptoms. Alongside education, our work helps develop an individual’s consequential thinking, decision-making and problem-solving skills, so that young people have real alternatives to violence long before they ever reach a crisis point.
Our work across Walsall and the West Midlands
- Our Full Circle Programme continues to deliver accredited, evidence-based education to children and young people, and to the practitioners who support them, addressing the root causes of antisocial and offending behaviour that can lead to serious violence.
- Our urban aid workshops are very popular, helping young people stay safer and feel more confident in emergencies. But the demand currently outstrips our capacity to deliver.
- Our Influence and Identity workshop helps young people understand who they are, what influences them, and how to make positive choices rooted in their own values and trusted relationships.
- We’ve now launched our brand new Raising Resilient Teens programme, designed to support parents and carers in understanding some of the complex challenges young people may face today.
- Our knife amnesty bins, with 4 currently placed across Walsall, give people a safe way to remove weapons from circulation – and we’re fundraising to expand this into more hotspots identified through our own research.
We’d also encourage the Government to look further at how it can support and resource the charities and grassroots organisations already embedded in the communities. Organisations like ours have built trusted relationships with young people, families and schools over years, often through funding that is short-term, project-based or hard-won. Long-term government funding is essential – it’s what will allow organisations like ours to invest in long-term local strategies, rather than start-stop projects, and to consistently deliver improved outcomes over time.
Consistency in a young person’s life pays dividends, and a closer partnership between national strategy and long-term, community-rooted delivery would help charities like ours reach further, sooner, into the lives of the young people who need us most.
Enforcement and prevention have always needed to move together, and today’s figures show what’s possible when they do. We’ll keep playing our part, reaching young people, families and communities across the West Midlands before violence ever becomes part of the story.
We want to live in a country where nobody walks in fear of youth violence.
