A new national police centre aims to slash illegal online knife sales, especially to children, as part of a drive to halve knife crime within a decade.
LONDON: British police have launched a new national hub to crack down on the illegal online sale of banned knives and machetes.
The National Knife Crime Centre will focus on a “grey market” where weapons are often sold to children.
The centre has been allocated £1.7 billion of government funding annually for the next three years.
Its leader, police commander Stephen Clayman, said it will have a “specific focus on tackling the supply of those knives … that will often fall into the hands of the vulnerable or violent, including children”.
Police link the prevalence of stabbings to easy online access to large “status weapons”. More than half of the websites identified as selling such illegal weapons are based outside Britain.
Policing minister Sarah Jones called the centre “a really pivotal point” in meeting a “very ambitious” goal to cut knife crime by half within ten years. She stated it “will coordinate investigations into illegal sellers” operating online.
Currently, knife sellers in Britain face no compulsory regulation. While sales to children are illegal, age checks are easily bypassed.
“There are people who are just selling over social media channels, just dismissively ignoring the law, and that’s what we’re trying to stop,” Clayman told AFP. He noted some sellers are children themselves, while others knowingly “facilitate violence”.
New legislation going through parliament would introduce stronger age verification for online sales. These measures are part of Ronan’s Law, named for a teenager killed with a sword bought online in 2022.
His sister, Nikita Kanda, said the murder weapon was bought on a site that “openly sold dangerous weapons with minimal checks”. She stressed these weapons “are being used to enable, inflict and escalate violence”.
In the year ending September 2025, there were about 50,000 knife crimes in England and Wales. London’s Metropolitan Police reported a quarter of 2025 stabbing victims were under 18.
