Brown under pressure over knife crime

Prime Minster Gordon Brown will come under pressure to produce answers to Britain's growing knife culture at his monthly press conference on Monday, following a spate of stabbing deaths in the past week.

Brown has pledged to announce new crime-fighting initiatives after four fatal stabbings in one day in London brought the total killed with knives in the capital this year above 50.

On Tuesday the government is due to unveil its 100 million pound Youth Crime Action Plan.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said on Sunday that those convicted of carrying knives would be made to visit hospital emergency wards in an attempt to confront them with the reality of stab wounds.

Convicted knife carriers would also have to meet families of knife crime victims and people imprisoned for knife crime.

The plans have been criticised by criminal justice experts and the families of victims, who say they would have little effect.

"Generally speaking, the evidence from shock tactics of trying to show offenders some shocking possible consequences of their own behaviour is not good," former Youth Justice Board Chairman Rod Morgan told the Daily Telegraph.

The father of Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old stabbed to death in south London in 2000, told the same paper he was "fed up with all these killings."

"We never expected there to be another stabbing after Damilola. We want to support the government to be tougher," said Richard Taylor.

Police say knife crime is their biggest priority, although they deny it has become an "epidemic".

Alf Hitchcock, the government's newly appointed "knife tsar", said stab injuries were more severe and were being committed by younger offenders.

"The age profile has gone from people in their late teens and early twenties to being mid-teens in terms of both perpetrators and victims and that's a very worrying trend," he told BBC television.

Smith has appointed Hitchcock, a Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner, to lead a national anti-knife crime programme focused on eight "hotspot" areas of the country.

Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve told BBC television that long-term solutions are needed.

"We have to tackle the root of why it is that you have 9, 10, and 11-year-olds going out on our streets who have a chilling attitude to violence that appears to have already been brought into their lives when they were very little.

"Unless we can tackle that, then we are going to continue to have higher and higher incidence of violence on our streets."