The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April. Among its many provisions, one is welcome and overdue: a new offence of possessing a knife with intent to cause unlawful violence. Where prosecutors can prove intent, the maximum sentence rises from four years (for simple possession) to seven years.
Seven years. For a crime committed by someone who has decided, in advance, to use a blade on another human being.
The Right Direction. Not Far Enough.
Anyone who has spent any time on a town-centre high street after dark knows that knife crime is not a problem of casual carrying. It is a problem of young men deliberately arming themselves before going out. The new offence at least acknowledges that the law had been pretending otherwise.
But seven years is a maximum, not a guarantee. Under the routine application of the early-release framework — and the Sentencing Act 2026's expanded suspended-sentence powers — a defendant sentenced to seven years may serve a fraction of it inside a prison.
Compare that with the lifelong damage done by a knife wound. Compare it with the years of pre-meditation captured on a phone search history showing a defendant looking up lock-knives the day before an attack. A seven-year maximum is not deterrence. It is administrative reform.
What "Intent" Will Mean in Practice
The Crown Prosecution Service will have to prove intent. That is the right legal test — we do not want a country where carrying a kitchen knife in a shopping bag becomes a serious offence. But the burden of proof has to be applied with rigour and consistency, not as a get-out for defence lawyers.
Reform UK welcomes the new offence and wants it used. We do not want it sitting unused on the statute book while CPS lawyers default to the easier "simple possession" charge. Resource the prosecutors. Train the police. Use the law that Parliament has now passed.
The Bigger Picture: Soft Sentencing All Round
The new knife offence sits inside a wider 2026 sentencing framework that points in the wrong direction. The Sentencing Act 2026 effectively bans short prison sentences of 12 months or less for most lesser offences, expands suspended sentences up to three years, and extends deferred sentences from six months to twelve.
That is not "smart justice". It is institutional capitulation. Most repeat low-level offenders — the shoplifters, the burglars, the bike thieves, the anti-social-behaviour merchants making town centres miserable — are now even more confident that prison is not on the menu.
You can pass a tougher knife offence and undo it the same week with a softer wider sentencing regime. That is exactly what 2026 has done.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would raise the maximum for knife possession with intent to ten years, with a statutory minimum of two years on first conviction. We would scrap the Sentencing Act's ban on short prison sentences for repeat offenders — a clear escalation ladder restores deterrence in a way that managed community orders cannot.
And we would invest in prison places, not in further excuses to keep people out of them. The British public are not bloodthirsty. They simply want a justice system that protects them from people who have decided to carry a knife. Seven years is a start. It cannot be the finish.