Ninja sword owners offered £5 compensation to hand in blades

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Owners of ninja swords will be paid a minimum of £5 to surrender their weapons – but only if they can prove they were bought before the end of March.
Some could even recoup the full value of the blades, if they can provide police with receipts as well as showing they were bought before a legal ban was announced.
The Government said on March 27 that the 14 to 24-inch weapons would be prohibited from Aug 1, as part of Ronan's law, a package of anti-knife crime measures.
Ministers are legally obliged to run surrender schemes when proscribing weapons and have tightened the rules in an attempt to prevent the Home Office being scammed by people offloading swords bought after the ban was announced.
Owners who wish to remain anonymous will be able to leave their weapons in 37 Home Office-funded surrender bins and will not receive compensation.
The bins have been specially designed to take ninja swords and placed in locations where 45 per cent of knife crime in England and Wales takes place.
An anti-knife crime campaigner is set to drive a fortified 'amnesty van' across the country to encourage young people to hand over the illegal weapons ahead of the ban taking effect.
Faron Paul will tour London, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester in July to help get rid of dangerous blades.
The surrender bins and the tour are designed to make it easier for owners of the weapons to hand them in, after concerns that many would be reluctant to take swords into police stations.
Mr Paul became a campaigner against knife crime after being stabbed 18 times in two separate attacks. One incident left him in a coma and with severe nerve damage, for which he needed years of rehabilitation.
Through his charity FazAmnesty, he has taken more than 8,000 knives from the streets of London.
Illegal to possess or sell
The Aug 1 ban will make it illegal to possess, manufacture, import or sell ninja swords.
Anyone caught in possession of a ninja sword in private after that date will face six months in prison, rising to two years under new measures in the Crime and Policing Bill currently before Parliament.
It is already an offence to carry such a weapon in public, punishable by up to four years in jail.
The crackdown is the final part of the anti-knife measures named after Ronan Kanda, 16, who was attacked and killed by two teenagers in a case of mistaken identity close to his home in Wolverhampton in June 2022.
His killers had bought a set of swords and a machete on the internet.
Ninja swords – which have a blade between 14 inches and 24 inches long with one straight cutting edge with a tanto-style point – have been linked to the surge in knife crime.
There were more than 50,000 knife offences in England and Wales in the past year, close to the record high of 2019.
Dame Diana Johnson, the policing minister, said: 'This Government is taking a different approach to tackling knife crime – one rooted in partnership with those who have first-hand experience of this devastating crime.
'We are committed to halving knife crime within a decade as part of our Plan for Change – and that demands bold, radical action.
'That is why we formed the Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime, not as a talking shop, but as a genuine working partnership and these new initiatives are a direct result of that collaboration.
'I'm deeply grateful to Faron Paul and Sandra Campbell for their leadership in driving them forward.
'We know that young people involved in crime can have complex pasts and often deep-rooted mistrust in authority, and I truly believe it's this kind of collaboration that will save young lives.'