With his blunt kitchen knife idea, Idris Elba is on point

Idris Elba is spot on when he says more needs to be done to get blades off our streets.

In his new documentary, he suggests that only kitchen knives that have had their sharp tip rounded off can be sold legally.

This might help reduce the number of knives on the streets, but the deeper issue remains. Knives can be made, objects sharpened, and different tools used.

Poverty often drives youth crime and violence, and these young people seek happiness and opportunities but are often manipulated and groomed into gangs, which gives them false hope. This leads them to sell drugs and carry knives for protection.

Allocating more funding to initiatives that help prevent young people from falling into crime would do more good.

We need to boost funding for organisations to provide wraparound services, change mindsets, and offer opportunities to lead young people away from crime. This requires a collective, multi-agency approach. However, communication between services and charities is currently lacking, and some people in authority are so far removed from the problem that they become part of it.

Elba is also correct in stating that there are effective interventions that nobody knows about. Just this morning, in my role as the chief executive of The Safety Box, I attended a stakeholder meeting with police officers and members of the police exploitation team at a Lona care home. We were discussing support for a young person at risk. After hearing our presentation and learning about the impact and measured success we’ve had over the years, one police officer said, “I’m so surprised I have never heard of you when I have been looking for an effective intervention,” and they immediately took our details.

Unfortunately, many interventions that truly reform lives and encourage young people to put down weapons are conducted by grassroots organisations too small to afford proper advertising or to the frontline in the public domain to put themselves due to safeguarding risks. Others struggle to get robust and effective academic evaluations done and rely solely on general feedback forms and testimonials.

At The Safety Box, we have been fortunate to have universities work with us to evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions. Additionally, the London violence reduction unit has supported many of these grassroots organisations with research and capacity building. It is statistically vital to measure the impact of these charities using robust evaluation methods that demonstrate their success.

I’m thrilled that Elba has taken a stand to push this issue to the top of the agenda and is raising it with Keir Starmer. We need stakeholders to come together to address this serious issue, as young people have been losing their lives for far too long. We need to create change and fight for the justice of our children, helping future generations with innovative solutions – like rounded kitchen knives.

However, more needs to be done. Resources must be allocated to social services, and there needs to be systemic changes to tackle the problem at its root. Concrete actions are necessary, such as better access to education, jobs, mental health services, and safer communities. Young people need wraparound support to help them get into employment.

More employers should consider working with charity partners on specific programmes that will allow young people to enter apprenticeship schemes, modelling the work of the EY Foundation which does just that. Within The Safety Box, we have conducted high-level violence interruption and support work with young people in care homes, and helping them to put down weapons, changing mindsets and assisting them to access mental health services, education, and jobs has always been a priority.

In some cases, when the local authority could not place a child in a care home and relocated the parent instead, we constantly reminded parents to remove kitchen knives from drawers. Rounded ends on some kitchen knives could indeed be especially useful in these scenarios.

Young people matter, and their traumas need to be addressed. It is vital to provide the right support for these children to stop the killings and help them to succeed.

‘Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis’ is on BBC One at 9pm tonight, and available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.

Nathaniel Peat is the founder of The Safety Box, a social enterprise focused on reducing youth violence