The government’s ‘Protecting Lives, Building Hope’ Plan to halve knife crime, published today, is a welcome and ambitious step towards tackling violence affecting children, young people, and their communities. We support the Plan’s focus on prevention as well as some of the enforcement innovation, and particularly welcome the cross-departmental approach, which reflects the complexity of knife crime. However, while the Plan contains many positive measures, we are concerned about some significant omissions and about whether the wider system has the capacity required to deliver the Plan’s ambitions.
As a member of the government’s Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime, Catch22 has been a sounding board for the Home Office in the development of the Plan and its Safer Streets mission. Alongside other charities in the coalition, we have provided feedback and service-led insights on a range of proposals and have advocated for measures where our evidence and services expertise showed the need for these. Our policy response to Protecting Lives, Building Hope reflects both of what we welcome in the Plan and where we believe it must go further to succeed.
What we welcome
Knife crime is a symptom of much deeper and long-standing issues: poverty and inequality, school exclusions and absence, early childhood trauma, unmet poor mental health and SEND needs, dire youth provision, and the difficulties in tackling the criminal gangs grooming these children into violence and exploitation.
Although it leaves untouched many of the drivers of violence such as poverty, broadly speaking, we think the government is striking the right balance to make sure that it nips the symptom in the bud and roots out the disease if needed. The Plan’s framework -‘Support, Stop, Police, End’ – spans upstream prevention, early intervention, targeted policing and new offences, and an overhaul of especially the youth justice system. Taken together, this represents a more holistic, joined-up approach to violence than seen in recent years. Outlined below are a few key takeaways we welcome at Catch22.
Prevention as the starting point
In our Drawing the Line campaign to end the violence and criminal exploitation impacting children, we call for more aligned government and local prevention strategies. Tackling knife crime cannot be reduced to enforcement alone, and the Plan is very encouraging in the extent it recognises this by focusing on prevention and support. Its cross-departmental approach integrates youth work and trusted adult provision, tackling severe absence and school exclusions, working with families, and improving mental health and SEND support.
The commitment to full national coverage of Mental Health Support Teams (MHST) in schools and enhancing this offer by training MHST staff on trauma and neurodiversity are particularly important. A whole-school approach will help to identify and address emerging mental health needs earlier, reducing vulnerability to extra-familial harm . Similarly, the Young Futures Hubs, building on eight existing pilots with a further 42 planned, has the potential to boost both open-access and targeted youth provision, including mental wellbeing support, in communities most affected by violence.
We are also pleased to see strong alignment with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and the Department for Education safeguarding reforms, including the development of Multi-Agency Protection Teams, Safety in and around Schools Partnerships, and updated RSHE curriculum. Children who are neurodivergent, have SEND, or experience persistent absences or suspensions are known to be at higher risk of exploitation and violence. The government’s wider reform plans focused on inclusive schools and SEND provision, as set out in the recent Schools White Paper, will eventually also have a crucial role to play in halving knife crime.
Tackling criminal exploitation and organised gangs
Catch22 supports thousands of young victims of child criminal exploitation (CCE) every year, including through our Home Office-funded national County Lines Support service. As such, we know the importance of tackling the very criminal gangs which groom and coerce children into this type of child abuse.
We are therefore pleased to see the further funding of the Home Office County Lines Programme, building also on its success of the last few years to which we will continue to contribute. As county lines policing becomes embedded in the new National Police Service, it is vital that enforcement activity continues to be matched by specialist, trauma-informed safeguarding and support for victims for the duration of the Plan.
We have previously welcomed the new child criminal exploitation (CCE) offence in the Crime and Policing Bill – a key component of the Plan. This represents an important shift toward prosecuting the perpetrators and holding them to account for exploiting children for criminal gain. However, we remain concerned that some of measures in the bill risk widening the net of the criminalisation of children unless they are underpinned by robust statutory guidance and a clear safeguarding, child-first culture in policing. The success of the new CCE offences will depend on how they are implemented in practice.
A more appropriate role for the youth justice system
The Plan brings youth justice much closer to prevention, early intervention, and diversion – offering a stronger, not a more punishing, response. We welcome the ambition to strengthen responses to children at the cusp of offending, including through the Young Futures Panels and the new role for local youth justice services in diverting children found in possession of a knife.
We are also encouraged by the government’s intention to reform youth justice, and are looking forward to the pending Ministry of Justice proposals on more Youth Out of Court Resolutions. When properly resourced and delivered, these can help to improve outcomes and prevent re-offending or children being drawn deeper into the criminal justice system.
What’s missing
While the direction of travel is positive, there are several areas where the Plan falls short and where we would welcome further measures.
A focus on girls and young women
Evidence from e.g. the Youth Endowment Fund and Commission on Young Lives indicate that knife-related harm and gang-related activity among girls and young women is much higher than previously assumed.
Across our own violence prevention, CCE, and county lines services, we see these trends clearly: 22% of children supported by our national County Lines Support service last year were girls, up from 15% in the previous year. Around a quarter of young victims of violence supported by our A&E-embedded Redthread youth work services were also girls.
The official Criminal Justice Statistics indicate that men make up the majority of homicide victims by a sharp object and are far more likely to commit knife-enabled crime. However, girls’ experiences of violence and exploitation are often different and more complex than those of boys and young men, which means that they are also far less likely to be identified in existing safeguarding and policing practices.
That’s why our Drawing the Line campaign calls for specialist support for girls and young women impacted by violence and criminal exploitation. This not only offers tailored help and safeguarding, but also ensures increased awareness of and identification by professionals supporting girls – as we are seeing as an impact of our specialist Girls and Young Women’s workers in our exploitation and violence reduction services.
We are therefore disappointed that the Plan is largely ‘gender neutral’. In doing so, the Plan risks reinforcing a narrow narrative that violence and criminal exploitation primarily affect boys. This is particularly frustrating given the Plan’s stated commitment to doing better for women impacted by knife-enabled abuse and sexual offences and the government’s VAWG Strategy. While many of the Plan’s measures will also benefit girls, we would have welcomed more intentional considerations of gender-specific risks and needs.
At a minimum, we would expect the Home Office to assess gender differences in reach, need, and impact of the evaluation of key measures, including the Young Futures Programme, and use this learning to adapt its strategy and provisions where required.
Mental health support should go further
The Plan rightly recognises that adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and unaddressed mental health needs increase vulnerability to extra-familial harm. The school-based Mental Health Support Teams and Young Futures Hubs community provision thus have an important role in prevention and early intervention.
However, these services are primarily designed to support children with lower-level needs. Catch22’s frontline work shows that many children affected by violence and criminal exploitation require specialist, therapeutic mental health support to break cycles of harm.
Data from our National County Lines Support Service, for instance, shows that 76% of victims supported experienced significant mental health difficulties, and that ongoing mental ill-health increases both risk severity and exploitation continuing into young adulthood. Similarly, where young people supported by our Redthread services re-present at A&E, this is most often due to a mental health crisis rather than repeat violent injury. This is why we call for specialist mental health care support in our Drawing the Line campaign.
Without target investment in specialist, clinical mental health provision as part of diversion and victim aftercare, the Plans risks leaving a critical gap for the most vulnerable and traumatised children. Closer involvement of the Department of Health and Social Care and targeted investment will be crucial to ensure that children most affected by violence and exploitation will not be left behind.
Stronger alignment with healthcare
This government has previously committed to embedded youth work in A&E settings part of both its election manifesto and its initial Safer Street agenda. While the Plan rightly acknowledges the importance of youth workers and the government’s investment in the youth sector workforce, we note the absence of these previous commitments. This is a missed opportunity to ensure that the most vulnerable and affected children get the support they need to break cycles of violence.
Healthcare services, and particularly A&Es, are important in identifying, safeguarding, and diverting children and young people already impacted by knife crime and criminal exploitation. Embedded youth work in A&Es, also known as A&E Navigators, helps to safeguard young victims of violence in their moment of crisis – the ‘reachable moment’ when a trusted adult and support can be most effective.
Embedded youth work not only keeps these children much safer; evidence from our Redthread A&E Navigator provision also shows a reduced burden on NHS staff and, important to the government’s NHS plans, a reduction in A&E presentations.
While some Violence Reduction Units and Integrated Care Boards continue to fund this critical intervention, its long-term sustainability and impact requires a firmer steer from the Home Office and, especially in the context of NHS reform, the Department for Health and Social Care. This is particularly important to ensure that the Plan’s ambitions also benefit those children who are more likely to be failed by the system and fall through the net.
Ensuring system capacity matches ambition
Finally, the success of the Plan depends on sufficient, long-term capacity within the wider eco-system. Despite new and existing funding streams announced, we have concerns that the reform measures are not properly matched by long-term investment to provide local support.
Take for instance the new mandatory referral and engagement with local Youth Justice Service for children caught in possession of a knife. When done properly, this can have a really positive safeguarding and early intervention impact, delivered in a much more consistent and equitable way. But while the Ministry of Justice youth justice services settlement will support the statutory function, this new measure heavily depends on the availability of community-based support. Subsequent increased local demand cannot be covered by the Youth Futures Hubs alone, given also their role in Young Futures Prevention Partnerships and open-access mental health support, and their geographical reach is also limited. Without adequate local provision, there is a real risk that children will be criminalised not because they refuse support, but because the appropriate support does not exist.
Other wider reforms also create uncertainty. Measures announced in the Home Office Policing White Paper and the Spending Review create further budget uncertainties for the successful implementation of the Plan. The abolition of the Police and Crime Commissioners leaves uncertainty about the commissioning of much of relevant local support to target knife crime and exploitation – as do the time lines of the police force reforms. Furthermore, the HM Treasury review of out-of-class room youth provision mentioned in the Spending Review could have a detrimental impact on the very prevention infrastructure, including measures in the National Youth Strategy, on which on which the Plan relies.
Conclusion
No child should be the victim of violence or exploitation. That’s why we want to draw the line.
Protecting Lives, Building Hope sets a welcome and overdue holistic direction for tackling knife crime through prevention, enforcement, partnership, and reform. Catch22 is encouraged by the Plan’s ambition and commends the government for its engagement with the sector during its development.
To deliver lasting change, the next phase must focus not only on implementation, but also on accountability and system capacity – keeping also in mind the long time lines of reforms in policing, NHS, and education and the delivery complexities related to the devolution agenda. This has to include clear oversight across the different government departments via the Halving Knife Crime Delivery Board, meaningful evaluation of its impact, not in the least on disproportionality, and sustained investment in the local services that keep children safe.
As a member of the Tackling Knife Crime Coalition, Catch22 looks forward to working with the government and our partners to ensure that this Plan delivers on its promise: not just reducing knife crime statistics, but to protect children, prevent harm, and build hope in the communities most affected.