More than 350 knife crimes committed 'every day' » Central government » 24dash.com

More than 350 knife crimes are committed in England and Wales every day, new figures revealed today.

The British Crime Survey (BCS) showed nearly 130,000 took place last year - and the total does not include offences involving under-16s.

It means that someone was wounded or threatened with a knife, on average, once every four minutes.

New figures also disclosed that more than 22,000 serious offences involved a knife last year, including 231 attempted murders, nearly 14,000 robberies and more than 8,000 woundings.

The figures will deepen public concern about knife crime after a horrifying series of deaths on Britain's streets.

Today's figures showed a third of all violent crimes involved a gang of three or more offenders.

A quarter of such crimes featured four or more assailants and 8% involved three attackers.

Nearly one in eight violent crimes involved school-age children and 52% were committed by criminals aged 16 to 24.

The figures also showed:

• The number of firearms offences recorded by police increased 2% in the year to 9,803 following a significant drop in the previous period.
• A 3% rise in the number of homicides, up from 759 in 2006/07 to 784 last year.
• The number of recorded drug offences rose 18%, mainly due to an increase in the number of people dealt with for cannabis possession.
• Violent crime measured by the BCS was down 12% overall.
• Overall crime levels fell 10% year-on-year to 10.1 million incidents, according to BCS estimates, and down 9% to nearly five million offences in police recorded data.

Additional figures from the UK card payments association Apacs revealed a leap in plastic card fraud.

There were a fifth more fraudulent transactions year-on-year - up to 2.7 million - and losses increased by a quarter to £535 million.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "Three years ago we set ourselves the tough challenge to reduce all crime by 15%.

"I am extremely pleased that today's figures show that we have exceeded this with an overall crime reduction of 18%.

"The Government's priority is to build on what we have achieved so that everyone feels improvement."

She added: "Whilst the BCS shows violence falling by 40% since 1997, with a 12% fall in the last year alone, we also know that knives are still being used in the most serious violent incidents.

"The Youth Crime Action Plan published this week is just one part of a comprehensive package of tough enforcement and intensive prevention measures we have put in place to tackle violent crime wherever it occurs."

Home Office chief scientific adviser Professor Paul Wiles said falling violent crime levels were at odds with the public's perception of their chances of being attacked.

Prof Wiles said: "It is possible to have an overall decline in violence nationally while sometimes, and at the same time, having outbreaks of violent crimes in particular places, in particular concentrations and having increases in those places."

Prof Wiles said the economic downturn might well result in increasing rates of property crimes, including burglary and theft.

"Depending on the extent of the downturn, that will put upward pressure on property crime and it is a matter of at which point it triggers that upward pressure," the expert said.

The 22,000 serious knife crime incidents were spread across all police forces in England and Wales, including largely rural areas such as Devon and Cornwall (288 offences) and Wiltshire (140).

The largest number of offences - 7,409 - was recorded in London, although the capital was below the national average for the proportion of serious crimes involving knives.

The second highest figure was recorded in the West Midlands with 2,303 incidents, followed by Greater Manchester with 2,294.

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: "While we welcome a drop in overall recorded crime these figures cannot hide some very chilling facts.

"The fact that violent crime has risen by 80% under Labour and the scale of knife crime on our streets, officially recorded for the first time, is a shocking indictment of Labour's failure to tackle crime and its causes.

"Our police have been tied up in so much red tape that they can only spend 14% of their time on the beat fighting crime.

"Conservatives would start tackling this crime crisis by freeing our police from red tape and targets so they can be deployed onto our streets to catch and deter criminals, having stronger deterrent sentences such as a presumption of prison for anyone convicted of knife crime and addressing the fundamental causes of crime like drugs and family breakdown which Labour have done so much to neglect over the past decade."

Today's figures showed that 65% of people questioned for the BCS said they thought crime had got worse in the previous two years.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "The public has lost faith in the crime figures.

"The Government tells them crime is falling but a rising number of people - now two thirds - think it is getting worse.

"If crime and the fear of crime are to be tackled, Labour and the Tories must stop posturing on penalties and start focusing on what works, which is getting more police on the street and catching criminals."

He added: "It shows just how slow the Government has been to tackle knife crime that it has only just started recording knife offences and still does not survey crimes concerning under-16s, even though this group has seen rapidly increasing hospital admissions for stab wounds."