Transparency data

Police recorded knife-enabled robbery offences methodology note

Published 20 May 2026

Applies to England and Wales

The Home Office collects information on police recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument (knife-enabled crime) in England and Wales for selected offences, including knife-enabled robbery (KER). KER includes offences where a knife or sharp instrument has been used to injure a victim or used as a threat. This will include offences where the weapon may not have been seen but is believed to be present at the time of the offence by the victim or another witness.

KER offences rose by 9% in the year ending (YE) June 2024 compared with the previous year. As a result of this, the Home Secretary and Policing Minister launched a KER Taskforce, with the first meeting held in October 2024. The purpose of the Taskforce was to agree new operational police tactics to halt the rise in KER offence levels.

The Taskforce was chaired by the Minister for Policing and Crime Prevention. It brought together chief constables in the 7 police force areas with the highest and/or rising levels of KER offences. These were: Avon and Somerset, Greater Manchester, Metropolitan, South Yorkshire, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and British Transport Police (England and Wales only). Collectively these forces accounted for 70% of KER in the YE June 2024. The Taskforce was also attended by mayors/police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in these 7 areas, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, College of Policing, Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, as well as other Safer Streets Mission partners.

The Home Office has previously published 3 ad-hoc statistical releases on KER management information (MI) to show the level of these offences since the YE June 2024 baseline for the 7 police forces. These statistics are published on a regular quarterly basis, starting with monthly data to March 2026.

Methodology and data quality

KER MI is supplied by the police to the Home Office by either a manual return (West Midlands and British Transport Police) or via a record level extract supplied to the Home Office Data Hub (HODH; the other 5 forces). The forces who supplied data to the HODH used the National Data Quality Improvement Service (NDQIS) to aid identification of whether or not an offence included a knife or sharp instrument.

KER includes offences where the weapon had been used to injure or threaten a victim. This will include offences where the weapon may not have been seen but is believed to be present at the time by the victim or another witness.

This data differs from the official statistics on knife-enabled crime published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in their Crime in England and Wales quarterly releases: Crime in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics. The information published by the ONS covers a wider range of offences than just KER and includes data from all police forces In England and Wales. Additionally, the Home Office publishes an open data table, ‘Offences involving knives or sharp instruments open data, year ending March 2009 onwards’, for knife crime which underpins the official statistics released by the ONS.

The monthly data published for the 7 KER Group forces includes provisional MI and is therefore subject to revision. The Home Office reconciles knife-enabled crime data with the police on a quarterly basis ahead of the release of the official statistics published by the ONS. The MI has not been fully reconciled with forces and may have been extracted from force systems at a different date from the reconciled data. Data may, therefore, differ between the KER MI and the official statistics.