Knife crime every four minutes

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

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

Someone was wounded or threatened with a knife once every four minutes on average.

More than 22,000 serious offences involved a blade last year, including 231 attempted murders, nearly 14,000 robberies and more than 8,000 woundings.

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

But violent crime was down 12 per cent and overall crime levels fell 10 per cent year-on-year to 10.1 million incidents, according to BCS estimates.

Data recorded by the police showed a 9 per cent drop in total offences to nearly five million.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "The Government's priority is to build on what we have achieved so that everyone feels improvement."

But 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 per cent 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."

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "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."

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