The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April. Ministers lined up to call it a turning point. New offences, new powers, new prevention orders. The press releases were glossy. The press conferences were earnest. And then the next morning, somewhere in Britain, a young man was stabbed in a town centre by an offender who had been carrying a knife for the second, third or fourth time. Because the Act addresses the headlines, but it does not address the soft sentencing that lets repeat knife criminals walk back onto our streets again and again.

The number that matters: 8.2 months

Read this number and let it sink in. The average immediate custodial sentence for an adult convicted of a knife or offensive weapon offence is now 8.2 months. Eight months. For carrying, or in many cases using, a weapon designed to kill another human being. With time off for early release, that is a few months in a cell and a return to the same streets, the same gang, the same victims.

Of the 20,771 knife cases dealt with by the criminal justice system in the last year, only 30.8% resulted in immediate custody. The majority of people convicted of a knife offence — nearly seven in ten — do not go to prison at all. This is not law and order. This is a system that has lost its nerve.

The Act tinkers. The problem is structural.

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 does some sensible things. It creates a new offence of possession with intent to injure. It strengthens prevention orders. It gives police more seizure powers. Good — these are useful tools. But none of them touch the central problem, which is that the sentencing framework does not match the seriousness of the crime. A four-year maximum for carrying a knife in public is, in effect, an eighteen-month real-world ceiling. That is not enough.

For a second offence, the law currently mandates a minimum six-month custodial term — "unless the court finds compelling circumstances". And the court, time and again, finds compelling circumstances. Personal difficulties. A guilty plea. A "promising" background. The escape hatches are wide open, and judges keep walking through them.

Victims and their families pay the bill

Every soft sentence has a name attached to it. Every knife back on the street belongs to someone who has already shown they are willing to carry it. The victims of knife crime are overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly working class, and overwhelmingly let down by a justice system that treats their attackers as a social work case rather than a public danger.

The families who bury their sons do not want another consultation. They do not want another government strategy document. They want the people who carry blades on their streets to be in prison. It is that simple, and the political class has consistently refused to deliver it.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would deliver a serious sentencing framework. We would introduce a true minimum five-year sentence for a second knife offence, with no judicial escape hatches except in the most exceptional, evidenced circumstances. We would scrap automatic early release for violent offenders. We would build the prison capacity the country needs rather than apologising for not having it. And we would stop blaming "deprivation" for behaviour that, in every other generation, was correctly understood as a choice.

Knife crime is not inevitable. It is the predictable result of a justice system that has been allowed to go soft. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 is a press release dressed up as legislation. Real reform means real time inside. Until a government is prepared to say that and mean it, the deaths will continue.