Jenrick: Prosecutors must push for harsher knife crime sentences

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Crown prosecutors are not 'playing their part' in stopping courts giving unduly lenient sentences for knife crime, Robert Jenrick has claimed.
The shadow justice secretary wrote to Stephen Parkinson, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), calling for urgent action on the record number of repeat knife offenders escaping jail.
He said Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures, revealed last week by The Telegraph, showed only 54.8 per cent of repeat knife offenders had been jailed in the last quarter of last year – the lowest proportion on record.
This was despite a 2015 law 'expressly mandating' that all repeat offenders should be imprisoned unless there were 'genuinely exceptional circumstances'.
It came with an independent review of sentencing commissioned by the Government due to be published on Thursday.
The review is expected to pave the way for offenders to be released as early as one third of the way through their sentences, if they behave well.
It will also scrap jail sentences of under one year except in exceptional circumstances and propose greater use of community punishments with an expansion of the use of electronic tags.
Mr Jenrick wrote: 'Sentencing is of course a matter for judges. However, I am concerned that the CPS is not playing its part in upholding the law by routinely challenging unduly lenient sentences.
'When a statute lays down a mandatory minimum, failure to impose that sentence is not a matter of discretion but of error, and surely demands appeals.
'The law was designed to break the cycle of violence. Instead, only 27.9 per cent of knife offenders are jailed, the lowest figure since records began, while knife crime itself has reached a near-record high.
'The deterrent value of custodial sentencing has been severely eroded and one can only conclude that this has fuelled spiralling violence on our streets.
'When the CPS declines to appeal cases in which Parliament's will has plainly been ignored [that] offends the rule of law.'
Mr Jenrick asked what steps the CPS was taking to ensure prosecutors identified knife crime sentences which fell below the statutory minimum, and referred them to appeal.
The CPS said there was no clear legal avenue to challenge cases, as knife crime was not one of the offences covered by the Government's Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme.
The ULS is the formal process by which individuals or organisations can ask the Attorney General to refer cases to the court of appeal for the judges to consider whether sentences should be toughened.
A CPS spokesman said: 'The CPS has no role in handing down sentences and they can only be appealed if they are covered by the ULS scheme – which these knife offences are not.
'Our prosecutors never hesitate to refer eligible cases for appeal where the punishment doesn't fit the crime.'
The proportion of offenders sent to prison after being convicted of knife crime stood at 27.9 per cent in the last quarter of last year, down from a peak of 42.9 per cent in 2020, despite knife crime hitting near-record levels, according to Ministry of Justice data.
It comes just a month after figures showed knife crime increased by two per cent to 54,587 offences in a year, 600 short of the all-time high. Nine forces, including the Metropolitan Police, the biggest in England and Wales, reported record levels.