Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012

Question

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 introduced the new offences of threatening with a knife or offensive weapon in a public place or school. These offences carry a mandatory minimum sentence of a four month Detention and Training Order for 16-17 year olds, and six months custody for adults.

The latest available figures on the number of custodial sentence given for the offence of threatening with a knife or offensive weapon are available at table 8 of the Knife Possession Sentencing Quarterly Brief January – March 2014. This quarterly bulletin was published on 11 June 2014 and is available from the Ministry of Justice website at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/knife-possession-sentencing-quarterly

The figures provided have been drawn from an extract of the Police National Computer (PNC) data held by the Department. The PNC holds details of all convictions and cautions given for recordable offences committed in England and Wales. In addition, as with any large scale recording system the PNC is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

The Government is clear that people who are convicted of threatening with a knife should always go to prison. Sentencing in individual cases remains a matter for the courts and they may depart from the mandatory minimum custodial sentence if there are particular circumstances which would make it unjust to do so. Parliament has provided the courts with tough sentencing options. The Government is keeping this whole area under close scrutiny and the Sentencing Council are likely to provide further guidelines on knife offences in due course.