I find fascinating the hon. Gentleman’s efforts to bridge everything: he is in favour of mandatory sentencing as long as there is discretion for the police and the judges—and everybody else. He is thoroughly confused. The judge already has the power to sentence somebody for up to four years. Under this proposal, they will also have that power, so I do not understand what the hon. Gentleman’s point is. There are many such cases.
The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) said that the cases in which there are exceptional circumstances are incredibly rare, but a huge range of cases will arise. They cannot be both incredibly rare and very common.
The main argument for the new clause seems to be that it sends a message out. It is not about changing what the judge can actually do; it is about sending out a message. As was said earlier, sending a message through legislation always seems like a pretty poor argument. I would be interested to hear whether there is evidence to suggest that people will listen to what such a message contains. We must understand why people carry knives: the Home Office has done a substantial amount of work on that over the years, and the main reason it found was that people feel they need protection. A Home Office study found that 85% of young people who reported carrying a knife did so for protection and only a tiny fraction did so to threaten or injure somebody.
People should not carry a knife for protection. It is not a sensible thing to do, but we should consider why they do it. We know that knife possession is particularly high among people who have been victims of crime, especially young males. Once they have been victims of crime, they are far more likely to carry a knife afterwards. That tells us something about the motivation, why they are carrying knives and how we can best persuade them not to do so. If somebody is literally terrified that they may be attacked—this is all too common—and they already know that they could get up to four years in jail for carrying a knife, will the new clause send a strong enough message? Are there better things that we could do to address the issue?