Policing minister Diana Johnson has defended government plans to increase sentences for those involved in knife offences amid a crisis in prison capacity in England and Wales, and said that the government needs to focus not just on possession of knives by young people, but on their supply.
Policing minister Diana Johnson also appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, where she described the prison situation in England and Wales that the Labour government inherited from Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government as a “disgrace”.
But what I would say is, I’m not going to, as the Police Minister, stop making the case for those individual offences where we need to have stiff penalties attached, and selling knives to under 18-year-olds, we need to increase [the sentence] from six months to two years to show the severity of how we regard that.
We’ve had 14 years of economic stagnation, so I think there’s obviously work that’s under way with the Chancellor, but I know that the IMF and the OECD are saying that we’re going to have the fastest-growing economy in Europe, so a bump in the road, and I think the Bank of England have recognised that yesterday.
In the past, there’s been this focus on possession of knives, and that’s absolutely right, but we also now need to focus on the supply of knives, particularly to under-18s, and that’s why we’re putting the sentences up.
