00:00So the launch of the National Knife Crime Centre today is a major milestone in our push to halve knife
00:06crime within 10 years.
00:09This centre, funded by government, £1.7 million, will investigate, bring together information, particularly about the very pernicious online sale
00:17of knives,
00:18where we see people, increasingly young people, buying knives and selling them in a marketplace that should be completely illegal.
00:28So this new centre will help to tackle that problem.
00:31It's just one part of our very substantial campaign to tackle knife crime, and we'll be launching the action plan,
00:39setting out all that detail next week.
00:41London's new government-funded National Crime Centre aims to support police forces in identifying and tackling offenders who sell offensive
00:50weapons online.
00:51Often referred to as the grey market, its opening comes as the Crime and Policing Bill,
00:58now in its final stages in Parliament, plans to crack down on knife crime, antisocial behaviour, violence against women and
01:07girls, shoplifting and child abuse.
01:10Police-recorded knife crime was down 9% last year, with 50,430 offences logged in the year to September
01:182025,
01:19according to the latest Office for National Statistics figures available.
01:24You can't tackle knife crime with one change alone, you have to use a suite of powers.
01:30We are putting into legislation new powers to tackle the online sale of knives,
01:34so to make sure there is a two-stage age verification, if you're going to buy a knife, you've got
01:39to be the right age to do so,
01:41to tackle what we're calling the grey market, where people are buying hundreds of knives sometimes,
01:47and then selling them on in a personal business.
01:51So we are putting a duty on the online companies to tell us when these bulk purchases are made so
01:57that we can investigate,
01:58and also putting more duties on those companies to remove illegal content,
02:02and there are sanctions both on the companies and on the individual executives if they do not do so.
02:08So the knife crime action plan that we're launching next week is going to bring in the Department of Education,
02:13the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, DCMS, all the different agencies to tackle what is quite a broad problem.
02:21If you are online as a young boy, it is quite likely you will see violence and you will see
02:26people holding knives,
02:27you might see the sale of knives, people purchasing knives, you might be offered knives,
02:32and that will make you scared. We need to tackle that online problem, and we are introducing legislation to do
02:38that,
02:38but we also need to work with our young people to make them understand what they need to do,
02:45and how they need to respond where they see this kind of thing, and help them understand that actually if
02:52you hold a knife,
02:53if you carry a knife, you're much more likely to be injured.
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